Tacoma Pride festival will move to new, bigger location this year. Details here

Yahoo

01-04-2025

The annual free Tacoma Pride celebration will take place in Wright Park this year on July 12 from noon to 6 p.m., according to the Rainbow Center, the LGBTQ+ organization that runs the event.
For the past decade the Pride festival has been held in Fireman's Park in downtown Tacoma, said Troy Christensen, the Rainbow Center's Board President. In the last few years more than 20,000 people attended the event, which pushed the center to look for alternative locations that could accommodate that traffic, he said.
The 27-acre Wright Park, 501 S. I St., was found to be the only park in town that could accommodate crowds of that size plus food trucks, Christensen said. The park is also near bus and train lines.
'The parks department is on board, the city's on board, the county executive's excited about the location change,' he said. 'We think it will allow us to continue to expand.'
This year attendees can expect musicians, singers, dancers and drag performances on two stages, he said. Although the event is open to all ages, there will likely be a beer garden limited to attendees who are 21 and older, Christensen said. A line-up will be published at a future date on tacomapride.org.
Pride celebrations in Tacoma began in the early 1990s in Lincoln Park before moving to the Theater District downtown and then Fireman's Park, Christensen said.
Tacoma's annual Pride celebration is funded primarily through sponsorships from local companies, vendor fees and a grant from Tacoma Creates, as opposed to large corporate sponsors, Christensen said.
Although he wasn't aware of any big sponsors pulling their funding this year, Christensen said he is concerned there will not be enough funding for Pride given 'everything that's happening federally.'
'You see companies you would never expect to see pulling their pride flags and decimating their DEI programs and their commitments to equity,' he said. 'We don't know what will happen this year, but assuming that even the LGBTQ population of the South Puget Sound all shows up, it's still going to be huge.'
Those looking to sponsor or support Tacoma Pride can reach out to [e-mail].
Christensen said the federal government is pushing the message that LGBTQ+ people are 'wrong and bad,' and events like this combat that message and show people they are celebrated, wanted and loved.
Every year the Rainbow Center fields threats targeting the LGBTQ+ community, he said. The center will be working with the city to make a security plan for Pride, like it does every year, Christensen said.
'People often confuse Pride with one of the seven deadly sins. That is not what we mean by Pride. We mean Pride as opposed to shame,' Christensen said. 'And it is important because, you know, for most of human history, there has been shame associated with being a member of the LGBTQ community, and there is not any longer. As people come out and they find themselves, they want to say, 'Look, I am here, and I am not ashamed to be who I am.''