Don't Miss Hampton Roads Pride Week: 6/17 - 6/23/2019

June is Pride Month and the transformation of the Pride celebration from the first one I attended hidden in the back of Lafayette Park with only a few hundred people to what we will see in 2019 is nothing short of amazing.  The following is a re-post of my May, 2019, VEER Magazine column that lays out all of the events.  As usual, my husband and I are among the sponsors and we and all of those working so hard a HR Pride hope people will come out and enjoy a week full of activities:

2019 HAMPTON ROADS PRIDE: “Live Your Best Pride”

Typically my columns on Hampton Road Pride’s PrideFest events have been published the same month in which the events have taken place.   The downside has been that many readers may not pick up their copy of VEER when it first hits the newsstands and, as a result, may miss out on the every growing Hampton Roads Pride celebration. Hence, the publishing this column in May rather than waiting until June. For new readers, Hampton Roads Pride’s mission is to unite the LGBT and allied communities in support of inclusion, dignity and equality of all people through nurturing and celebration of LGBT organizations, institutions and culture; by promoting strong community partnerships; and by increasing public affirmation of LGBT individuals through education, advocacy and outreach. 

While LGBT Americans have seen huge strides made over the last decade, including the right to marry same-sex spouses, much work still needs to be done. Here in Virginia, thanks to Republican obstructionists in the House of Delegates, LGBT Virginians continue to find themselves without any non-discrimination protections in the spheres of employment, housing and public accommodation. Worse yet, on the same day that I am finalizing this column, the Trump/Pence regime has announced the release of a new regulation that allows medical professionals and organizations that receive federal funds to refuse service to anyone if they claim serving that person would violate their “deeply-held religious beliefs.”  The number one target of the regulation is the LGBT community, although others will likely also find themselves rejected by healthcare providers claiming to be “godly Christians” who work at organizations that receive federal taxpayer funding.  Sadly, for now, Christian extremists are now exempt from the non-discrimination laws that govern the rest of us. 

Under this cloud of a license to discriminate afforded to the few, Pride month (the month of June each year) and Pride events can offer some who remain in the closet due to fears of job loss if their “secret” is discovered a brief opportunity to join their community under HR Pride’s promotional theme of “open to all.” For allies and potential allies, Pride events are an opportunity for learning and a chance to rebut negative stereotypes disseminated by enemies of equality inasmuch as Pride observances provide a reminder to all outside and within the LGBT community of our relationship with police, larger society, and the laws that historically aimed to dehumanize and/or criminalize us.

This year, with a theme of “Live Your Best Pride,” PrideFest has grown to involve events that truly encompass an entire week. In 2003 – my first Pride event – the event involved a few hundred people tucked away out of sight in a city park.  Now, PrideFest is second only to Harbor Fest in terms of Norfolk’s festival events in Town Point Park.   

Presenting sponsors for this year’s event will again include Decorum Furniture, Newport News Shipbuilding ("NNS"), WHRO-TV and the City of Norfolk.  As noted in a prior column, several years ago, the City of Norfolk came to realize that Hampton Roads Pride and the annual PrideFest event (i) brings significant tourism from across Virginia, Washington, D.C., and parts of North Carolina to the region which translates into revenues to the City and its hotels, merchants and restaurants, and (ii) helps to make Norfolk (and the region) look more progressive and more appealing to Millennials and progressive business.  In addition to the presenting sponsors, numerous banks, insurance companies, businesses and individuals (including my husband and myself) all pledged funds to support the 2019 Pride event.

This year’s music headliner will be the singer JoJo, an acclaimed pop singer who in 2004 at age 13 became the youngest person ever with a # 1 hit on the Billboard charts.  She has been a devoted advocate for LGBT rights and equality.  Jojo has in the past credited the LGBT community with “saving her life” and she has used her celebrity status to raise funds for suicide prevention organizations like The Trevor Project and Trans Lifeline and has included LGBT individuals in her music videos.   She has headlined Phoenix Pride and San Diego Pride, and should provide a great experience to PrideFest attendees.  The other headliner will be Crystal Waters, the Focus on 90s dance diva… Her hits include “Gypsy Woman (She’s Homeless)” and “100 Percent Pure Love.”  She has recently headlined Orlando Pride, Denver Pride, Louisville Pride, Queens Pride, and Hartford Pride.

As grand marshal, for 2019, PrideFest is welcoming Virginia Beach native Angela Hucles, a two-time Olympic Gold Medalist and two-time World Cup Bronze Medalist for the U.S. Women’s National Team.  Angela Hucles played college soccer at the University of Virginia (1996-1999) where she was a four-year all-ACC player. She currently holds the record at UVA for most overall goals, game-winning goals and total points. In her last year, she was listed as a finalist for the prestigious MAC Hermann Trophy. She is a regular speaker on topics of sports leadership, equality, inclusion & safe spaces, anti-bullying, and the power of sport and its impact on personal growth and development.  Born and raised in Virginia Beach, Hucles currently resides in Los Angeles, California with her wife, Meg and son, Huntley.  She is currently a sports analyst FOX Sports.

As noted above, PrideFest 2019 in Hampton Roads is much, much more than a single afternoon party in Town Point Park and has grown to a truly week-long event with venues scattered around Hampton Roads.  The following is a review of some of the varying events and venues which build in size and excitement as the week progresses.

·                     June 11 - Pride Night at Harbor Park with the Norfolk Tides. Enjoy a night OUT at Harbor Park as we celebrate the first Pride Night at Harbor Park!  You can support Hampton Roads Pride as they unite the LGBT community for a night at the ballpark. 
Ticket Promo Code: Pride

·                     Monday, June 17 - Ghent Pride - Party at the Palace Shops (6PM - 10PM).  The Ghent Business Association is proud to announce and support Hampton Roads Pride with the PARTY at The Palace Shops & Station at the start of Pride week.  Decorum Furniture and The Palace Shops & Station is partnering with the Ghent Business Association to bring you a party you won't forget. Music, Beer, Wine, Signature Cocktails, and tasty food from local Restaurants.  Cover charge: $10.00. To buy tickets go to the HR Pride Facebook page and click on this event.

·                     Tuesday, June 18 - LGBTQIA Interfaith Service. Details will follow on the HR Pride webpage and Facebook page.

·                     Wednesday, June 19 - Pride Party on the Peninsula (6PM - 8PM). Party with Pride at the fifth annual Pride Party on the Peninsula. The fun begins at Carousel Park in Downtown Hampton at 6:00PM. Attendees will enjoy complimentary food and beverage, as well as free rides on the historic Hampton Carousel. Later, hop aboard the Miss Hampton II for the annual Drag Down the River Boat Cruise.

·                     Thursday, June 20 - Pride at Chrysler Museum of Art (6PM - 9PM). Explore the Museum's galleries and special exhibitions and celebrate Pride, enjoy live music. Food will also be available at the “grab & go table” and beer, wine, and soda will be available at the cash bar. 

·                     Friday, June 21 – Eighth Annual Pride Block Party at Scope Arena (7PM - 12AM) “Strike a Pose” / tickets via Ticketmaster. Imagine a New York City or LD dance club transported to Norfolk.  Dancing, Drag, Live Art & Magical Performers!  DJ RAYS, Beer, Wine and Craft Cocktails, Tito's Handmade Vodka Miller Light/Yuengling, Barefoot Wine.  Ticket pricing: $13 ticket Before June 17, $16 ticket After June 17.

All Tickets Purchased via Ticketmaster.  All Proceeds Benefit Hampton Roads Pride & its Mission

Saturday, June 22 - PrideFest 2019 featuring JoJo and Crystal Waters.  See the nation's only Pride Boat Parade!  PrideFest is the largest annual LGBT festival in Virginia and the City of Norfolk's largest one-day festival!  PrideFest combines entertainment, vendors, and fun activities for all ages. PrideFest attracts thousands of visitors and brings together local residents, families, community leaders, civic organizations, and businesses to unite the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender (LGBT) and allied communities in support of inclusion, dignity and equality of all people. Admission: FREE   For more information, go to the Hampton Roads Pride website: http://www.hamptonroadspride.org/pridefest-2019/

·                     Sunday, 6/23 - First Annual Pride at the Beach at Neptune’s Park (2PM - 7PM).  A luxury, VIP, lounge experience with white linens and fabrics, couches, lounge beds, and exciting DJ. Music at the Virginia Beach Oceanfront!  Entertainment to be announced later in May 2019
Free and open to all 21+ to drink. White beachwear strongly encouraged! Admission: FREE and open to all.

·                     Pride Week at Ocean Breeze - special rate to be offered all of Pride Week with details to follow on the HR Pride website.

It should be a truly amazing week overall.  For those who have attended Pride events in the past, I hope you do so again this year.  For others, I hope you will make a point to try something new and different this year and participate in one or more of the Pride events.  If you do, I suspect you will have a great time and get to understand the diversity and friendliness of the LGBT community and how equality for all strengthens the Hampton Roads community both socially and economically.

Pride After Orlando

I frequently note that living one's life "out and proud" is one of the most powerful forms of activism that we in the LGBT community can do.  Making people realize that we are not the ugly stereotypes that the "godly folk" like to disseminate can and does change hearts and minds - at least among decent, thinking people.  One way of doing this is to go to Pride events which in some ways are true acts of rebellion and well as opportunities to celebrate solidarity.  I'm sure that many in the straight community do not understand because they are part of the all too often oppressive majority.  The husband and I will attend Pride Fest today, both to celebrate with friends, but also to be visible and send a message that we will not be intimidated and we are here and never going to slink back into invisibility.  An op-ed in the New York Times expresses this mindset.  Here are excerpts:

June is pride month around the country, and it will continue to be. This weekend, celebrations will take place in Portland, Ore., and Chicago. The weekend after in New York City and San Francisco. All pride parades happen in defiance of people who want the L.G.B.T. community to be scared and ashamed. Most years those people are just parents who won’t talk to you about your personal life; for a decade it was a plague the government wouldn’t fight because they thought gay men deserved it. This year we thought it would be politicians trying to make going to the bathroom impossible for trans people. Now, after a massacre, it is more than that. But every Pride parade is an act of rebellion. And our preferred form of rebellion is getting drunk, sweaty, loud and naked.

Before the parade last weekend, my friends and I talked about Orlando, we talked about gun violence, we talked about horrible things politicians had posted, then deleted. There were rainbow streamers and inflatable unicorns and the flat knowledge that 49 people had been executed the night before for being gay. We walked the half block down to the parade, and it was alive. Go-go boys on fire trucks, Dykes on Bikes, serried ranks of L.G.B.T. Methodists mixed with dance music and light inebriation into a good time. It got better.

Our reaction wasn’t somber. We didn’t cancel the parade. We had fun. That is what gay people do. Every gay, trans or lesbian adult I know had to fight hard against family and social training to be an out, proud person. Our answer to loss and indignity, it seems, is to give a party, have a parade, and celebrate bits of happiness.

The uprising at Stonewall, our most famous civil rights moment, happened at a bar. It wasn’t noble or solemn, it was drunk, surly, and there were sequins involved. Those trans women and drag queens didn’t just stage a polite protest about repealing sodomy laws or cross-dressing prohibitions. They fought back against a police force invading our bar, the one place where the simple right to get a vodka soda and make out with a cute gay girl or boy in peace was something we could take for granted. It may seem frivolous, but when society has denied you dignity, honesty and safety, frivolity is all you’ve got.

And frivolity still comes through. When I logged into Grindr, a gay hookup app, on Sunday night, I was first greeted with a pop-up that let me know where and how I could help victims of the Pulse shootings.

It’s a dark, cruel joke, but ours is a culture that is not unfamiliar with darkness and cruelty. When people kill us, pass laws against us, make cheap jokes about us, they aren’t actually saying all gay people should die. They’re saying all L.G.B.T. people should know our place, live in silence, lie about who we are. Societal homophobia wants us to be ashamed, and finds ways to punish us if we refuse. The greatest gay rebellion is honest expression of our truth.

When word surfaced that the Orlando shooter had frequented gay bars and dating apps, some speculated that he might have been doing research to plan his attack. Gay people understood the other very real possibility, that the attacker might be a man with homosexual desires whom society had filled with so much secret shame that he would do anything to prove his distance from the gay world. It’s a tragic, complex truth that means however revolting I find him, I also have sympathy for the ways shame and the inability to live honestly may have twisted this man into a murderer.

The people who were at Pulse nightclub in Orlando on Saturday made the choice to be out and gay, and they paid a horrible price for it. The people who were out in West Hollywood on Sunday, and who will come out around the country this month, were there for all the L.G.B.T. people before us who suffered and struggled to be out and honest, and we did it with pride.

Virginian-Pilot: End Political Attacks on Gay Americans

click image to enlarge

Last night's Pride block party - the main lead off to today's Pride Fest in Norfolk's Town Point Park - was an amazing success with over five thousand people attending the event which was held in Norfolk's Scope.  Yes, it was a party (a very good one) but it recognized the fact that LGBT Americans and LGBT Virginians more so than some others remain subject to constant attacks and denigration by politicians seeking to whip up support or to prostitute themselves to the ugliest elements of the Christian Right.  The event also honored the dead and wounded in Orlando after a hate motivated attack where once again religion played a disgusting role.  One amazing aspect of Pride events this year is that America's premier shipbuilder, Newport News Shipbuilding, builder of America's nuclear carrier fleet, is one of the presenting sponsors.  In its lead editorial yesterday, the Virginian Pilot called for politicians - i.e., Republicans - to end their politically motivated attacks on LGBT Americans.  Here are editorial highlights:

While the nation mourns the loss of lives in Orlando, the pain remains especially acute and visceral for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Americans.

The shooter chose his target specifically because it was an LGBT-friendly nightclub. The victims were overwhelmingly members of this community. Evidence now suggests that the killer — married twice — may have been uncomfortably on the periphery of that same world.

Living as targets of violence and hatred, being victims of sometimes murderous intolerance, is nothing new for gay Americans. History is replete with instances of gays and lesbians brutalized for who they are or marginalized for political expediency.

Consider this an opportunity for America to do better.

[T]his specific horror represents the confluence of a great many political and social issues, and proposed solutions inspire overheated debate.

So here’s one straightforward suggestion: The nation, especially elected leaders with powerful positions of influence, should take this opportunity to affirm the equality of LGBT Americans — and stop using them as a target for political gain.

Until relatively recently, most LGBT Americans lived in the shadows, fearing the repercussions of being who they are. They feared ostracization and consequences legal, financial and physical due only to their sexual preference or gender identity.

That began to change with the Stonewall riots of 1969, generally considered the beginning of the modern LGBT movement. But, as with most civil rights movements, the transition to acceptance was achingly slow, replete with setbacks and suffering.

It wasn’t until 2003 that the Supreme Court struck down a Texas law prohibiting certain types of intimate, consensual sex — though many such statutes remain on the books.

Over the years, dog-whistle and direct attacks on gay people have fueled successful presidential campaigns and turned state legislatures. Even same-sex marriage, settled by the U.S. Supreme Court last year, remains a flashpoint in many states, especially across the South, and especially in places where politicians think it gives them some advantage.

Republicans in North Carolina are hoping to tread this same homophobic path in the coming general election, fearful of a voter backlash against retrograde policies and nanny-state meddling in matters of the heart and bedroom. They once again intend to use gay people as a political tool for re-election.

Such nonsense has to stop. The laws, the politicking, the dog-whistles and gutter rhetoric. LGBT citizens are, first and foremost, Americans, deserving of equal protection under the law and all the rights endowed to them by the Constitution.

[T]hose who employ these cynical and divisive attacks should be condemned for doing so — and those who respond favorably to such prejudice should be ashamed. Demonizing LGBT citizens has no place in our politics, and all who seek public office should recognize that, now more than ever.

This message, of course, will fall on deaf ears among Republicans and the Christofascists.  

Reflections on Hampton Roads Pride Fest 2014

Mikado preparing to leave the dock

Yesterday's Pride Fest in Norfolk's Town Point Park by all estimates was the largest ever.  News reports say the crowd exceeded 15,000.  One of the Absolut vodka reps I spoke with - Absolute was a presenting sponsor - pegged the crowd at 20,000.  Whatever the final number, the event was a huge success and no doubt sent shivers through the gay haters in the Virginia GOP and The Family Foundation.  One of the most remarkable things was the diversity of the crowd both in terms of age span, the number of families and racial mix - black, white, Hispanic and lots of Filipinos (Hampton Roads has a large Filipino population).  Another remarkable thing was that the CIA had a recruiting booth at the event.  We have gone from the days when being gay got one fired to now where gays are being sought after.   The Norfolk Police Department also had a recruiting booth at the event.   

CIA recruiting booth

Our day began with the Pride Boat Parade on board the 50' Mikado, the lead boat of the parade with Pride Fest grand marshals Tim Bostic and Tony London among the passengers.  It was a great kick off for the day's events and the flotilla received loud cheers and waves as it passed by Town Point Park.    From the sponsors' tent - my company was among the corporate sponsors - we had a great view of the main stage where various acts, culminating with Deborah Cox performed to the large crowd.   Below are assorted photos from the day.

Other boat parade participants

The roster of sponsor who backed the $100,000 cost of the event (my company was a gold sponsor)

An early view of the gathering main stage crowd

Me and the husband

A panel from the History Project that looks at Virginia's early gay rulers

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A boat decorated for the boat parade

We hope that next year's event will be even bigger and that marriage equality will be a reality in Virginia.  Meanwhile, make a point of giving your business to the companies that supported this year's event. 

UPDATED: One more photo of some of the boats that participated in the Pride Boat Parade.

 

Hampton Roads Pride Fest Is Today

 

While the boyfriend and I are unfortunately out of town for a family event, I hope that local readers will make a point to go out to Hampton Roads' pride fest event in Norfolk's Town Point Park on the waterfront.  While we are out of town, the boyfriend and I were once again among the many financial sponsors of the event, with the big donors being Decorum Furniture and Svedka vodka at the Diamond Sponsor level.   The event begins at 12:00 Noon and runs through 6:00 PM.  There will be many vendors and entertainment to satisfy varied tastes.  A schedule of events and more information can be found here.  One event that is unique to our pride event is the boat parade - the only one in America.  This year the boat parade will be led by the American Rover pictured below.

Here's a view of the park eary this morning:

Other sponsors are as follows (please support their businesses0:

Gold Sponsors
Todd Rosenlieb and Ricardo Melendez
Jim Deming and Mark Board,
Lin Miller, Russell Allen
John Wills and Fred Bayersdorfer
Wendy Maness, Phil Copley. James Hermansen-Parker
The City of Norfolk.
Moira Wright
Silver Sponsors Mike Collins, Sandra Deane

Robert Woolfitt,

Darrell Hitchcock, 

Barry Menser & Michael Hamar
Mayor Paul D. Fraim

Bow Meow

 

Bronze Sponsors      

Randy DeMille, Sharon McDonald,

Dee Agonostini with Dragas Homes, Bill Calvert,

Charles Ford, Chris Hilliard,

The Space Above Yoga Studio,

James and Jamie Ferrell,

Danny Epperson, BeeDee McMillian,
Stacy Shaw and Emily Parker
Terry C Pearce & Susan E West

Rainbow Sponsors

Ralph and Pam Northam
Michele Finck,Alan Psimas,
Lisa Sands, Bee Dee McMillian,
Fred Hughes, Andrea McClellan

Julie Clark

 

Note that two local Mayors and the Democrat candidate for Lt. Governor personally helped sponsor the event.