‘Everyone is welcome’
Annual Pride celebration offers a safe, fun space for everyone
Riverside Veterans’ Memorial Park was a little more colourful than normal Saturday, with the park playing host to the sixth annual Pride Festival in Medicine Hat.
“This is a place for anyone — everyone is welcome,” said Medicine Hat Pride chair Becki Korhonen. “We hold Pride every year because we’re proud of who we are.
“We’re proud of the fact that we can be who we are — we’re proud that we can be with a boyfriend or a girlfriend or we can be transgender, but the community is accepting of us — that’s so important to us.”
The festival featured a number of entertainment acts, food trucks, games for kids and booths set up by local groups and businesses who showed their support of this year’s celebration.
“We’re not out here trying to be better than anyone — that’s not what this is about,” said Korhonen. “We’re trying to show people that they are accepted — even if they only feel that on this one day of the year. We want people to know that we’re here for them and that people care about them.”
Despite the cold weather, a few hundred people passed through the park to take part in the day’s festivities in one way or another.
“We’re happy with the turnout,” said Korhonen. “We had our Pride Prom dances (Friday night) and had a solid showing at that as well.
“It’s great to see people out at our events, no matter who they are. All we ask is that people are respectful.”
Korhonen says the community has stepped up in a big way to help with this year’s events.
“We’re still working from the ground up as an organization and the support has been amazing this year — the budget has been very tight,” she said. “We had the space to hold our dances donated, we had a bunch of doughnuts donated to us — people are just coming out of the woodwork to support us and it’s great to see.
“It shows us that the community is here for us.”