HOUSTON DISPLAYS ITS PRIDE
Spirited parade and festival draw thousands of revelers to downtown
Tens of thousands of rainbow-bedecked revelers descended on downtown Houston for PrideHouston 2017, the annual festival and parade celebrating the LGBT community.
Mayor Sylvester Turner led the parade wearing a blinking bead necklace as a varied crowd cheered loudly along the parade route.
“Tonight shows the diversity of our city,” Turner said minutes before the parade began. “Tonight we show that not only are we diverse, we are also inclusive.”
Police Chief Art Acevedo led most of the department’s command staff along with a police SUV specially decked out with rainbow decals.
“We have members of our extended HPD family, members of our team” who are LGBT, he said. “This is our community, and we have to serve all sections of our community.”
Earlier in the day, the seven-hour festival by City Hall had a tailgate atmosphere that included stages with DJs and live music, voter registration, shaved ice, AIDS prevention groups, churches, a lingerie shop and plentiful food trucks and drink tents.
Attendees come from across the Houston region and beyond, young and old, of all ethnicities and races in an broad representation of Houston’s vaunted diversity.
Listening to a speaker on transgender issues, Fred Josephson, 67, said he remembered when Hous-
ton’s pride celebration was just two drag queens and a bartender getting together in Montrose. Things have changed since he came out in 1967.
“The voices have been heard,” he said, standing with a friend who came out only 12 years ago and came to Pride with his supportive daughter.
Today, Josephson said, transgender people suffer the most and need support from the wider LGBT community, which he said was narrowly focused on gay and lesbian issues until recently.
Camera Linton, 11, was leaving the festival about 3 p.m. with her mom, stepdad and two little sisters.
“People should be able to love who they love,” she said as her little sisters ran around a park, all three faces painted with rainbow butterflies.
Camera said she’s passionate about LGBT rights because her aunts were not able to marry until just a few years ago.
Arianna Perez, 20, said she came from Cypress for her first-ever Pride after coming out four years ago. She said she was surprised how much the event impacted her, making her feel accepted by a wide swath of society.
“It changed me a little bit,” she said.
Perez added that she was surprised to see a few churches with welcoming booths. Her family fell away from the Catholic Church after she came out.
She spoke with members of Bering United Methodist Church, whose Montrose congregation was the first Methodist “reconciling” church in the 1980s.
Mark Albright, 60, is the Bering historian and remembers going to Pride parades decades ago. He said he reaches out to people rejected or unwelcome in more conservative churches with traditional interpretations of scripture, with which he disagrees.
“Allow God to be God,” he said. “Your job is not to judge. Your job is to love.”
The event had a few antigay protesters on the sidelines.
Westboro Baptist Church, the Kansas-based congregation known for picketing soldiers’ funerals, made an appearance for an hour, said HPD Capt. Kristine Anthony, a commander whose division manages special-events security. A group called Bulldog Ministries occupied a spot negotiated with HPD and held signs such as “Homo Sex Is Sin” and “Repent or Perish.”
A couple of men gathered a crowd that blocked an entrance about 7 p.m. as they preached against homosexuality. Anthony hustled over as the crowd gawked at the men, one of whom held a Bible in his hands. She talked with them until they agreed to leave that disruptive spot.
A couple in their 40s who have attended Houston’s Pride celebrations since 1999 laughed as they said the parade has gotten a little more tame over the decades. The crowds are certainly bigger and more rambunctious, they said, but the marchers are more mainstream.
“Pride means the world to us,” said one member of the couple, Patricia Capito, 47. “Pride means that we can celebrate together our love.”
The couple have been together 18 years, married in California in 2007 and finally got legally married in their home state of Texas this year. They said one of their sons is transgender, adding another reason to keep showing up to LGBT events. And they note that more and more letters have joined that acronym.
One young couple said Pride was not just a chance to express their identity but also to remember recent advances for LGBT rights and honor the older trailblazers.
Jorge Ibarra, 19, was walking hand-in-hand with his fiancé, Stefan Rios, and wearing matching blue-and-green tie-dye.
“We grew up in an era when ... it became more open. People are a lot more comfortable,” Ibarra said.
However, he said his own parents do not accept his sexual orientation or his fiancé.
“It’s something that we need to fight for,” he added. “We didn’t get here by luck.”