OKC Pride parade turns 30
Thirty years have passed since the first LGBT pride parade in Oklahoma City, and its spirit of resistance has lasted decades.
OKC Pride will observe the 30th anniversary of its annual parade at 6 p.m. Sunday with the theme “30 Years of Resistance.” Floats and walking participants will follow a route that starts at NW 42 Street and Classen Boulevard and ends at NW 39 Street and Youngs Boulevard.
The parade is the final attraction in a weekend of pride events. A free concert begins at 6:30 p.m. Friday at the 2200 block of NW 39, featuring the bands Drive and The Bright Light Social Hour. A festival with food trucks and booths will take place from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. Saturday and 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Sunday at Expressions Church, 2245 NW 39.
Amanda Kerri, an OKC Pride board member, said this year’s event theme will honor its history of protest for LGBT rights.
“These celebrations and these parades have gone from being sort of a militant kind of protest to a protest, a celebration and an act of awareness,” Kerri said. “Over the years it’s just grown more and more as the community has grown larger and larger, and it’s just one of those things that snowballs over time.”
Small gay pride celebrations in Oklahoma City started in the 1970s and grew in the 1980s, culminating into the first local pride parade in 1987 with a few hundred people, Kerri said. The parade began as a way to increase gay visibility and address issues such as the HIV/AIDS epidemic and discrimination.
Since then, the Oklahoma City parade has honored local LGBT leaders and activists, Kerri said. For the 2017 parade, organizers chose longtime performer and activist Sonja Martinez as the grand marshal.
OKC Pride treasurer Gordon Beznoska said he first attended a pride parade in Oklahoma City in 1993. What used to be a smaller event with only a few floats has grown to host 100 participating groups, elaborate floats and thousands of spectators.
“As we gain more allies, we have a lot of people that support our movement that are joining us in the parade,” Beznoska said. “The resistance has been not only resisting those who oppose us but also as welcoming people into our fold that have a change of attitude, a change of mind.”
Troy Stevenson, executive director of Freedom Oklahoma, said pride parades are comparable to St. Patrick’s Day and Martin Luther King Jr. Day, which began as celebrations among Irish and African-American minority groups but are now widely celebrated holidays.
Pride parades are on a similar path of social change, Stevenson said.
“When you’ve got 80,000 people lining 39th Street, that’s more than just gay, lesbian, transgender Oklahomans,” he said. “That’s people from all over Oklahoma City coming out to celebrate diversity and people being who they are.”