Due to a complete lack of follow-through by the Long Beach Pride organization, the annual festival was canceled after having existed for decades.
First was the outright misleading social media posts. Then the local coverage. Then the national coverage. And then the bittersweet coverage. And then, in the words of The Advocate—the nation’s leading queer publication—the “blame game.”
It was an anger-inducing, eyebrow-furrowing, cringe-worthy representation of our city, the organization, and Long Beach Pride—the Pride not as an organization, but as a culture. After years of mismanagement, there’s no question the Pride board needs to be entirely replaced, or perhaps the Pride festival needs to be taken over by a third party that can handle its creation. The city should have alerted leaders outside of the Long Beach Pride organization of the festival’s woes long before the Friday it was to launch Teen Pride, with a saddening group of kids turned away from partying with no context, explanation, or alternative.
We can go on and on about this—and when it comes to next year’s festival, we should. But amid this rightfully named blame game, nearly every single one of us, very much including myself, lost the whole damn point.
Pride isn’t an individual concept; it is an inherently collective one that should be geared toward our most vulnerable—and that means our youth.
In a particularly poignant, succinct, fiery two minutes of talking, Congressman Robert Garcia addressed a crowd of invitees to a reception atop the Fairmont Breakers co-hosted with California Senator Lena Gonzalez and Assemblymember Josh Lowenthal. And he said something particularly important:
“Pride—the festival, the stages, the lights, the tents… Those aren’t for us up here. They are for that brown or black 19-year-old who wants to see people who like him, dancing the weekend away. It’s for that 19-year-old who might have the courage to finally come out because of that festival… He doesn’t know who the Mayor is. They don’t care about the board of the Pride organization. Pride, for them, is much bigger and more personal than that.”
Amid the very people who were having feverish conversations about that very board, they were forced to pause amid the debacle of it all.
For the queer people who were up there, literally perched above the parade-goers below, Pride was a different concept, one that has long been removed from its roots. We have been comfortable with our queerness for decades. We didn’t have qualms about coming out anymore, professionally or otherwise. And we had friends and family, often chosen, who supported us on the daily. We didn’t have to worry about coming out to our bestie, let alone ourselves.
Long Beach Pride has long been for the have-nots, the unprivileged, the non-white.
I knew the 19-year-old brown kid Robert was talking about—and it definitely included himself. Having known the congressman since his 20s, there was no question that Pride, underneath the Urban tent, as it was called, dancing to hip-hop and R&B, became a pivotal part of his coming out and queer maturing. As we slowly grew up, letting go of the insecurity, places like Circus or Tigerheat became intertwined in the development of our queer identities.
And Robert’s words of returning to his younger self, noting who Long Beach Pride is for, were all but compounded when someone told me, on that very roof, “Ever since I moved to L.A., I’ve constantly heard Long Beach Pride called ‘The Inland Empire Pride.'” I can only assume this take on our festival was a jab at the less affluent and the more colorful of our brethren. Likely from transplants, let’s be honest.
And if that is the case, it only made me prouder of Long Beach Pride. Because, yes, it has always been the Pride best described by words white folk tend to use when speaking of places that aren’t theirs: grittier. Trashier. Dirtier. It was far more vibey. Far more funky. It wasn’t the white-male-specimen-lined pathways of the Abbey. It wasn’t the Pride with a triple-digit ticket price. Nor was it “Gaychella,” as WeHo Pride was often called after it began booking larger and larger music names for its lineup.
And that made it special in the grand cog of queerness SoCal, even if, because of bad leadership, the festival has been underwhelming since its stellar 2022 event, when the festival had the chance to become the nation’s premier Latino and hip-hop Pride festival.
Were it not for Jewels, Pride would have been anything but proud this year—and we can and will do better.
Drag queen Mayhem Miller said it best: “Best Long Beach Pride in a very long time. Get back to grassroots, y’all…”
And, in a sense, that’s very much what it was: grassroots in all its beautiful glory. The extremely depressing, private Zoom meeting between City officials and the community lit a fire underneath us all. Jewels was the first to say that she and I should do a video to remind people that, festival or no festival, there was still somewhere to go and queer businesses to support.
Following that, Jewels would work 24-hours gathering performers for what would be a completely free festival at Bixby Park for anyone who wanted to properly do Pride. In that tiny space at the park, Mayhem’s words felt tangible. Kids of all colors of the rainbow were there. Watching drag. Dancing. Seeing people who look like them.
We need to do better—and we can, like Jewels, who, repeat, hosted a free Pride festival with about 30 hours’ notice. Like the countless performers who still came out this weekend. Like the many people who hosted house parties that likely made that 19-year-old queer kid feel a bit more seen and welcomed.
Now to the work ahead: to ensure this never happens again. Onward and upward, Long Beach Pride.
