By GARLAND KENNEDY
Sentinel Staff Writer
Sitkans will celebrate Pride Month Saturday with a parade down Lincoln Street, one of a number of events scheduled for the coming weeks.
Last year’s Pride celebration was the biggest yet in Sitka, and event organizer Johnny Elliott said it’s gained traction since then and could be even larger this year.
“Pride has been celebrated in a lot of smaller, more private capacities… but then last year, during the pandemic, there was more of a concerted effort and an organized sort of public-facing Pride that was able to launch last June,” Elliott told the Sentinel.
He highlighted the importance of visibility for LGBTQ+ people in small towns.
“Being a young person growing up in a rural community where everyone knows each other, it can be challenging to be out and to feel supported,” he said. “And so for anyone who is going through that type of experience, we help to provide support and on a big scale. That’s part of why visibility is so important.”
Public events such as the parade are “affirming” for Mel Beadle, who is also working to coordinate Pride events this year,
“I have been really excited about organizing Pride in Sitka because I, as a queer person from a really, really small town, I understand the value of representation,” Beadle said. “I didn’t really get to be my whole self, because I didn’t know what that meant, that it even existed. So creating spaces where we can allow the full spectrum of LGBTQ2+ to exist is really important to me, and we’ve already seen a huge turnout, a ton of queer folks coming out to our events.”
Hundreds of Sitkans turned out for a Pride walk in 2021, and Michael Mausbach hopes this year’s celebration builds on previous success.
Last year’s Pride celebrations “culminated in what was effectively a community carnival of sorts, and we had booths and games and art activities,” Mausbach said. “There were speakers, there was music and the turnout far exceeded our expectations. I think our final tally was around 250 people that attended last year’s event. And in a community of about 9,000 I think that kind of helped us realize that there is a hunger for this, There’s a much larger queer community than we’re even experiencing as organizers within it. And people want that visibility.”
With the support from the Sitka Health Summit, Sitka Pride has been more organized in the last two years than it was in the past, Mausbach said.
“There’s a long unofficial history of Pride in Sitka,” they said. “Various business owners, be they queer or allies, have kind of generated their own in-house programming before, usually in the form of one-off events.”
But it wasn’t as organized as it has been since “a kind of a Pride steering committee of sorts” was formed in the last two years, Mausbach said.
For Elliott, Pride Month boils down to building community.
“It’s about community building and about celebration of identities and in large part around identities that are misunderstood in the greater, systemic level of things,” he said. “And that people can find unity within those identities and can find kinship within those identities.”
Saturday’s Pride Parade will be a walk starting at Totem Square at noon, proceeding down Lincoln Street to the traffic light and turning right onto Harbor Drive. The route will reach the top of O’Connell Bridge before turning and heading back to Totem Square.
Mausbach intends the parade, along with other Pride events, to be all-inclusive.
“A goal of ours has been to really stress the inclusivity of this,” they said. “And with so many Pride events, historically, there was this focus on cisgendered queer people… We really want to be able to let people know that under the queer umbrella… there’s space for so many different identities wherever they fall in the larger LGBTQ+ acronym. And I think that, too, has really kind of opened us up to so many kinds of participants who historically maybe didn’t necessarily feel like they could have participated in something that their identity or their experience was accounted for.”
Police in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, arrested members of a white nationalist group last Saturday and charged them with conspiring to riot at a Pride rally there. As a precaution there will be a police presence and de-escalation plans for Saturday’s parade, “just ensure that if there is someone there who is trying to cause trouble or maybe is getting upset in that way, they’re able to address that so that the larger show can go on and folks can feel safe,” Elliott said.
Other Pride related activity includes two queer comedy night events at the Mean Queen at 7 p.m. and 10 p.m. today. And at 11 a.m. Saturday June 25 the film “Torrey Pines” will show at the Coliseum Theater. On Sunday, June 26, an LGBTQ2+ art show will be up at Harrigan Centennial Hall from 3 to 8 p.m., with performances at 6 p.m.
