RICHMOND — A month full of Bay Area Pride celebrations will kick off this weekend with Richmond’s 11th annual Pride parade and fair which organizers say is meant to be both a gathering of hope and a symbol of resistance.
A festival featuring live music and performances and a selection of food and drinks will be held from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Sunday at the Richmond Civic Center Plaza after a brief parade from Nicholls Park at 10 a.m., all to mark the city’s annual Pride celebration.
The event is put on by Richmond Rainbow Pride, a community group focused on connecting and uplifting the city’s lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, questioning, intersex and a-sexual residents.
This year’s theme, “forged in resistance, shaped by love,” is a defiant message of hope in a time of political attacks against the LGBTQIA+ community by the Trump administration, but it’s also a call-back to the pivotal role Richmond played in fighting against fascism in World War II, said Jamin Pursell, the organization’s co-chair and creative director.
“We really look at (Richmond’s history) as a community created by people from all over the country trying to resist the fascist powers trying to take over during World War II. We were a community that wasn’t connected but crafted by resistance,” Pursell said.
The event is meant to be welcoming to all, Pursell said. The goal is to create a space where everyone can feel seen and understood, regardless of whether they are members of the LGBTQIA+ community or not, he added.
The message is particularly important given the current political climate, Pursell said.
The celebrations come at a time when LGBTQIA+ rights are under attack at the federal level and across the state. President Donald Trump has signed executive orders recognizing only two unchangeable genders – male and female – and others banning transgender individuals from serving in the military, targeting gender-affirming care for youths and transgender athletes playing in women’s sports, and rolling back diversity, equity and inclusion efforts.
American Civil Liberties Union, a national civil rights organization, is also monitoring 588 anti-LGBTQ bills proposed in states with both Republican and Democrat strongholds, including bathroom bans, gender-affirming care restrictions, changes to sexual education curriculum regarding sexual orientation and gender and more.
At least six anti-LGBTQ bills have been proposed in California, according to the ACLU dashboard. Two, both aiming to prohibit transgender girls from participating in girls sports teams, have failed so far.
The four others seek to create religious exemptions for school lessons on transgender people, require that transgender inmates be housed in a facility consistent with their sex at birth or to create a facility in women’s prisons specifically for transgender inmates, and to assert that a parent is not committing child abuse by denying their child gender-affirming care or to call them by a chosen name or pronouns other than the ones associated with their birth sex.
“The LGBTQ community has been the scapegoat of fascists over and over again in history,” Pursell said. “It’s an old drum people love to bang, but we realize the best thing we have to do is come together in community and realize that we’re not alone and we’re not isolated.”
Richmond is all too familiar with attacks on its queer community, Pursell said. It’s what inspired the founding of Richmond Rainbow Pride in 2014. At the time, former Councilmember Jovanka Beckles was routinely the target of homophobic attacks for being a lesbian, Pursell said.
The attacks led current Vice Mayor Cesar Zepeda, the late Duane Chapman, Pursell and other community leaders to form Richmond Rainbow Pride. The group has helped organize a celebration every year since.
“Richmond is constantly bringing itself together. We may argue over what is the best method but we have a very good sense of what we want the community to be,” Pursell said. “We don’t have to agree but we have to stand together against this greater ugliness. We know what it’s like to be separate, to be alone and we’re not putting up with that.”
Following Richmond’s Pride bash Sunday is an expansive list of events including ConcordPride Fest on June 7, which will kick off a month full of activities; a car parade and festival held by Pacifica Pride on June 7; the 13th annual San Mateo County Pride Celebration in San Mateo Central Park on June 14; a family Pride storytime and parade at Fremont Library on June 18 and the Fremont Pride Fair on June 21; and San Francisco Pride on June 28 and 29.
Further into the year, Berkeley will host its first official Pride event on Aug. 16, with a focus on celebrating queer joy. Silicon Valley Pride will be held Aug. 30 and 31, honoring “50 years of love, legacy and liberation,” the event tagline reads. A week later, Oakland’s Pride parade and festival, themed “in unity we thrive,” will be held Sept. 7.
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