Q-Seattle Events: Tacky Tourist Clubs

Seattlest was too kind to give us an extra-special hat-tip at the end of their wonderful summary of our dueling parade/marches. Thanks.

Below, we're going to try to crib from our organizational memories a bit of the long and sometimes sorry history that has contributed to this year's less-than-desirable dis-organization of Pride activities.

Seattlest guesses that

the "political march" distinction has more to do with their permit application to the city than any actual focus planned for the event, and we could be wrong, but if it looks like the Pride Parade, and it smells like Dykes on Bikes (the bikes, not the dykes)...

We're not so sure because it seems to us that the two parades represent a long-standing bifurcation in local LGBT politics and activism. There is, after all, not just tradition involved in this, but history as well. Oh, the history...

Ever since the last time there were dueling Pride marches/parades in Seattle (1984, we think it was), there has been a relatively uneasy alliance between those who regarded Pride Day as an opportunity for "celebration" (which is itself a code word) and those who regarded it as an opportunity for protest.

For most of its 23-year history on Broadway, the events (officially called the Seattle Lesbian Gay Bi Transgender Pride Parade/March and Freedom Rally) were presented by a volunteer group that followed the organizing principles of the political-protest crowd, but worked diligently to include the "celebration" crowd in the events. The Pride Committee attempted to be broadly inclusive and to operate through consensus. Especially in the early years, the planning would begin with a big and often loud "community meeting" which would devolve into smaller (and sometimes even louder) groups who would then try to focus in on what needed to be done to get the ever-growing weekend event running for its next iteration.

While that kind of process can be inclusive -- at least of those willing to attend sometimes testy meetings, it is rarely efficient. That lack of efficiency in the collaborative process led to a few breakdowns through the years.

In 1997 (we believe it was) a group that included The Stranger's Dan Savage as its spokesmodel, attempted to disband the Pride Committee and replace it with a more efficient and business-like organizing model. That didn't work out so well. The original Pride Committee ended up presenting both the parade/march (it's importantly PC or use both words and the slash since the term was arrived at by "consensus" only after hour-upon-hour of meeting discussion) and the rally.

The next coup -- an even bigger one -- happened in '98 or '99 (sorry, our collective memories fade with age on some of this stuff) when the Volunteer Park permits were granted by the city, not to the official "Pride Committee", but rather to two guys who had for several years been most instrumental in organizing the "Freedom Rally" part of the event. They had chafed a bit at the consensus rule that any "entertainment/celebration" element at the park had to be balanced by a "political/protest" element. They hoped, by getting the permits issued to a new group that they controlled, to shift the park event's balance more toward what they regarded as crowd-pleasing entertainments, so that it would be more of a festival and less of a rally.

That kind of thing didn't sit well with the mostly leftist queer political groups that had led the uneasy Pride alliance for most of the prior decade. With SGN's editor George Bakan leading the charge, elements of the original Pride Committee convinced the mayor, Paul Schell (if we have our years right), to cancel both the park permit for the rally/festival and the street permit for the parade/march.

Both permits were eventually reissued to the Pride Committee, which then percolated along for a few years with relatively few public eruptions. Until last year.

And, frankly, we're not exactly sure what happened last year since our local gay print media (such as it isn't) has traditionally been too personally involved in the Pride planning processes to cover their politics accurately. But it sure does look like something pretty nasty happened. Several of the volunteers who had worked on Pride events since the '99 re-compromise resigned Seattle Pride Committee in protest when the group that had taken control of the Pride Committee board started talking about moving things to downtown and the Center.

The discomfort of those volunteers brought back to the planning process some of the same political/protest activists who had helped broker the original Pride Committee alliance, along with Broadway-area business owners. But, as near as we can tell, their voices were pretty much ignored by the current board of what was soon renamed Seattle Out and Proud, Inc. [SOP] (dba Seattle Pride) which owns the downtown parade and festival permits.

It's the political/protest activists and their younger and more energetic allies who then turned to the Seattle LGBT Center for help in creating this year's political march on Broadway.

So, then... We could be wrong since anyone who wants to join into the march has been invited to do so. But we still wouldn't expect the march on Broadway to quite match the character of recent Sunday parade/marches on that street.

We haven't yet heard much from the Broadway businesses who were so upset last year when Seattle Pride said they were thinking of taking the parade downtown. Somehow, however, we doubt that a political march on Broadway on a Saturday evening is exactly what they were expecting when they signed those petitions a year ago.

We mentioned that the term "celebration" when used in a Pride Day context is often a code word. It may be unfair, but it's a code word for business and commercial interests. What's odd about last year's Pride Committee coup is that, while it seemed to represent an embrace of the week's "celebration" aspects and a rejection of the political/protest aspects, it didn't quite work out that way since commercial and business interests on Capitol Hill sparked the initial protests to the move.

Somehow, however, those interests don't appear to have had the necessary meeting-stamina to either change SOP's collective mind about parading among the parking lots of 4th Ave or to greatly influence the character of the alternative march on Broadway.

We look forward to next year's compromise.

Technorati tags: Gay Gay pride Seattle Pride Pride on Broadway Seattle

Labels: Gay events, LGBTQ, Seattle Pride