Updated June 12, 10:48 a.m.
Queer and trans people exist loudly during Pride festivals and parades: They take up space in parks and downtowns, marching from one part of a city to another, many decked out with rainbows and flags for their respective identities.
To some, the month’s celebrations are an opportunity to claim space through joy.
“I am most looking forward to seeing everyone be the very embodiment of QT [queer and trans] joy and liberation,” Elk Grove Pride organizer Judah Joslyn told CapRadio via email. “To claim and take up space to exist and be in community with one another.”
To others, these celebrations are a source of affirmation.
“What Pride means to me is being able to be out and be my true authentic self,” said Cindy Baudoin, who helped organize Placer Pride and sits on the board of the Placer LGBTQ+ Center.
“Seeing people living in their truth is really powerful,” said UC Davis doctorate student Mia Karisa Dawson about Pride month.
Power in numbers provides a source of safety, they added: “There’s a type of community seeing everyone coming out and living their lives together. If you’re surrounded by other queer people who are doing their thing, it feels more safe to be yourself and do your thing.”
That’s a weighty feeling when being pushed to the margins of society through homophobia and transphobia makes safety for LGBTQ+ people a tenuous, uncertain thing.
The first Pride marches were held in 1970, a year after queer and trans people fought back against police who stormed and raided the Stonewall Inn. At the time, homosexuality was still criminalized in every state barring Illinois, and businesses could be shut down for serving or employing gay people.
And during the inception of the AIDS epidemic, then-President Ronald Reagan barely acknowledged the disease and the predominantly gay men and trans women of color it was killing.
Homophobia and transphobia aren’t vestiges of the past. California’s Proposition 8 remains in the state constitution, despite being overruled by 2015’s Obergefell v. Hodges, which made same-sex marriage legal across the U.S.
And this year, LGBTQ+ people face rising legislative violence — with over 550 anti-trans bills introduced in legislative sessions this year — along with emotional and physical attacks, both nationally and locally.
“None of us are safe,” Dawson, who also organizes with Decarcerate Sacramento, said. “Some of us are more safe than others.”
For queer and trans people of color, racism also complicates and impacts the meaning of safety. While the broader LGBTQ+ community faces increased rates of surveillance, profiling and violence from police, trans and gender-nonconforming people of color, particularly Black trans people, are most likely to have experienced police violence.
While there’s a spectrum of views on police at Pride — in either a security or personal celebratory capacity — queer and trans people in the Sacramento region agree: “We keep each other safe.” And that takes many forms, from community training as protection to coming together to learn from each other and experience communal joy.
Broadening ideas of safety, protection at Pride
For many Sacramento community members in 2019, Sacramento Pride became an explicit protest and proclamation. The year marked the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots, sparking conversations about whether modern-day Pride celebrations retained the same spirit of the original marches. And one of the main conversations was about the increasingly accepted presence of police at Pride.
Marchers at the Sacramento Pride parade June 9, 2019.Nick Miller / CapRadio“The big push was mostly by trans and gender nonconforming folks,” said Ebony Ava Harper, who had been voted Grand Marshal for the parade that year. “Most of us were just bringing to attention that trans folks are still suffering, and law enforcement plays a huge part in that suffering.”
While the Sacramento LGBT Center had initially asked LGBTQ+ law enforcement officers to not wear uniforms to the main event that year, they reneged on that promise without consulting staff, much to the frustration, dismay and anger of many community members. It in itself was the result of an organizing push that began in 2018, after a predominantly Black, queer group of organizers presented a variety of demands, including the demand to keep police out of the Pride parade.
The Lavender Library, an all volunteer-run queer lending library and archive, also put on an event with face-painting, drag queen readings, queer historical presentations and music that drew hundreds of people as an alternative to those who no longer wanted to attend Sac Pride due to the Center’s decision.
A separate, but allied group of organizers — largely queer and trans people of color — calling themselves the Still Here Alliance for Trans Rights arrived to that year’s Sacramento Pride, ready to barricade the entryways and hold a demonstration calling for the reclamation of Pride. They had been planning the action for months, before everything that happened with the Center.
“It's not a winning fight to talk about visibility and inclusion into a system that is already grinding and brutalizing people,” said Nghia Nguyen, one of the alliance’s lead organizers.
A press release Nguyen shared from 2019 laid out the alliance’s “rallying cry”: “No cops at Pride. No rainbow corporate sponsorships. No collusion with an anti-trans, racist state. We will make Pride free again.”
The momentum of those conversations has taken new shapes after 2019: The COVID-19 pandemic began, backgrounding a summer of protesting police violence after George Floyd’s murder. And violence against LGBTQ+ people has been rising in tandem with right-wing groups targeting drag queens and trans people inside and outside legislative halls.
Now, community members and Pride organizers have different strategies for community protection.
Many Pride organizers around the region have chosen to hire private security firms for their respective events, only having uniformed police present when mandated by permit requirements or in the case of emergency.
Sandré Henriquez Nelson has been the director of Davis Pride for nine years and said the committee had major discussions about limiting police at Pride; it eventually “came back to the mission of building inclusive communities to eliminate hate-based violence.”
’80s cover band Tainted Flag headlined the Davis Pride Festival on Sunday, June 4, 2023, at Central Park.Photo provided courtesy of Wendy WeitzelThis year at Davis Pride weekend, which happened from June 3-5, the Davis Phoenix Coalition hired a private security firm, and says law enforcement didn’t participate “outside of permit requirement guidelines, if we have political candidates or government officials, and/or if called to help protect attendees from threats.”
Four years after 2019 Sacramento Pride, the Sacramento LGBT Center maintains a similar policy for this year’s Pride celebrations, which happen this weekend: No uniformed law enforcement “unless in a last resort” or due to city of Sacramento requirements given event size.
Elk Grove Pride’s organizing committee, which is working in conjunction with Sac Filipinx, is putting together a comparatively smaller Pride event on June 17 — they’re also using a private security team “trained in de-escalation” to protect the event’s perimeter, said organizer Cheena Moslen.
“I wish more organizers would listen to the community members who share that police do not create an environment of safety; rather, they evoke fear,” Moslen told CapRadio via email about the decision to hire private security. “I wish they would listen to community members when they say that the uniform can trigger memories that take away from the experience of celebration.”
At Placer Pride, held on May 20, attendance doubled from last year, going from around 500 to 1,100 people — and so did the security presence, said planning committee member Cindy Baudoin. She said that for her personally, having police at Pride “was important and imperative to keeping our community safe.”
“I had some bad experiences with the police when I was a child, so it's not like I'm immune to police violence or police brutality, but I feel that there's good and bad in everything,” they said. “What we want is safe, and I know that police are a trigger for some people … so I don't know what the real answer is.”
Headliner Ryan Cassata at Placer Pride on Saturday, May 20, 2023.Photo by Jolanne Tierney and provided courtesy of Cindy BaudoinBaudoin added that Placer Pride organizers went through an active shooter training provided by police, in order to better prepare themselves for the worst case potential.
But Harper, who is also the executive director of California TRANScends, said she’d like to see community defense training come from the community — not from law enforcement — because “we keep each other safe.”
“We don’t really need outside entities,” she said. “There are people who volunteer to look out to keep our community safe [at events] … and I think it would be more communal to invest in [training] community folks.”
And she said the interactions and experiences a white gay man has with police are different from the ones she has as a Black trans woman.
“Recently, I was going to do my laundry, and I was stopped by the police because they assumed I was a sex worker,” she said. “It doesn’t matter if you're a Black or brown person that represents the system of policing. You having those identities doesn't negate the fact that policing has acted as oppression to marginalized identities.”
Dawson, the Decarcerate Sacramento organizer, said safety isn’t something that just happens.
“It’s something we have to proactively create … we have to create networks, and create a community of people that are willing to keep each other safe,” they said. “You can’t think of it [safety] as like an absence of danger. You have to think of it as a presence of safety networks that come out of organizing and activism.”
An example of community making sure that “everybody was safe and looking out for each other” took place at a drag show during Davis Pride’s community fest last weekend, Nelson said.
“There was a couple of protesters … and they were messing with this young lady that was just having a good time dancing and singing,” he said. “The crowd around all of them did not appreciate it … and sent the message that, ‘Hey, you need to leave. You’re not welcome here. Your behavior isn’t appreciated.’”
At Davis Pride Festival on Sunday, June 4, 2023, a drag queen interacts with a young festivalgoer in front of a crowd of community members.Photo provided courtesy of Wendy Weitzel“It’s not about the money”: Shifting Pride away from profit
Another conversation, though less emphasized, that emerged during 2019 was about who gets to access Pride — particularly when charging to attend Pride celebrations, especially ones increasingly reliant on sponsorships with companies that had worked against LGBTQ+ interests.
Monsanto, Dignity Health and Wells Fargo are among some of the companies that have sponsored Pride celebrations in the Sacramento region.
“Pride celebrations across the country have adopted a rainbow capitalist model of charging entrance fees that limit access to our most marginalised community members,” the Still Here Alliance’s 2019 press release read.
And Harper said of Pride: “It’s not about the money — Pride is still a protest. Pride is still resistance to dominant culture.”
Demonstrators protest the Sacramento Pride parade in response to a decision to allow uniformed police officers to march on June 9, 2019.Nick Miller / CapRadioThe TRANScends executive director also sits on the board of the Transgender Law Center, wants to see more grassroots celebrations where corporations don’t play a sponsorship role — “with more seasoning, with more focus on the marginalized folks in our community,” namely Black trans women.
“You see us on Pose, you see us in different media outlets,” she said. “But that doesn’t mean that a Black trans woman in the hood benefits from that.”
At Elk Grove Pride, organizers have intentionally partnered with Black LGBTQ+ led organizations — especially since their event lands on Juneteenth weekend — and say they’re redistributing funds back into the community through paying panelists and performers.
Like Harper, Elk Grove Pride organizer Joslyn said they often feel like most celebrations still center “those in our community who hold a significant amount of privilege.”
“Elk Grove Pride has become the embodiment of what Pride can look like when we take out corporate influence and center those who continue to be left out of even our own community,” they said.
The event, officially called “Elk Grove Pride: Embodied Liberation,” includes live performances, like an all-Black drag performer line-up, vendors and three panels: Family Acceptance, Embodying Black Queer Joy, and LGBTQIA+ Youth.
“It is important to center Pride toward Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) community and youth because the Elk Grove and Sacramento community demographics reflect that,” Nikki Abeleda, one of the Elk Grove Pride organizers, told CapRadio via email.
Both areas are “minority-majority” areas, meaning non-white people make up the bulk of their respective population.
Of the four celebrations mentioned — Davis, Sacramento, Elk Grove and Placer — only one charges for its main festival: Sacramento Pride.
Its Sunday march is free, but tickets to the two-day festival start at $10.
Priya Kumar, the marketing and communications director for the Sac LGBT Center, said the payment system exists because of how big the Sacramento Pride event has gotten since it was first held in 1979.
“We are a nonprofit, so we don't have, you know, unlimited funds to put on these types of events,” Kumar said. “The funds will go back into the Pride festival and back into the center. So we're making sure that anything we do get is going back into putting these events on and making them bigger and better every year.”
Back in 2019, Lizzo was the Sacramento Pride headliner. This year, Rebecca Black headlines the festival.
Not every Pride event has big-name performers. But community members overwhelmingly said that the Pride experience they most look forward to — and enjoy — is the experience of being together with other LGBTQ+ people of all ages.
The kids zone area at Placer Pride on Saturday, May 20, 2023.Photo by Jolanne Tierney and provided courtesy of Cindy BaudoinBaudoin said she met someone who was 66 and newly out at their first Pride during this year’s Placer Pride.
“They were just so grateful to just be there with their community and not have to worry and be their true authentic selves,” she said. “So that, to me, is the most important part of pride.”
And Moslen, another Elk Grove Pride organizer, added that she’s excited to bring youth into Pride celebrations, because they “are our past, present and future.”
“The trans and queer community has been built in part on the efforts of youth claiming their space among our community,” she said. “Without their knowledge and experience, we do not move forward as a community.”
Upcoming Pride parades, festivals
- Sacramento Pride Weekend
- Dates: Saturday and Sunday, June 10-11
- Time: The festival runs 12 p.m.-9 p.m. on Saturday and 12 p.m.-6 p.m. on Sunday. The Pride March is Sunday from 11 a.m.-2 p.m.
- Cost: The Sunday Pride March is free, and anyone 12 and under can attend for free.
- Single-day festival tickets are $18 with fees if purchased online and $20 at the gate. Discounted single-day tickets, at $10 plus fees, are available for youth between 13-17.
- A weekend pass is $32 plus fees for adults and $18 for youth between 13-17.
- Pride organizers have allotted some tickets for free distribution for those who are priced out by the tickets; contact them to learn more.
- Elk Grove Pride: Embodied LIberation
- Date: Saturday, June 17
- Time: 12 p.m.-6 p.m.
- Cost: Free
- Woodland Pride Parade
Correction: A previous version of this story incorrectly spelled Nikki Abeleda and Cindy Baudoin's name. It has since been updated.
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