Karma can be a bitch. When Seattle's small LGBT Center vowed in 2007 to produce a second QueerFest—a parade and festival on Capitol Hill to compete with the official Gay Pride Parade and festival, which moved downtown in 2006—it hoped to shut down the downtown parade. But the LGBT Center lost so much money on QueerFest that it was forced to cancel most of its programs and move into office space provided by Equal Rights Washington (ERW).

So when ERW announced its plans to move, the now-dependent LGBT Center had to move with it. On the afternoon of May 22, LGBT Center coordinator Anna Bacler moved the office to ERW's new digs on Seventh Avenue, two blocks from City Hall. In other words, the LGBT Center has been forced off Capitol Hill and into downtown.

A few years earlier, in an attempt to reclaim Pride for Capitol Hill, the LGBT Center invested tens of thousands of dollars in a parade on Broadway and a festival in Volunteer Park. The result was a catfight between Capitol Hill loyalists, primarily business owners who benefited from the Pride weekend crowds, and Seattle Out and Proud, the historic producers of Pride events, which moved the Pride Parade to the literal and figurative center of Seattle to make a political statement. Seattle Gay News editor George Bakan, one of QueerFest's biggest cheerleaders, says the LGBT Center "overreached and they didn't budget carefully."

Bacler cites only a tumultuous economy for the organization's decline (the LGBT Center now maintains only a helpline, and without its own office space, there is no actual "center"). "We decided that with the financial overhead, it cost too much," says Bacler.

With the atrophy of the LGBT Center and the end of QueerFest, the controversy over Pride leaving Capitol Hill has evaporated. "Last year, there were the two factions fighting each other, and now people are, like, to heck with it," says Robert Sondheim, co-owner of Rosebud restaurant.

Canceling QueerFest may have led to misconceptions. An erroneous headline in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer on May 23 announced that there will be no Pride Parade at all on Broadway this year, and the article made no mention of another historic Pride weekend event that is still planned for Capitol Hill.

The Seattle Dyke March, according to Jill Mullins, one of four organizers, has a permit to rally at Seattle Central Community College and march down Broadway on Saturday, June 28, the evening before the downtown parade. Dyke marches were founded in the early 1990s as a counterpoint to male-dominated, beer-logo-wrapped pride parades. Seattle's dyke march typically draws 1,000 or more women and, Mullins says, has never been in direct competition with the Pride Parade.

Troy Campbell, an organizer with Seattle Out and Proud, producer of the downtown Pride Parade, says he doesn't take pleasure in QueerFest's demise. But, he reflects, "It just spread the community a little thin." recommended

dominic@thestranger.com