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.”
