Seattle’s Gay Pride celebration has long teetered on the brink of financial and organizational collapse. In recent years, under the leadership of the weary volunteers who make up the Seattle Out and Proud committee, this sense of constant crisis has been even more pronounced. On Tuesday it reached a point of no return as the committee gave up on trying to salvage an event that, under its tenure, had become, paradoxically, both more popular and more debt-ridden than ever.
Coming one year after Out and Proud moved the Pride festivities off Capitol Hill and into the streets of downtown, the announcement Tuesday that the committee would be disbanding and filing for bankruptcy brought a renewed round of recriminations and debate in the gay community over what Seattle Pride should look like—and whether or not it would happen this year at all.
One thing was clear, however: The Seattle Out and Proud committee had not found a workable model for running a parade down Fourth Avenue and then holding a subsequent festival at the Seattle Center. The high cost of holding a post-parade event at the Seattle Center last year, and the committee’s inability to anticipate and cover that expense, left Out and Proud more than $100,000 in debt, a crippling financial blow from which the group found it impossible to recover.
“We must cut our losses and start anew,” said Eric Albert-Gauthier, the Out and Proud president. “We have honestly tried to do our best as a volunteer board with no agenda other than to produce a great celebration for our community. We hope that whoever does step in can unite the community behind them and likewise lead with no alternative agenda. We look forward to supporting whichever group of people can step up.”
It was not immediately apparent who would step into the vacuum created by the Out and Proud committee’s dissolution, but it seemed likely that the Seattle LGBT Community Center would try to step in and organize a parade and celebration on Capitol Hill, perhaps in concert with the Seattle Gay News. The center did not respond to a request for comment by press time, but it apparently holds a permit for a march on Capitol Hill on the evening of Saturday, June 23—the evening before the downtown parade was to have happened. The director of the center indicated on Tuesday that she would try to move her march permit to the morning of Sunday, June 24. Others in the gay community have called publicly for the already permitted downtown parade—currently scheduled for that same morning—to go on, and for parade-goers to simply take advantage of the Seattle Center being open to the public and go there for an impromptu gathering after the march.
It is unclear who might inherit Out and Proud’s permits for the downtown parade, and what might be done with them, but with multiple permits for similar and perhaps competing events now in play, the matter could end up in the city’s lap.
The financial failure of the Seattle Out and Proud committee likely has many roots, but the biggest problem was clearly the $100,000 debt the committee ended up owing Seattle Center after last year’s event. It was a debt that most committee members at the time had not anticipated, according to Weston Sprigg, vice president of Out and Proud.
Sprigg told The Stranger that the committee’s contract with the Seattle Center was negotiated last year by Dale Kershner, the Out and Proud president at the time. But, according to Sprigg, no one else on the Out and Proud committee saw the contract Kershner negotiated until Pride was over and done with. “When we got the invoice from Seattle Center,” said Sprigg, “we were shocked.” The shock came from labor charges that Sprigg said he and other committee members weren’t expecting.
The whole episode raises questions not just about Kershner’s financial decisions, but also about the now-dissolved board’s commitment to financial oversight. Sprigg is careful to say that the board does not blame Kershner for the $100,000 debt. “It was no one’s fault, really,” he told The Stranger. “We’re all volunteers. We just didn’t communicate well.” Still, it appears that Kershner did not leave the board on the best of terms (he says they just didn’t call him anymore; they say he didn’t show up for meetings so they voted him off).
Kershner claims the Seattle Center contract was discussed many times at board meetings. “We all knew roughly what it was going to cost,” says Kershner. “We thought we’d have the sponsorship to cover it.” According to Kershner, that sponsorship just did not materialize. Several liquor companies that had previously backed the parade pulled out at the last minute, because, Kershner claims, “some of the bars in Capitol Hill just refused to carry their products.”
Kershner was also dealing with a number of personal financial and legal challenges at the time that he was entrusted with making financial decisions for Out and Proud. In October 2006, the Superior Court of King County, on behalf of Kershner’s ex-wife, held Kershner in contempt for his failure to comply with more than $60,000 of unpaid child support. (Kershner told The Stranger that the issue has now been “cleared up,” but he did not elaborate.) Court documents also reveal that Kershner is currently embroiled in a lawsuit over $8,000 in bills left unpaid by his business, the Seattle GLBT Yellow Pages, and that he owes more than $2,000 to a credit collection agency. Furthermore, since 2005, Kershner has been involved in a legal battle over a house in West Seattle that he bought with his ex-partner.
To deal with the debt burden, Out and Proud this year had partnered with Independent Event Solutions, a local production company that puts on the Capitol Hill Block Party. The company had offered to pay half of Out and Proud’s debt to the Seattle Center, and with that assurance, the Seattle Center allowed the event to go forward. But on Sunday, the production company announced it was pulling out. “It just didn’t pencil out,” said Dave Meinert, one of the partners in the company. There was no way to turn a profit and pay off the debt while keeping the event free (organizers felt the event had to be free). Meinert said he thought this year’s Out and Proud committee, which had a much different membership than last year’s, was doing a good job, but had simply inherited a losing hand from preceding committees.
“What probably should have happened,” Meinert told The Stranger, “is that at some point, when people noticed that this event was outgrowing Broadway and Volunteer Park, a long-term plan should have been made to move it, and to know the expenses of that move in advance. That didn’t happen.” 
