The neighborhood started coming to life in the 1950s. To help you understand how this all went down, I gotta take you back in time… to the beginning of Philadelphia’s Gayborhood. In the LGBTQ community, there were deeper wounds that fueled the downfall of Pride. MW: It wasn’t just those few Facebook posts that took down the group that ran Pride for 30 years. And so when that didn’t happen, I think people felt like, wow, are these the gatekeepers that we need or wanted in this role, who are not responsive? You can’t tell me that you’ve held an organization for 28 years and you don’t have enough compassion or concern for the community that you would respond transparently to our concerns. JD: I think people had absolutely enough of Pride and their, you know, BS.Īnd from there, the organization unraveled.ĪM: People were upset because they had not only deleted their Facebook page, they wiped their website. That someone else in the organization had posted them, and that he had resigned.īut it was too little, too late. They said those posts had never been approved by the group’s leader, Franny. So Philly Pride Presents put out an apology. MW: That’s José de Marco, a longtime organizer with the HIV/AIDS coalition ACT UP Philadelphia. JOSÉ DE MARCO: I mean, that really was the worst kind of insult you could pay. It was actually a response to police brutality, after years of police raiding gay bars and using violence against queer and trans people.ĪM: And then it also referred to trans people, more specifically trans women, as those dressed as women, which is highly transphobic. MW: And of course, that’s not really how Stonewall went down.
One that seemed to take the side of police officers.ĪM: Whomever posted it from Philly Pride Presents made it seem like the police were under attack from people participating in civil disobedience. The post painted a twisted picture of the first night. This time, it was about the Stonewall Riots. So they posted that, but I guess the gay version.Ībout a week later, they posted again. MW: You know the Blue Lives Matter flag, right? The black and white version of the American flag, but with a royal blue stripe right through the middle? It’s come to represent everything from support for police officers to white nationalism, and even that 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Seems pretty standard, right? But under those two sentences was an image.Ībdul-Aliy Muhammad, a Black, nonbinary activist and writer, was one of many community members who saw it.ĪBDUL-ALIY MUHAMMAD: What it looked like was a Blue Lives Matter flag, with the rainbow strip in the middle. We look forward to seeing you all in person Saturday, September 4.” One of the posts went like this: “Philly Pride wishes everyone a happy Memorial Day, 2021. They tried to build the hype exactly how you would expect a couple of middle-aged queers to do it. Pride had to be virtual in 2020 because of the pandemic. In the summer of 2021, Philly Pride Presents was gearing up to host its first in-person event in two years. In this episode, you’ll hear why Philly Pride Presents went up in flames. And ran the group like a hierarchical business for almost 30 years.īut her reign was about to come to a dramatic end. She made Pride into an official nonprofit, called Philly Pride Presents.
When the first round of organizers got burnt out, they handed the reins to a woman named Franny Price. You heard how they fought to create something meaningful for the community - up against community infighting, and the deadly HIV/AIDS epidemic. Last episode, you met the early organizers of Philadelphia Pride. MICHAELA WINBERG, HOST: Welcome back to March On: The Fight for Pride.