OutReach knew that it could have been approved to host a 2019 Pride Parade just as it has in past years for at least a week before announcing to the LGBTQ community that it was foregoing the popular parade in favor of a festival, Madison Alder Mike Verveer said.
For over a month, OutReach has led media and community members to believe that it was essentially stonewalled from hosting the Pride Parade by the Streets Use division of the City of Madison as well as elements inside of the Madison Police Department.
In a letter dated March 26, 2019 OutReach’s Board of Directors addressed a letter to the LGBTQ community stating that OutReach “encountered unforeseen circumstances related to the logistics and feasibility of the parade. While planning for a festival gained momentum, the logistics and costs of OutReach hosting a parade became insurmountable.”
The letter goes on to say that OutReach got to a point where there was no time left to be able to organize a Pride Parade for 2019.
“With time running out, we decided to move forward with festival planning and to discontinue efforts to hold a parade,” the letter said.
OutReach Blamed New City Restrictions
While the March 26 letter does not specifically blame the City for putting barriers in place, OutReach leadership told Madison365 said it was obstacles put in place by the City of Madison Streets Use Commission and the cost of hiring officers from the Madison Police Department to provide security that led to the parade being cancelled.
In an interview Friday, OutReach Executive Director Steve Starkey said when he went to the Streets division to talk about this year’s Pride parade, they told him in no uncertain terms that the parade would not be able to use State Street and that the gathering would have to remain on the Square and that Outreach would have to cap the parade at 60 units, as opposed to the 90 units (a contingent of marchers or a float etc) that they’d been previously allowed.
OutReach was able to break through the first wall about not using State Street. But the City said if they used State Street, then everyone marching would have to stop at every red light.
“We said we don’t want to just stand around in a circle on the square,” Starkey told Madison365. “They eventually said we can use State Street but we have to stop at all of the three red lights. So they were asking us to have a third of the organizations involved previously to not be involved, for us to stop for all the stop lights which would break up the parade, and said that we couldn’t do it on the third Sunday of August anymore because it was too close to student move-in day.”
Starkey said another matter was that of the police presence once again. For 2019, the City was requiring that they triple the number of uniformed police officers covering the event. They also were making it a “district event” so that they could charge double the price per officer.
“So, all those various things they were asking us to do, we just decided it was not feasible this year,” Starkey said. “We’re not saying we’re never going to do a parade again. Another organization might do one in the future. For this year we just ran out of time for negotiating and working with the City.”
City Would Have Allowed Parade as Usual
But minutes and agenda reports from the Madison Common Council meeting on March 19 contradict those statements. On March 19, the Council approved an ordinance that would classify the Pride Parade as a Legacy Event, meaning that new restrictions and regulations adopted by the Streets Use Commission would not apply to the parade.
The ordinance had been in the works since November 2018, with exceptions for “Legacy Events” proposed in February.
“The ordinance that the city council adopted in no way would have prevented the Pride Parade from continuing on State Street,” said Verveer, who represents the downtown area, in an interview Tuesday.
The City Council made sure that events like Crazylegs, the Pride Parade, the UW Homecoming Parade, the Maxwell Day Sale and other events near and dear to the hearts of Madisonians would continue unaltered despite new rules put forth by Streets Use. The ordinance adopted March 19 gives an exception to new rules to any event that had held a permit for 10 years as of 2018.
That decision came a full week before OutReach’s Board of Directors decided to post the open letter to the public in which it sounds like they did all they could to make the parade happen but were opposed at every turn.
Alder Verveer said that indeed the Streets Use Commission has been oppositional to OutReach for years over the Pride Parade, but stated repeatedly that Mayor Paul Soglin has historically overruled unfair restrictions (such as forcing the Parade onto Williamson Street instead of allowing it on State Street) and reiterated that OutReach dropped out of negotiations right before the Common Council was going to help make this year’s event run smoothly.
“So, we came up with a compromise with the City Council,” Verveer said.”It would have completely exempted the existing Pride Parade from the new rules. They would have been able to march without stopping at the stop lights and at the same time of day, the same day of the month and everything. What the City Council approved in March would have exempted them. But OutReach wanted to nail down their plans for the year and couldn’t wait to see what the City Council adopted. So they went ahead and made their decision.”
Verveer said that as it relates to the police department, the costs were not going to be doubled. He said that, as in years past, police would volunteer to provide security to the event.
But by the time all of this had come to light, OutReach had already decided on pursuing the festival idea. Verveer said he was involved in several iterations of the festival idea. One idea was that there would be a Pride Parade on West Washington Avenue or on Langdon Street culminating in a festival at James Madison Park or Brittingham Park. There was talk of doing a festival without a parade and hosting it at Olin Park.
“Big Community Conflict” Marred 2018 Parade
Starkey said that indeed the pressures and demands of hosting the Pride Parade had become too much for the small staff of OutReach.
“We’re a small organization. We just have two full time and four part time staff,” Starkey told Madison365. “Trying to do the parade even in good circumstances is challenging but to do it in this entire big community conflict and respond to the media and all the people with concerns was overwhelming for our staff.”
The big community conflict was a reference to the torrid nature of community discussions surrounding last year’s Pride event and the participation of law enforcement agencies.
In 2018, the Pride Parade was a contentious and controversial event that resulted in (or was the result of) fractures in the LGBTQ community which combined with an ugly fight over the presence of police officers who traditionally marched in the parade.
In 2018, just weeks before Pride, a group of LGBTQ people of color posted a message on Outreach’s Facebook saying that they were not comfortable participating in the event because of armed and uniformed police officers being present at the march. Outreach controversially deleted those remarks, which sparked outrage among some in the community who perceived it as Outreach being markedly pro-police and silencing people of color.
The ensuing backlash and the threats by some groups in the community to boycott the parade and make executing it basically impossible put Outreach in a situation where administrators felt they had to appease those groups by publicly stating they would exclude police from participation.
But instead of appeasing those groups, Outreach’s position outraged much of the rest of the community and people who were in support of police participation, particularly because over the years a huge majority of the police who have marched in Pride are officers of color who identify as LGBTQ.
“A lot of organizations and people in the community didn’t want a contingent of officers to march in the parade,” Starkey said. “A lot of people of color and transgender people said they have a lot of negative contacts with police and they didn’t want to march with armed police officers in the parade. We met with the Community Pride Coalition and the MPD. The police said they were required to wear weapons if they were going to appear in uniform. But UW Health as well as Diverse & Resilient joined the boycott. We were facing a demonstration that was going to stop the parade. We asked the police not to march and we got a big backlash from the people who wanted the police to march. It was very challenging. It was challenging to respond to all the community comments and feedback and do all the logistics.”
The presentation of people of color in Madison as one group that is spoken for solely by its community leaders (or white allies) was on full display throughout this public debate. While it remains accurate to say that many (particularly youths) in communities of color who are gay or transgender have been mistreated routinely by the police, there also are many people of color who felt that being able to see officers who share their skin tone and sexual identity march next to them at Pride would be a powerful image.
“So I think that communities of color are not a monolithic kind of united opinion about this,” Starkey told Madison365. “We heard from people that strongly wanted the police removed and we heard from other people of color who wanted the police to be in the march.”
At the end of the day, the police agreed to take of the guns and badges and march as private citizens in the parade that drew over 10,000 people.
But Outreach was left with scars and fears about its public image. In a letter announcing that there will be no Pride parade in 2019, Outreach’s Board of Directors opened with a lengthy and intense racial apology.
First, we’d like to offer a sincere apology for our racist actions. We take full responsibility for all our actions that silenced, erased, overlooked, and excluded our Queer, Transgender, and Intersex People of Color (QTIPOC) in the community, as well as the harm that we caused in these actions which we recognize function to maintain and reinforce white supremacy. We can’t promise that we won’t make mistakes in the future, so we humbly ask our community to hold us accountable as we make efforts to educate ourselves, staff, volunteers, clients, and stakeholders, and continue to engage in community healing.
The letter said that Outreach has also revised the organization’s mission statement to include eliminating racism.
Starkey said Outreach is making a major commitment to making sure the organization partners with communities of color and that Outreach strives to make sure diversity is a top priority.
“One of the key factors into the boycott was about racism and about racial justice and about portions of the community being insensitive to the needs of people of color,” he said. “So we have embarked on an anti-racism program and we intend to in the future do that kind of work. We’re working on exactly what kind of program it would be. We are looking to do more partnerships with organizations that serve communities of color. We’re also working on having better diversity in the client population that we serve.”
It was under these circumstances that OutReach entered into negotiations for the 2019 Pride event. And, it appears, the organization was just too battle weary to undertake the event again.
But none of that explains the way OutReach has chosen to divulge (or not divulge) the sequence of events in a more transparent way that led to its decision to stop doing the Parade.
Verveer believes that OutReach needed more time to work through the rifts and divides with the Police Department and that, overall, he is saddened deeply that there will not be a Pride Parade this year.
OutReach has instead opted to resurrect the old MAGIC Picnic, an event Verveer says “old timers” like him remember fondly.
The MAGIC Picnic will be a nod to the popular gatherings that took place in Brittingham Park beginning in the late 70’s and ending in 2008. The festival will run from 1pm-6pm on August 18 at Warner Park and administrators from Outreach say they want to combine the most popular aspects of the old MAGIC Picnic with the fun atmosphere that has surrounded most of PRIDE in years past.
“We are going to have a stage for live music and entertainment. The Festival is happening the same day as the Pride Parade has in the past,” Starkey told Madison365. “We will have a pavillion there and so we’ll have a dj and some dancing in the pavillion. We’ll have merchandise vendors, food vendors, we’ll be having either a beer tent or a beer area of some sort. We’ll have games, non-profit organizations will have booths. So a lot of activities and many of the features that the old MAGIC picnic had.”
Outreach is hoping that festivals like this year’s will have a healing effect on the community after all the rifts last year.
Some will definitely join Alder Verveer in being disappointed about not having the time honored parade.
Others might wonder silently or out loud why OutReach continued to blame the City for cancelling the parade if they simply decided to host a festival instead.
