Pride Month feels different as threats, fear of violence grows

For the residents of St. Cloud, Fla., a small city on the outskirts of Orlando, Pride Month feels different this year — and it looks different, too.

There will be no procession of rainbow Pride flags, or drag entertainers or street vendors this June.

In fact, there won’t be an official Pride Month celebration in St. Cloud this year at all. A festival scheduled for June 10 was canceled last month by its primary organizer, who cited a “climate of fear” and hostility toward LGBTQ people in a post on Facebook.

“This decision was not made lightly. We have been working hard to plan this event for months, and we were excited to celebrate our community with you. However, we have recently become aware of a number of factors that make it unsafe to hold this event at this time,” Kristina Bozanich, the owner of Bozanich Photography Collaborative in St. Cloud, wrote in the post.

In an interview with The Hill, Bozanich said a recent slate of laws passed in Florida that target LGBTQ people ultimately drove her to pull the plug on the event. At least four anti-LGBTQ laws have been signed this year by the state’s Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), who launched an expected bid for the White House last week.

When Bozanich created a Facebook event in early May for St. Cloud’s second annual Pride festival, she was met with a handful of negative comments, which she said she had anticipated. But things began to change after several laws condemned by LGBTQ advocacy groups took effect in Florida, and nebulous threats quickly turned into calls for explicit violence.

On May 18, one day after the laws were signed, a digital traffic sign in nearby Lake Nona was hacked and altered to read “KILL ALL GAYS.” The Orlando Police Department said the incident is under investigation.

“That was a big thing for us,” Bozanich said, referring to herself and her co-organizers, a team consisting of several local business owners.

Negative Facebook comments were one thing, but an act of overt hate playing out in the real world, so close to home — in blue Osceola County, no less — was something entirely different. The county voted overwhelmingly for President Biden in 2020, and voters there have sent Rep. Darren Soto, a Democrat, to Congress four times.

To make matters worse, Bozanich’s headliners, a group of drag performers, backed out of the event over fear that one of the laws, which restricts drag shows, could land them into legal trouble or attract violence. At least 166 drag events between January and April were targeted by threats, protests and violent action, according to GLAAD, an LGBTQ media watchdog.

“They felt it wasn’t a safe environment or event for them to be at, given what’s been going on,” Bozanich said of the performers.

“We had to assess whether we could handle if anything extreme were to happen,” she added. In the end, she and her co-organizers decided they could not; they didn’t have enough money to hire the security they felt they needed, and they called the whole thing off.

The experiences in St. Cloud are not unique. Across the nation, Pride organizers are recalibrating and reshaping what their celebrations will look like amid a record-shattering year for anti-LGBTQ legislation that has altered the legal landscape and galvanized hate groups.

“We’ve definitely seen movement with regard to some organizations that have either outright canceled or retooled what they’re doing, especially with regard to these vague laws about drag shows,” said Marsha Levine, a co-president of the U.S. Association of Prides. “It’s just not clear to them what they should do.”

Four states — Florida, Tennessee, Montana and Texas — have passed laws or policies this year that ban or heavily restrict certain drag performances.

For Vanessa Rodley, the president and festival director of Mid-South Pride in Tennessee, the path forward is clear, albeit littered with cumbersome obstacles that have made putting this year’s Pride celebration together the most difficult in her 12-year career.

“This is the roughest year I’ve ever had,” Rodley told The Hill in a recent interview. “More stressful than COVID.”

“It’s very scary and we’re nervous, but we do it for our community,” Rodley said, “because our community deserves it.”

In March, Tennessee became the first state in the nation to enact a law explicitly targeting drag shows, attaching criminal penalties to certain performances that take place in public or where they may be seen by minors. A federal judge temporarily halted the law on March 31, just hours before it was set to take effect, and a final ruling is due by June 2.

Rodley said her team has made certain changes to this year’s Pride festival — which will kick off June 3 in Memphis — taking the state’s new restrictions on drag shows into consideration. She made it clear, however, that the more than 50 drag entertainers booked to perform aren’t going anywhere, regardless of whether the law is allowed to take effect.

“We will not alienate or take away any part of our community,” Rodley said. “We will not have an event where drag entertainers or trans people or anyone who just decides to wear a wig or a mustache that day cannot participate or be part of our event.”

In addition to prohibiting “adult cabaret performances” from taking place within 1,000 feet of schools, public parks and places of worship, Tennessee’s drag law expands the state’s obscenity laws to include restrictions on performances that feature certain “male or female impersonators,” a provision that has been criticized as an attack on transgender and gender non-conforming people.

That said, Rodley has taken some precautions ahead of this year’s Pride celebration, including instructing drag performers not to remove any articles of clothing during their performances, even if they are fully clothed underneath. Drag entertainers have also been asked to not accept cash tips on stage this year, Rodley said, to make the experience feel less like a “cabaret show.”

People attending this year’s Pride festival will also be charged a $1 entry fee for the first time, Rodley said, to compel guests to adhere to a code of conduct and prevent disruptive or violent anti-LGBTQ protests from taking place. An annual Pride parade, also slated for June 3, will include members of local law enforcement and the district attorney.

Beefing up security is top of mind for other Pride organizers this year as well. Kevin Hamm, the president of Montana Pride, has been working with law enforcement and community leaders in cities across the state in anticipation of an annual Pride celebration in August.

It’s an unfortunate but vital consideration, Hamm told The Hill, especially in Montana, ranked highest among all 50 states in terms of hate groups per capita.

Last month, a Pride parade in Bozeman — the city’s first in more than a decade — was disrupted by members of a white supremacist group holding signs with anti-LGBTQ slurs written on them. One person was pepper-sprayed by the group, according to local news reports.

The following week, a transgender couple at a Target in Missoula was harassed and threatened by a man throwing merchandise from the retail giant’s Pride collection onto the floor. Target in May announced it was removing items from its annual Pride collection, citing threats made to employees at locations across the country.

“I’m hoping they don’t show up [in August],” Hamm said of anti-LGBTQ protesters, “but we’re taking all the necessary precautions to have all the authorities in place.” 

Hamm said hate groups like the Proud Boys and the Patriot Front, both of which have been known to target drag events, in Montana have been emboldened by the state’s legislative session, during which lawmakers passed no fewer than five anti-LGBTQ laws, according to the ACLU.

“They’re exhausting,” he said. “But we deal with them, and we stand tall, we stand together and we move forward and we have a better life.”

“We must remember that the reason that we have Pride is not because everything’s hunky dory and we can just celebrate our lives,” Hamm said. “The reason we have Pride is because we still have a fight to fight every day.”