While rainbow flags decorate St. Petersburg year-round, Pride month is extra special in the Sunshine City.
St. Pete Pride isn’t just the most popular LGBTQ+ happening in the state of Florida. Visit St. Pete/ Clearwater calls the monthlong festival the largest Pride event in the Southeast, with over 300,000 expected to attend this weekend’s festivities alone. In June 2023, over half a million people attended local Pride events.
“It’s like we put on Woodstock every year,” said Stanley Solomons, St. Pete Pride treasurer.
How did St. Pete — a fast-growing city, but certainly not Florida’s largest — grow such a vast audience?
St. Pete Pride was founded in 2003 after the Tampa Bay PrideFest held in Tampa fell apart, according to LGBTQ+ news outlet Watermark.
That year, the first “St. Pete Pride Promenade” drew about 10,000 people to the city’s Grand Central District, Times archives said. The march commemorated the anniversary of the Stonewall riots and occurred a few days after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned state antisodomy laws.
St. Pete’s then-Mayor Rick Baker resisted attending the parade or backing it with a public statement.
“Personally, I don’t support the general agenda of the Pride event,” he told the then-St. Petersburg Times in 2004.
But the festivities continued to grow without the mayor’s help. By the time Solomons got involved with St. Pete Pride’s fifth festival in 2008, the event brought out tens of thousands.
Solomons remembers attending when the parade and street festival still took place on the same day. Tables and tents lined both sides of Central Avenue, with floats and processions in between.
“It just got big. It got to be too big and it wasn’t safe anymore,” he said.
To create more room on the street, St. Pete Pride separated the parade and street festival into two events across one weekend. This allowed for more vendors to participate, Solomons said, ushering in even more publicity. By 2017, the parade had outgrown its original neighborhood and moved to the downtown waterfront. Though the move was controversial among some business owners in the Grand Central District, it ultimately allowed for more attendees.
Solomons credits the success to St. Pete’s small-town feel, word of mouth and support from groups like Visit St. Pete/ Clearwater.
“I was in New York in a cab and I heard an ad for St. Pete. So we’re all over … and we’ve got a good reputation,” he said. “(St. Pete Pride) just became a way of life. We already have people wanting to book hotels for next year.”
Tiffany Freisberg, former St. Pete Pride president and current board member, said the organization works with Destination Analysts to measure growth. The third-party company uses information like hotel beds and drone footage to determine people per square mile. In 2022, St. Pete Pride brought a local economic impact of $67.2 million.
“I think what’s happened in the last few years is that we have a lot more people coming from out of town,” Freisberg said. “We’re on more and more lists of LGBTQ-friendly cities.”
She credits several individuals from the city. Jim Nixon, the city’s former LGBTQ+ liaison, helped St. Pete maintain a perfect score on the Human Rights Campaign’s annual Municipal Equality Index for seven years. Rick Kriseman was the only City Council member to sign a proclamation recognizing St. Pete Pride when it started. As mayor, he raised the rainbow flag at City Hall and declared March 31 Transgender Day of Visibility.
“He’s the one who, when I became president, gave us a contract to ensure that St. Pete Pride carries on for at least five years, getting the level of support it has from the city,” Freisberg said. “He walked in every parade. He was a huge advocate, and we really, really needed that coming out of COVID.”
In 2020, the pandemic forced St. Pete Pride to pivot once again. When the 2020 and 2021 parades were canceled, the group focused on creating new events through the month of June to highlight the local LGBTQ+ community. Offerings included a 5K, fireworks and a day for youth and families.
“It allowed us to create more sponsorship opportunities, because suddenly organizations that maybe didn’t see themselves belonging at Pride originally could see themselves at Family Day,” Freisberg said. “Maybe that was a less controversial way for them to support the LGBTQ community.”
Current Mayor Ken Welch has continued city support, from hoisting the Pride flag in June to pledging to fight discrimination.
“We cannot and we will not stand silent while our fundamental rights of freedom, choice and self-determination are stripped away by anyone or any organization, including politicians in Washington and Tallahassee,” he said in 2022.
Going forward, St. Pete Pride wants even more folks to feel welcome. Tamara Leigh, founder of Tampa Bay Black Lesbians, is working to cultivate safe spaces and events for the Black and Brown queer community.
“There’s this misconception outside of the LGBTQ community, I think, that we’re kind of all skipping shoulder to shoulder, arm in arm, doing the YMCA,” said Leigh, who is also the founder and editor of Blaque/OUT Magazine and Consulting. “Inclusion and making sure that all of the people that are part of the community is incredibly important. If you’re only fighting for one piece of the community, what happens to everyone else?”
Since getting involved in 2020, Leigh has worked with St. Pete Pride organizers to create more diverse events, including the Juneteenth Pride celebration that debuted in 2021.
“The evolution over the years has made it a two-day Juneteenth festival that celebrates everything that Juneteenth is about and why it matters to community,” she said. “It’s a safe space for Black queer folks to be able to celebrate that day.”
Amid recent anti-LGBTQ+ legislation that has passed in the last few years, Leigh wants to remind folks about the power of visibility.
“Some people are scared to come out and so it’s sort of an act of bravery and rebellion to even show up to these events, because it can be scary,” she said. “But I think it’s incredibly important to realize that people still do.”
Information from the Tampa Bay Times archive was used in this report.
