P&L event causes dissent among KC's LGBT community
Even with a last-minute venue change and protesters, this year's Pride festivities are bigger and better than ever, say organizers
Power the Light with Pride is being held this Friday at the Power & Light District
Thursday, June 3, 2010
Organizing this year's gay pride festivities has been an exercise in flexibility for Show Me Pride president Rick Bumgardner.
First, the festival's home for the past seven years was pretty much destroyed when torrential rains descended on Penn Valley Park at the same time as Rockfest's 40,000 or so attendees, turning the grounds into a muddy mess. And just as soon as Bumgardner was offered a new space for the festival, he had to cancel the pride parade.
"It was one thing we did not want to have canceled this year," Bumgardner said. "But with the costs of blocking roads, police and permits, it became something that wasn't fiscally feasible for us to do."
After the festival was moved more than five miles south of Penn Valley Park to Berkley Riverfront Park, Bumgardner said it didn't make sense to have only 18 entries parading such a long way to the new festival grounds. So the Show Me Pride Parade was canceled.
That's when some other folks decided they'd host a parade of their own. A loosely-organized group operating under the moniker Gretchen Wieners (a character from the 2004 movie "Mean Girls") planned a parade that begins Friday at 4:30 p.m. near 18th and Main and ends at the Power & Light District. But instead of joining Show Me Pride's 6 p.m. Power the Light With Pride party inside, the collective Gretchen Wieners of Kansas City will stage a protest.
"Our main issue is the fact that the Power & Light district has a pretty rough history with Kansas City in regard to their dress-code policy," said one of the protest's organizers, Rachel Gadd-Nelson.
P&L has been criticized by the media and the public over a recently-amended dress code that many saw as discriminatory toward black men, and one Gadd-Nelson saw as just plain discriminatory. "They have discriminated against members of our community, regardless of race," she said.
Video
What do you think of Show Me Pride hosting an event at P&L this year?
Asked outside Hamburger Mary's
For Bumgardner, the newly-relaxed dress code is a step in the right direction at P&L, and many in the LGBT community see Friday night's event as a great way to incorporate pride events into Kansas City's mainstream nightlife (see Speak!KC, left).
"This is unfortunately a rare occasion when someone really starts to question or counter the major LGBT organization in Kansas City," Gadd-Nelson said. "And unfortunately, that doesn't happen a lot. A main reason we have Gretchen Weiners as our spokeswoman is the fact that we have a lot of people who say 'I want to be involved but I can't be identified because I'll be blacklisted and people in the community will make it difficult for me to be an active member.' That's scary."
According to Bumgarnder, that's not the case at all.
"The cool thing about it is that they have a voice, and I think their voice is being heard," Bumgardner said. "I don't think they have a different voice than we do. I just think the way we're going about expressing that voice is diametrically at different ends of the spectrum."
For Gadd-Nelson, that dissent is a good thing.
"In the long run, it's going to be really productive that someone's coming out and talking about these things," she said.
Whatever happens in the long run, Bumgardner said this year's pride events have had more participation than ever, and he expects nearly 30,000 people to attend the festival over the course of the weekend.
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