Rescheduled Cleveland Pride event hoping for dry weather @myClevLGBTPride

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Sat 8/8

Having already been affected by Mother Nature’s wrath in the past, Cleveland Pride officials made the difficult decision earlier this summer to cancel the June 27 event due to the foreboding forecast for heavy rains, high winds and lightning.

Now, six weeks later — with fingers crossed the weather will hold up — a rescheduled Cleveland Pride event takes place Aug. 8 at Voinovich Park in downtown Cleveland.

The upcoming 27th annual Cleveland Pride parade, rally and festival, which over the past decade has grown in attendance from 8,000 to upwards of 40,000 participants, will basically mirror the original affair with the only high-profile difference being ‘80s singer Belinda Carlisle won’t be in attendance.

Cool Cleveland talked to Cleveland Pride Board President/CEO Todd J. Saporito about what kind of hoops — albeit of the rainbow variety — organizers had to jump through in order to restage the upcoming event.

Let’s go back to June 27. At what point did you realize Cleveland Pride would have to be postponed or cancelled?

We started getting concerned about 5:30am. The rain wasn’t forecasted to come over Cleveland. If there was some drizzle, we would have had the event but at 5:30am the weather shifted aggressively. We held two conference calls and we determined we may have to cancel. We had to get people down to the park at 6:50am and then watch the weather from there. I’d say by 7:45am we determined the prediction for lightning. That’s what does it. We’ve had rain before but 45 MPH winds and lightning, it’s just too dangerous. We had the festival wiped out in 2008 at 5pm due to a similar storm and not nearly as aggressive as the one that was coming. So we weren’t going to take any chances and made an announcement about 8am calling off the event.

At that point, were you certain you were going to be able to reschedule Cleveland Pride?

Voinovich Park is actually going under renovation so there were not more available dates for Voinovich Park from then until September when they closed the park. While we wanted to reschedule, we didn’t know for certain we could. We did learn from the Downtown Cleveland Alliance — you have to give them credit — that the park would be open on Aug. 8 because of a non-confirmation. So we were working behind the scenes, working with Cleveland Metroparks and others to see if there was a venue to house the number of people we had. We looked at 117th and Clifton Boulevard — we were going to take 110th to 117th on Clifton Boulevard to come up with an alternative plan. On July 13, we got word from the city they wanted us to come to the special event planning committee and present the actual event on August 8.

How thrilled were you to be able to have Cleveland Pride at Voinovich Park?

We were happy because this year is our 20th anniversary of being at Voinovich Park and this is the last year Cleveland Pride would be held at Voinovich Park. We have to find a new home. So we used all of our energy to make sure this is going to be a really great celebration — our 20th anniversary there, our last at that venue, and of course that combined with the SCOTUS ruling and our center’s 40th anniversary. The team itself really wanted to have the event, especially since we had actually already built the entire venue.

Aside from Carlisle not performing, is there a silver lining to the delay?

It’s going to be the same format because we have the same venue. Again, we want to celebrate being there one last time, especially since we’re not certain where it will be. We don’t know if the parade will be a component of Pride in upcoming years. So more importantly this year, we can march past the federal buildings and City Hall, which was what was so important about our particular parade. We were able to go past those government buildings and basically show that our community is here. That was really an important factor.

Finally, there seems to be so much to celebrate this summer in the LGBT community. Do you feel the momentum?

I’m seeing momentum from a different perspective and I’m clearly biased on this. You have the SCOTUS marriage equality ruling and you have other types of headway we’re making. But for what I see, the rescheduling of the event caused a community of people in Cleveland and around the areas [to understand] that Pride is not an entitlement. And the event itself just doesn’t happen by happenstance. As the community has been challenged to find a way to make this happen a second time, I’ve seen an organization called NEOHA (NorthEast Ohio Alliance of College & University GSAs) come together, drive a campaign with the partnership of the Center and key individual businesses to actually raise funds that were not recovered from that cancellation. And to me, it’s seeing those groups of young people, who have become a part of and integrated into our program at Pride, literally go out there and raise community awareness that the festival and the events that they want to celebrate are important. That’s the reward in all of it: These people who are working together to help us make this happen would have probably never really matured in this way if it hadn’t been because there was a loss.

clevelandpride.org/

[Written by John Benson]
 
[Photo by Anastasia Pantsios] 

800 E 9th St, Cleveland, OH 44114

 

 

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