What is now called Seattle Pride in the Park seems to have evolved from an event originally called the "Volunteer Park Pride Festival," which I first attended in 2017 but apparently did ocurr in 2016 but which I somehow missed that year. (It was apparently on June 11 in 2016, what was I doing? Let's check my Google Calendar!

Ah, I think this might have had to do with it: the fact that, in those days, the festival was in mid-June and not at the beginning of the month, So, even though I had nothing scheduled on my calendar that Saturday except a dinner with Ivan (who was not living with me but did live in Seattle at the time), Shobhit was visiting from Los Angeles for that year's anniversary visit, and we left for our anniversary trip to Chicago the very next day. In all likeilhood we were, to at least some degree, getting ready for the trip on that Saturday. Indeed, it would appear from that Saturday's blog post that Shobhit and I just ran a few errands that day before the dinner with Ivan, and there is no indication that I even had any awareness of the Volunteer Park Pride Festival happening that day at all.

My position at present is that they weren't very good at promoting it. I don't remember how I became aware of it in 2017, but, to be fair, once that happened, I simply knew it was an annual event and knew to look for information on it every year henceforth. I will say, though, that flyers for Seattle Pride in the Park 2024 were posted so many places all over Capitol Hill, you couldn't miss it.

So, was there a Volunteer Park Pride Festival in 2015? I'm not completely certain, but I don't think so. I googled "Volunteer Park Pride Festival" and filtered results to 2015, and nothing came up. So I'm pretty sure it started in 2016.

I went with Shobhit, Evan and Elden in 2017. I didn't go in 2018, again because since it was in mid-June, that Saturday Shobhit and I left for Wallace, Idaho, for a visit with Mom and Bill on our way to our fabulous anniversary trip to Yellowstone National Park that year. I did go in 2019, that time with Laney.

There was no event in 2020, of course, and then there wasn't in June of 2021 either, but then Seattle Pride put on the "All Together Now," "Seattle Pride In-Person Fall Event" in September that year.

It appears to have been a different organization that put on what had been called the "Volunteer Park Pride Festival," but once Seattle Pride put on the event in fall of 2021, they basically took over from there. And, now three years in a row—2022, 2023, and 2024—they have settled into a reliable scheduling convention or Seattle Pride in the Park: the first Saturday of June. This makes it a lot easier to remember when it's going to happen and therefore plan for it. And this year, Seattle Pride in the Park and the Seattle Pride Parade are as far apart as they can be, given the Parade is always the last Sunday of June: the first Saturday this year was on the 1st and the last Sunday will be on the 30th.

Back in 2022, I went to Seattle Pride in the Park with Alexia. We walked into the park at 5:00 in the afternoon and left at about 6:30, giving us about ninety minutes at the event.

Last year was a much longer affair, the vast majority of it with Laney. She was living in Renton then, and she drove up and parked her car near the condo building, and we walked together from here to Volunteer Park, which is about a mile. She would have arrived to meet up at around 12:30, since we walked into the park shortly after 1:00 on that day—and we left the park right around 7:00. Getting back to my place around 7:30, we hung out for a total of seven hours that day, something I had also noted in last year's blog post. Shobhit joined us for a brief period in the middle of that, but as he was running for Seattle City Council at the time, he spent a fair amount of timing walking around the crowd and campaigning. The first photo I got of him that day was taken just before 3:00, the last one shortly after 4:30.

I actually looked up that blog post yesterday, to see how Laney and I had approached getting there and also whether we had packed drinks and a lunch. Since we indeed had, I emailed her early yesterday morning to suggest we do the same again, so we could save money and potentially only spend on a drink or two at the event. Laney did bring her own blanket last year, but as Shobhit worked yesterday and could not join us, I told her my blanket tote I planned to bring would comfortably fit both of us, so she said she would just bring her own wine and lunch in her backpack.

This year she had only to walk the six blocks up to my building from hers—actally closer to five blocks, as we agreed to meet over on 14th at Pine—and we did once again plan to meet at 12:30. This year, though, instead of hanging out for seven hours, we hung out for . . . just under six. I don't know why it felt so much shorter this year, but barely more than an hour's difference when we're talking basically all afternoon isn't really a huge difference. Also, last year was extended slightly by the fact that Laney got uncharacteristically drunk that day, and we actually stopped in the park on our way out, near the reservoir, to rest for a bit. That was when she actually took a cigarette to smoke from some people hanging out near that same spot. (Kind of amazingly, it looks like I never mentioned the cigarette. I must have just spaced that while writing about it; it's not like I was protecting her propriety or anything—I wrote plenty about how drunk she got. Which was the biggest reason she had a cigarette.

There was none of that this year, though!

Laney did ask me at one point yesterday how I thought the event compared to last year—I definitely thought last year was better. "But not by a wide margin," I said, which was fair. There were just some small details I found slightly disappointing, such as the fantastic "PRIDE" standing letters in a floral display, which had been there both last year and the year before, which made for great photo ops; they did not have that this year. They did have other letters affixed to the fence in the beer garden, though, spelling out SEATTLE PRIDE, which did make or a nice photo op in their own right. I just liked the standing letters display better.

Furthermore, last year there were beer gardens both over by the Volunteer Park Amphitheater and one by the Volunteer Park Conservatory; this year they only had the latter. And overall, there was a noticeably smaller number of vendor booths, particularly in the field over by the Amphitheater. It wasn't a lot smaller of a production this year, but it was definitely still slightly scaled down. But, who knows what factors would have contributed to this, from resources to available organizers and volunteers to the fact that it came so early in the month (only two days earlier than it was last year, but whatever).

I should still stress that I had a very good time though. As I noted to Laney, after so many years of these events, they kind of start to blend together, and they can't all be special—although it occurs to me now that this one should be, given that it's the 50th anniversary celebration of the first-ever Pride March in Seattle. Nevertheless, this will be the 27th Pride Month I have participated in, and a lot of time what moves me most is to see young people, or in some cases older people, clearly coming to these events for the first time, experiencing a kind of freedom they might not have at whatever home they are coming from. Seattle Pride is the biggest Pride event in a huge geographical area; you have to go as far south as San Francisco and as far east as Chicago to find something bigger. (North is a bit different; Vancouver Pride is arguably bigger, or at the very least just as big. But that's in another country.) People come from far and wide for these events, certainly not just people in the metro Seattle area. And frankly, all you have to do is head to some of the summers to find noticeably less tolerant places. It's hardly like this country is some kind of queer utopia.

Anyway, Laney and I stopped at a picnic table right after getting into Volunteer Park. It barely broke 60° yesterday, but it was also humid. Between the humidity and the side effects of Laney's heart medications, she was sweating buckets by that point and needed to rest a minute. I even asked whether she had poured water on herself after I saw her take a drink, but she confirmed that how totally soaked her upper chest was, was simply her sweat. Damn!

She was ready to go again within a minute or two, though, and then we walked over to the field in front of the Amphitheater. Last year Laney had requested we lay out our blankets under the shade of trees off to the side, but as it was overcast most of the day yesterday—it was even very slightly sprinkling when we arrived—she suggested yesterday that we go ahead and sit on the blanket out in the middle of the grass with the rest of the crowd (also noticeably thinner than last year, but that was probably just because of the weather). We watched a couple of fun drag queen emcees, and then a pretty good half-hour set by a local queer six-piece band called Day Soul Exquisite.

The drag queen emcees were called Betty Wetter (whose website is, hilariously, ItGetsWetter.com) and Versace Doll. Both Laney and I were rather struck when Versace went into a bit of an aside about mental health and mental health resources, and she said she "lost my partner to suicie a couple of weeks ago." Holy shit.

On a lighter note, and I can't remember what the reference was about, but they also mentioned another drag queen name that is a new favorite: Pat Smear. Ha! That really cracked both of us up.

Laney and I ate our lunches during the Day Soul Exquisite set—mine was much more involved than originally planned, as I had a sandwich made, but I also brought a container of salad Shobhit and I made together before leaving, as he had gone grocery shopping and bought a few bags of salad greens that would need to get used fairly quickly without going bad. I started working on the margarita I brought as well, which had three shots of tequila in it.

Shortly before Day Soul Exquisite's set ended, Laney suggested we pack up and peruse all the booths. So that's what we did, in the middle of which we ran into a few people Laney knew—incuding two people from Pride Place, where she lives: their names were Chris and Victor, if I remember right. Shortly after walking the booths, we found a table to sit at right outside the beer garden over by the Conservatory, but before long we went into the beer garden. We ran into Chris and Victor in there again, and we all took the photo with the SEATTLE PRIDE sign together.

Laney and I found two empty chairs and took them over to the fence near the Beer Garden exit but with a good view of the DJ stage. When we first got there, there were two gogo dancers, one a woman and one a really hot guy. I wanted a photo of the guy but he disappeared after only a little while and then never came back again, the woman dancing the whole afternoon away, with occasional breaks.

In between our two drinks, Laney and I got up to dance for a bit. Our tactic with our chairs seemed to have worked: we left our hoodies draped over the backs, but took our backpacks with us. But, once I saw other people had done this, we took our backpacks off and set them on the grass, and just danced around them.

Because I had played it last year and Laney was feeling nostalgic about it, I once again played "Ride Across the River" by Dire Straits on my phone while we walked home, not long after we finished our second drinks. (Well, second drinks we bought.) I forgot that it had been kind of a mistake last year and I followed it up with the song I meant to play, "Your Latest Trick," because it has the line "It's past last call for alcohol." I didn't even think of that this year though, which was fine because Laney and I both agreed "Ride Across the River" is a better song anyway,

I got home around 6:30. And although I got through processing and uploading photos okay, I did develop a doozy of a headache, of a sort I now know from experience is from drinking too much alcohol. The sense that I have is that whether I get one of these headaches—always within hours of drinking, rather than a hangover the next day—really depends on the quality of the alcohol I was drinking. I have a suspicion that the tequila drinks I had in the beer garden, in which they seemed to do heavy alcohol poors, used bottom-shelf tequila. In any case, even though Shobhit had earlier suggested maybe going dancing later after he got back from work (there's a good chance he would have changed his mind on his own anyway), I felt so awful that I got into bed at about 9:30. Shobhit didn't even get off work until 10.

This was even though I drank a lot of water—I was very strategic about that, and even brought a separate bottle of water to the park, something I never do. But I had that nearly finished by the end of the evening, plus a mug of tea, plus a couple more drinks of water besides. It didn't help much until I went to sleep. Thankfully, by the time I woke up this morning, I felt a hell of a lot better: no headache, no hangover. A rather dry throat, but that may have just been from snoring or something. I woke up at about 6:30, giving me a truly unusually long night's sleep.

I have a lot less going on today, though I do plan to take myself to a movie. So I guess I should go start getting ready now.

[posted 8:5 am]