SPECIAL EVENT: Central Arkansas Pride puts on parade, rolls into Little Rock Riverfront Park for festival

Pride is bigger than one city, and Central Arkansas Pride Executive Director Zack Baker says the annual celebration of the gay community in Little Rock needed a name to reflect that.

Before Central Arkansas Pride became the norm, the celebration in Little Rock had struggled to attract crowds and to keep the event going every year. Until 2013, when Baker and a group of go-getters in the community formed the new organization, there hadn't been a regular Pride festival in Little Rock for a while.

The group that eventually formed the new Pride already was working on the Arkansas Initiative for Marriage Equality.

"Now, there's been other Prides that have happened in Little Rock before, but they'd been kind of sporadic and not consistent. We decided that we really wanted to bring something and make it something that the community would be proud of and want to attend. And one night we were all sitting around talking about what resources existed in central Arkansas and what things were here. We started planning at the end of July and pulled it off in October that year. We had like a three-month turnaround, which was insane," Baker says.

There was a parade — "probably 700 people showed up to it" — and a festival on the Clinton Presidential Center grounds. It started small, but the seed was planted and Central Arkansas' Pride now rivals those of larger cities in the South.

This iteration of the celebration began on the lawn of the Clinton Presidential Center, but outgrew it and moved to Riverfront Park in 2017. The site includes First Security Amphitheater and plenty of room for vendors and food and beverage booths. In a good sign for the festival, vendor spots sold out this year.

The parade has blossomed into a colorful collection of cars, floats and marchers that stretches way down President Clinton Avenue. At last count, there were 40 entrants signed up for the parade. Baker set a goal of 60, and "I think we're well on our way," he said earlier this month.

The parade forms at noon, taking off at 1 p.m. from the corner of Louisiana and Markham streets, by the Capital Hotel, and disbanding at the corner of Sherman Street and Clinton Avenue. The grand marshal this year is more than one person: The symbolic marshal is the transgender community and organizations of central Arkansas, such as Artec and Intransitive.

The theme of the festival is "Reclaiming Our Pride," which the Central Arkansas Pride website says was chosen to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the uprisings at the Stonewall Inn in New York's Greenwich Village, which is considered the beginning of the modern gay rights movement.

The festival Saturday is a culmination of a yearlong effort at keeping the LGBT community together as a force for change.

"Our mission is to produce events that inspire, unite and educate," Baker says. To accomplish that mission, Central Arkansas Pride organized, among other things, Out Days at the Zoo on June 1, and saw a large turnout.

That same night, it held the annual Ride With Pride Trolley Party, which takes over one of the city's downtown trolleys for a rolling cocktail party and raises money for the organization. Also this year, there was Pride Night at an Arkansas Travelers baseball game on June 12, and more than 200 people attended, Baker says.

"The Travs were really impressed with the crowd size, so it's definitely an event that we're going to continue to do, and continue to grow."

On June 22, Pride hosted Out Days at Magic Springs at the theme park in Hot Springs and more than 300 took advantage of a day at the park.

"For the Magic Springs event the past two years, we've consistently had a little over 300 people show up to that ... that's a really big deal for us." The popularity of these events is proof, Baker says, "there's a need here for more social events."

This week, there has already been a burlesque show at Stickyz Rock 'n' Roll Chicken Shack and a Drag Queen Brunch Pride Pre-Party at Pizza D'.

Tonight, Pride, with the Arkansas Transgender Equality Coalition, is sponsoring a screening of the documentary Man Made, a transgender story, and Friday night is a Queer Art Walk in Argenta Arts District.

The big event, the festival, opens at 2 p.m. Saturday, right after the parade. Admission is free, but donations are accepted.

Once inside the festival grounds, festivalgoers can enjoy a full day of entertainment headlined by Australian singer-songwriter Betty Who at 4 p.m.

Who gained fame in 2013, when her song "Somebody Loves You" was used in a viral marriage proposal video filmed at a Home Depot. (See it on YouTube.) She had released the debut single independently the year before. RCA Records signed the singer and released her debut studio disc "Take Me When You Go" in 2014. In 2017, she made The Valley album, which was a top 10 hit in Australia and made the Billboard Dance chart in the United States.

She told NPR in a July interview that her goal is to make people happy and comfortable. "You know, if you have purpose on this planet, my purpose is — I want to provide a space that people feel joy in, people feel safe enough, also, to cry in, and to be themselves in. ... Music is supposed to be fun."

But the party doesn't end when the festival closes at 6 p.m. There's an after-party at Pizza D' from 9 p.m. to 1 a.m. On Sunday, the Pride Recovery Brunch featuring singer Thea Austin unfolds from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. at Mosaic Templars Cultural Center.

On Oct. 31, Baker and crew present the other big project for the year, the 5th annual Kaleidoscope LGBTQ+ Film Festival (more on that in Style Oct. 29).

The work Central Arkansas Pride is doing to attract more out-of-towners to the Little Rock festival has paid off, apparently.

"We've had people from Shreveport, we've had people from Memphis, we've had people from Fayetteville, from Tulsa, we've had some from Springfield, Mo. Some of our vendors come in from out of town to vend at the event. I mean, there are definitely a lot of people traveling. And as we continue to grow, I think that's also going to bring in more people."

But now that gay people can legally marry, some wonder why pride celebrations are still necessary. In Boston recently, a Straight Pride was organized to counter gay pride celebrations, but it landed with a thud. Baker says Central Arkansas Pride and other organizations are still very much necessary.

"It is a celebration of our identities. And it's a way for us to get together to connect. It gives people a chance to kind of be themselves in an environment that's open and judgment-free. But there's still other things as far as protections go that we don't have. In Arkansas, for example, you can still be fired for being gay or trans, you can still be denied housing for being those things. So just because we have marriage equality doesn't mean we achieved everything that we need to achieve."

Weekend on 10/17/2019