Celebrating Pride
USF Pride Picnics
The USF Gay Coalition sponsored Tampa’s early Pride festivals. They began in 1976 as a picnic of a handful of students at USF’s Riverfront Park. By 1984 these picnic gatherings had become popular enough to move to the main campus and included tents, entertainment, and booths from local businesses.
In 1987 management of the event was taken over by a community-based group named Tampa Pride. This tradition of gathering to socialize out of the public eye lasted until 1989, when the popularity of the event, and the desire to sell alcohol, caused the University to suggest it needed to move elsewhere.
Photo credit: Robert Bruce Grounds
1981 First Gay Pride Week
The Bay Area Rights Council (BARC) formed in the spring of 1981 to challenge discrimination against the LGBT community and other disadvantaged groups. Sparked by the dismissal of Staff-Sergeant Harold Bryant from his position at McDill Airforce Base for “associating with and living with known homosexuals,” BARC expanded its role to include other issues and by June of that year BARC sponsored Tampa’s first Pride Week celebration.
As the calendar below shows, the week included a disco dance, an MCC church service, and a public service cleanup of Davis Island beach. For the first time, events at local bars such as a pool party at Rene’s and a Tea Dance at Old Plantation were included. In keeping with tradition, the week culminated in a final rally and picnic at Riverfront Park.
Suncoast Gay/Lesbian Pride: "Bridging the Communities"
These St Petersburg Times photos illustrates the expectation, and hope, that participants would be seen by the public, and potentially their families.
Starting in 1986 the Suncoast Lesbian and Gay Pride Coalition sponsored a motorcade between Tampa and St Pete, a short march, and then a rally in the destination city, which shifted from year to year.
These photos are from 1987, when the motorcade ended in Vinoy Park, with a march to St Petersburg City Hall. In 1989 the motorcade ended in Tampa’s Hyde Park neighborhood.
While these Suncoast Gay/Lesbian Pride events attracted only a few hundred participants, they did represent a more public, political celebration of Pride from the private events on the USF campus.
1990 Pride March
In the wake of the Tampa City Council’s October 1989 refusal to include sexual orientation in its human rights ordinance, Suncoast Pride expanded dramatically to a march in downtown Tampa, starting strategically at City Hall and ending at the University of Tampa. For the first time Tampa Mayor Sandy Freedman issued a proclamation supporting “Gay and Lesbian Rights Week.” The picnic at Pepin-Rood stadium was bared to the news media, because without civil rights protections, many people feared being outed to their employers. An estimated 5,000 people attended, a dramatic increase from just two years earlier.
For the first time, Tampa Pride celebrations include a Film Festival at the Tampa Theater. After several years, the film festival separated and moved to October and became one of the largest such LGBT film festivals in the country.
Suncoast Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Pride, a grass-roots coalition led by Pat Nolan of the American Friends Service Committee (Quakers) continued to sponsor Pride events in Tampa throughout the early 1990s.
The 1992 event featured a street festival and floats down 7th avenue in Ybor City.
The Fall of Tampa Pride
Starting in 1994, a new organization, Greater Tampa Bay Pride Organization, began to host Pride events. Unlike the previous grass-roots coalition known as Suncoast Pride, this was a stand alone organization mostly of white men, led by Barry Barlow, operations manager at Tracks nightclub in Ybor.
By 2002, Tampa Pride had become very commercialized, featuring a Pat Benatar rock concert at Raymond James Stadium, a Wet Party at the Florida Aquarium, and a Pillage and Plunder cruise with porn stars. The Greater Tampa Pride Pride Organization ended up over $300,000 in debt, facing accusations of financial impropriety, conflicts of interest, and drug abuse. Gazette editor Brian Feiss called it “an embarrassment to the gay community.” Overly ambitious, mismanaged, and out of touch with the LGBT community, Greater Tampa Bay Pride folded.
The demise of Tampa Pride is often attributed to Hillsborough Commissioner Ronda Storms and her ban on the county supporting gay pride, “little g, little p.” But that ban did not happen until 2005. The record shows it was the extravagance and wild spending of the organization that killed it, not Ronda Storms.
“Everything cost money to get in, there was an unusual dependence on porn actors for entertainment, and there was no parade where people could express their, um, pride at being gay”
– Watermark
The Rise of St. Pete Pride
As Tampa Pride was self-destructing, St Pete Pride was taking off as a community-based celebration in the Grand Central District of gay shops and bars.
“We’re going to be a little more grounded. Most people think of a Pride fest as walking down a public street, being visible, not being behind a huge venue,” said Brian Longstreth, the event’s lead organizer.
It started in 2003, with 10,000 participants and little support from the local government. The City Council only included sexual orientation in its Human Rights Ordinance a year earlier. “Personally, I don’t support the general agenda of the Pride event,” said St. Petersburg Mayor Rick Baker.
But it grew quickly to become the largest Pride event in the state of Florida, some say in the Southeast, attracting hundreds of thousands of participants.