Bittersweet Pride: Joy at the Long Beach parade, outrage over canceled festival

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Hundreds of spectators gathered along Ocean Boulevard dressed in rainbow tutus, dresses and shirts, whooping and waving as the Long Beach Pride parade rolled past Sunday morning.Mayor Rex Richardson, wearing a rainbow lei and holding a Pride flag, marched down the street with gubernatorial candidate Xavier Becerra as Bad Bunny’s “BAILE INoLVIDABLE” rang out.“Long Beach Pride in the house,” Richardson boomed into a microphone.“Thank you so much for coming out, keeping up this tradition for 43 years.”But this year felt different for some, after the abrupt cancellation of the Long Beach Pride Festival hours before it was set to kick off.City officials said this year’s cancellation was due to unresolved safety and permitting issues, while organizers with Long Beach Pride, the nonprofit that organizes the festival, say they worked in good faith to resolve them.

The disruption lands at a moment of renewed national conflict over LGBTQ rights and visibility, giving the absence of the festival an outsized emotional and political resonance.Debra “Deb” Kahookele, who is running for City Council, acknowledged the difficulties in holding a large festival but said, “there’s always a little bit of leniency when it comes to certain things.”“I feel like, was there absolutely no room to help out?” questioned Kahookele, who attended the parade with her wife of 24 years.“In this moment in time, the community has been attacked in many ways, and so the last thing we needed was for a festival that everybody enjoyed to be canceled.”“I just feel like Long Beach let the people down,” she added.Long Beach Pride, established in October 1983, produced the first annual festival and parade the following year, at the height of the AIDS crisis and during an era when communities often organized in the face of political indifference.

California The Long Beach Pride festivitie...