Charlotte Pride festival and parade canceled over coronavirus concerns
The popular Charlotte Pride festival, parade and related activities, which were scheduled for July and August, have been canceled over concerns about the novel coronavirus.
Charlotte Pride, in conjunction with Charlotte Black Pride, made the announcement early Tuesday. The Pride activities celebrate the LGBTQ community, and is the biggest annual parade in the city.
The event, which drew about 200,000 participants last year, involves so much logistical planning that organizers felt they couldn’t wait any longer to see what social-distancing restrictions would be in place this summer.
“We couldn’t wait until the last minute. There are just so many events to put in motion,” Daniel Valdez, president of Charlotte Pride’s board of directors, said in an interview.
Valdez said 2021 Charlotte Pride is tentatively scheduled for Aug. 21 and 22. Charlotte Black Pride will plan to host the 2021 Charlotte Black Pride Week July 11-18, 2021.
Charlotte Pride and Charlotte Black Pride are organizing digital and online programming in lieu of in-person events.
The organizations plan webinars, livestreams and showings of LGBTQ artists and entertainers. Future programming announcements will be made via Charlotte Pride’s website — https://charlottepride.org/virtual/ — and Charlotte Black Pride’s Facebook page — https://www.facebook.com/CLTBlackPride/.
Charlotte Pride is the latest public gathering that has been eliminated because of the pandemic.
Charlotte Pride first organized a festival in 2001 and added the annual parade in 2013. Charlotte Black Pride was founded in 2005 and provides services for about 25,000 people annually, according to a fact sheet from the group.
Valdez said rescheduling 2020 Charlotte Pride wasn’t practical because of the size of the event. The earliest organizers could get a weekend permit to reschedule would have been mid-December.
“With so much social-distancing going on, we didn’t know” what state and city protocols would be by mid-summer, Valdez said. “This is a huge, huge event, so it was a pretty large ordeal” to try to re-schedule, rather than cancel.
Safety remained a top concern.
“We must do everything we can to prevent knowingly exposing our already vulnerable community to the uncertainties and risks of COVID-19,” the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, Valdez said in a statement released with news of the cancellation. “We know this decision will hit our community hard,” he added. “But we know that pride itself can never be silenced.”
There’s an economic loss too. Last year’s Charlotte Pride Festival & Parade had a total economic impact of $8.05 million, organizers said, along with 23,000 out-of-town visitors using more than 10,000 hotel rooms.
In a statement, Charlotte Mayor Vi Lyles said, “The absence of this year’s Pride events is not only a loss for our local LGBTQ community, but also a loss for our entire city and its social and economic well-being.”
Valdez said the pandemic had already impacted Charlotte Pride programming, prior to Tuesday’s announcement: A conference in March was canceled, and a film festival scheduled for May has been pushed back to October.
This story was originally published April 28, 2020 at 7:53 AM.
