The volunteer team at Come Out With Pride (Website) will be celebrating its 20th anniversary this Saturday, October 19, with a day full of activities in and around Lake Eola Park.
The event will feature a community fair, a fireworks display, and its signature “Most Colorful Parade,” which is sporting a new route this year to accommodate downtown road construction and to cut down on any crowd bottlenecks that the City of Orlando deemed too unsafe to continue (traditionally, hundreds of people show up on East Central Boulevard to watch the parade and end up crowding onto the actual streets).
The parade will kick off at 4 p.m. with this year’s grand marshals, which include HDTV Star David Bromstad, Founder and Executive Director of the Gender Advancement Project Ashley Figueroa, and Juleigh Mayfield, a fierce advocate for intersex people who recently launched Interlusion, a non-profit organization serving intersex people like herself.
The festival in Lake Eola Park will feature a marketplace of handmade crafts and goods, a sponsor walk that showcases Pride Partners giving out swag, a family spot for young children and youth, a Trans Pride area, a Sober Space, a Quiet Zone for those who need a sensory-friendly retreat from the Pride chaos, live performances at the Disney Amphitheater, and more.
Click HERE for the complete Come Out With Pride event schedule.
I’ve talked to so many people this year that are foregoing Pride because of the new route and lack of marketing. I feel bad for all those Thornton Park businesses that thrived on all the foot traffic. The safety “issue” could have been easily alleviated by doing what all city parades do, set up barricades at the sidewalk level.