2014 Tarrant County Gay Pride Week

The 2014 Tarrant County Gay Pride Week festivities happen Oct 2-12 at different venues around the city. Here’s a complete guide to the times, dates, and locations of all the events, but it’s a good idea to highlight the week’s three main throwdowns: The Pride Parade and Street Festival starts noon Sat Oct 4 in downtown Fort Worth; the Pride Picnic kicks off noon Sun Oct 5 in Trinity Park; and Q Cinema’s sixteenth annual international LGBT film festival rounds out the week with screenings Oct 9-12 at the Rose Marine Theatre.

As you can see, Pride Week 2014 is a big, busy, city-wide event. While I’m neither a spokesman for nor affiliated with the Week’s hard-working organizers, I’d nevertheless like to extend a special invitation to heterosexuals, including couples with children: Come check out the goings-on, especially if you’ve never been to a Pride event. Once there, you will find young people and old people; singles, married couples, parents, and childless folks; Democrats, Republicans, and independents; atheists, agnostics, and devout believers. In other words, you will encounter the same crazy variety of personality types at an LGBT event as you would at any other public celebration. Intellectually, this is probably a “no, duh!” proposition, but venturing outside your hetero safety zones and interacting with out LGBT people really drives the point home.

In every minority community, there are always tensions between the assimilationist view (let’s join the mainstream!) and the preservationist view (let’s strictly maintain our hard-won identities!). Reality as it’s lived will probably always be an artful blend of the two. Personally, I’d love to see Pride Week become something like St. Patrick’s Day or Cinco de Mayo –– a culturally specific event that is enjoyed far beyond the members of that culture. (Honestly, it’s already trending that way in major U.S. cities.) But that’s just my opinion. Happy Pride, ya’ll!