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Local News
Larabee Looks to Pride 2006
Center executive director wants to build on the successes and fix the problems of Utah Pride 2005
It’s only been five months since Pride 2005 closed its gates and packed up its booths, tents, sound stages and beer wagons, but GLBT Community Center Executive Director Valerie Larabee’s already got next summer on her mind.
“I always dream big,” she laughs as she ticks off some of her plans for next year’s event. Along with wanting to create some events for “older community members” and adding activities to complement the booths, dancing and beer drinking, she’s also interested in getting more people to join the Pride Run.
“It’s something that we feel like is an event that is undersold and really could be maximized,” she says. “We had the best participation this year that we’ve ever had, yet there were still probably only a hundred runners. I know in the gay community alone that we have so many runners, and with our friends and allies added on, it would be a nice thing to get that event up to speed.”
And then, of course, there’s the grand marshal.
“I have a hope to bring in somebody wonderful to be the grand marshal, a nationally known person.” When discussing Salt Lake Pride, Larabee’s ambitions can be summed up in four words: “I always dream big.”
But in order for her dreams for Pride 2006 to be both big and manageable, Larabee knows she has to examine the strengths and the shortcomings of this year’s event, which drew almost 15,000 people—the first accurate count the Festival has ever been able to make, according to Larabee. The Center was able to determine these numbers by relying on one of the most controversial element’s of this year’s festivities—the five dollar admission ticket.
“We were a little on edge because it was the first year that we charged an admission,” she says. “We didn’t know how the logistics of all that were going to work and we didn’t know if it was going to impact our attendance. In years past there was never any definitive number of how many people had attended. There were always these gestures of well, ‘yes it was the most successful pride ever! We must have had 40,000!’ ‘Oh no we had 50,000 easy!’ Well now we know. In all of my years of going to pride—I’ve been here since ’97—it was the most people I’ve ever seen on the grounds.”
Though Pride’s organizers were apprehensive about how the ticket price might impact turn out, Larabee says she only received “one or two phone calls or emails” complaining about the fee, which lead her to think that most in the community were alright with the charge.
“I think that it’s important for people to know that Pride can’t be a money loser for the Center, it just can’t be,” she said. Though this year’s festival “didn’t set any records” as far as the amount of money made, it still ended well in the black, netting the center about $13,000 with a gross revenue of $183,000. Of this last amount, two-thirds went to Pride’s community partners like sWerve, the Bear Alliance, Utah AIDS Foundation and the First Unitarian Church—organizations whose contributions of time and resources are crucial to Pride’s yearly operations.
“There’s a contract we have with them [our partners] where they get paid based on a formula, and a large part of the formula depends on how many volunteer hours their organization has during the event,” Larabee explains. “So it’s a win-win for the community. The better we are at making money with the event the more the whole community benefits from it.”
Still, Larabee says Pride 2005 hit some snags that need to be worked out for next year—namely bottlenecks created by crowds leaving the parade route to enter the festival grounds and the amount of time people spent waiting in lines, particularly at the beer garden.
And of course, there’s the coordination of the Pride Festival’s more than 300 volunteers. This year, Larabee hopes to further improve communications and “lines of reporting” among them. She hopes to do this by adding a Pride Coordinator to the Center’s staff for a few months this coming year. The coordinator, Jere Keys, will eventually have office hours at the Center itself.
“That was something we didn’t have last year and that made things very difficult to manage, so I’m really happy about that,” says Larabee.
Though Larabee and all of the Center’s employees have several months’ work cut out for them on the long road to Pride 2006, she says the annual festival is worth the hard work.
“The fact that we have such a wonderfully big pride event here in this Red State is something to be really proud of,” she says. “As a matter of fact I’ve heard so many people say they’ve gone to pride in other cities and they don’t get the feeling that they get from our Pride. I don’t know if it’s the beautiful buildings with the trees and all the grandeur of the library, but I think it’s probably some of that. But I think our community is very close knit also, so that makes it fun.”
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