The Dayton Pride Festival kicks off in downtown Dayton this Friday night.
Rick Flynn is the executive director of the Dayton LGBT Center. He spoke with WYSO’s Jerry Kenney about the festival's new location and the Friday and Saturday schedule of events.
Rick Flynn: We will be on St. Clair. The new center building is at 136 North St. Clair, between First and Second streets.
Friday nigh was our usual "Affair on the Square." We got lucky here, and we just switched it to "Affair on St. Clair." That was a pretty easy fix.
So it's going to be the first block, between First and second Street. And we will have food vendors. We'll have a couple of sponsors there Friday night. Friday's a little bit more low-key than Saturday. We've got some great entertainment. Sage Fire, The Ruby Girls are performing. We've got a lot of great entertainment for Friday night. We try to do some things a little bit differently this year with the entertainment to kind of bring more variety. So that's Friday night, and we'll have, of course, the usual beer tonight. And Tito's Vodka is one of our sponsors this year. So they're doing a specialty drink.
And also because we're downtown and DORA exists now, we're able to utilize DORA with the Downtown Dayton Partnership, and so we were able to, you know, do the Tito's Vodka and everything, as long as we've got everything in the DORA Cup, and it makes it a lot easier than having to fence everything off and all of that.
It's a little bit more open like a block party.
And then Saturday we will start with the parade. We're kicking off an hour earlier than usual at 11 a.m., the reason behind that, there were a couple of reasons.
Last year, the parade luckily was so long. It took an hour, and we decided that let's just back it up a little bit so we can still have about four hours of the festival. So the parade will kick off, at 11 a.m.
And because of the change of venue, we also had to change the parade route. We'll be lining up on Jefferson Street in front of the stage door, MJ's Cafe and right around the corner from the Right Corner. So it's kind of in the "The Fruit Loop," as people have referred to it. It kicks off there and then turns on to Second Street going west one block to Main Street. We'll pass the Schuster Center and Victoria Theater. We'll turn right on First Street, go down a couple blocks past Care Source, and then we'll pass the back side of the stage for the festival. The stage will be right there at the corner and First and St. Clair. So we'll be able to announce the parade as it's coming by from the back side of the stage, which is kind of fun.
As soon as that's over, the festival kicks off. So we'll have entertainment all day. We'll have a few speakers. We have lots of food trucks this year. The beer truck, the Tito's Vodka again. We have something like 175 vendors this year, which is huge. We sold out last year and we were at 120. So with the extra space, we added more.
And we've got Cooper Park as well because Saturday we extend into the next block, so we've got between Second and Third Streets in addition to the first and second block, we added Cooper Park so people will have plenty of shade. PFLAG Dayton is actually organizing a family area, which will be in Cooper Park. So we'll have more family friendly vendors in that area, and it's just going to be a lot of fun. That's going to go until about 4 p.m.
Jerry Kenney: So for more details than we've given here, where can people find out more information?
Flynn: Sure. You can go to our website. There's also a Pride Guide tab which will tell you a little bit more about our sponsors, and it will also show you some other prides happening in the area. We've got a lot going on. Fairborn, Kettering, Yellow Springs, Dayton Black Pride. We've got a lot of other pride's coming up. So that can all be on our website. And also check out our Facebook page. We've got a Dayton Pride 2024 Facebook page and the center's Facebook page.
