DAVID TAFFET | Senior Staff Writer
Taffet@DallasVoice.com
For two years, Dallas Pride has known Fair Park wouldn’t be available for the 2026 Dallas Pride parade and festival because of FIFA’s World Cup soccer tournament. So Dallas Pride officials decided to move the annual Pride Month celebration downtown.
That decision didn’t come lightly, according to Jimmy Bartlett, an organizer of the event.
“We didn’t know if we could make it work,” he said. “So we discussed it with everyone — police, the fire department, Downtown Dallas Inc., vendors.”
While Dallas Pride has been a two-day event for several years, with the festival on Saturday and the parade on Sunday, police and fire officials this year asked organizers to hold the festival and parade on the same day so available resources wouldn’t be overtaxed this year. Next year things will be more flexible.
For security, police suggested the route they could best manage. Coincidentally, the route was the same as Dallas’ first Pride parade.
“In 1972, a ragtag group of 30 unimaginably brave individuals marched down Main Street in Dallas, Texas, and paved the way for future generations,” The Dallas Way Co-founder Robert Emery said on the move. “Fifty-four years later, we have returned to our rightful place in the history of our beloved city.”
Holding the festival and parade on the same day meant the parade would move to the evening, something Houston has done successfully for more than 10 years. Austin’s parade steps off at 8 p.m. on Aug. 22 and San Antonio’s at 9 p.m. on June 27. A sunset parade simply makes sense in the Texas heat.
Bartlett said he doesn’t have figures for numbers of tickets sold to the festival, but the estimate is 61,000 people attended, according to the Downtown Dallas, Inc. tracking platform. The Pride in Dallas parade on Cedar Springs each September usually attracts 30,000 to 45,000 people.
The majority of buildings along the parade’s Main Street route are mostly residential. That means hundreds of additional people may have been watching the parade from their apartments and wouldn’t have been counted in the total.
“The crowd had a great time,” Bartlett said. “It was great to see the fire chief going down the parade lines and hugging the kids. It was very festive and upbeat.”
The comments from dignitaries were positive, and parade-goers said they felt safe downtown, Bartlett said.
When Dallas Pride decided to move downtown, they made a five year commitment, so a downtown parade next year is already decided.
With the festival spread out over four parks, Bartlett said it made logistics a little more difficult. There weren’t as many vendors as last year in Fair Park’s Centennial and Automobile buildings, and there wasn’t the protection from the weather that Fair Park offered.
“We had signage to direct people to the parks,” he said. “We will work with Downtown Dallas for a solution to directing people.”
He said for the parade, there were people lining Main Street outside the four-block route. For next year, they’ll evaluate the route and possibly expand it.
Parking shouldn’t have been much of a problem. The easiest place to park was in a DART parking lot and then take the train to St. Paul Station, where four train lines stop. That station is at Pacific Plaza, the first of three parks along Harwood Street where the festival took place.
Dallas Pride partnered with the Elm Street garage at Main and Harwood. Vendor check-in was held there. The high-rise garage filled up, but other surface lots were also an option. But the later people arrived, the farther they had to walk.
And while this was a difficult year for sponsorships for all LGBTQ+ organizations and events, Bartlett said, “We did rather well. This year had new sponsors come onboard. It was not as big a struggle as we anticipated.”
Bartlett said everyone involved worked together well — Downtown Dallas Inc., the city of Dallas and its Office of Special Events, Dallas police, Dallas Fire and Rescue and infrastructure vendors who provided everything from tents to port a-potties.
“I’d like to tell everybody how great they were in helping us get this done,” Bartlett said.
With one year of staging Pride downtown under their belts and without FIFA eating up resources, next year should be easier on everyone.
