The Dallas Tavern Guild presented a total of $30,000 to its two 2018 parade beneficiary organizations at its December meeting. The donations — $22,500 to AIDS Services of Dallas and $7,500 to Resource Center — represent proceeds from the 2018 Miller Lite Music Festival and Alan Ross Texas Freedom Parade. Organizers said this year’s Pride celebration was the largest ever in Dallas.

Turnbow says parade location could be ‘revisited’ in 2020, but planned construction on Cedar Springs made 2019 relocation necessary

Tammye Nash | Managing Editor
nash@dallasvoice.com

Dallas Tavern Guild Executive Director Jaron Turnbow this week confirmed that the city’s annual Pride festival and parade will take place the first weekend in June at Fair Park.

Tavern Guild officials said last November that they had voted in June 2018 to move the annual Pride festival to Fair Park in June. But plans for the 2019 Alan Ross Texas Freedom Parade were still up in the air at that time.

This week, Turnbow — who also leads the Dallas Pride Steering Committee and is chief organizer for Dallas’ annual Pride festival and parade — said the parade will also definitely happen in June at Fair Park in 2019. But it could move back to the gayborhood in subsequent years.

“The city is planning to start construction on Cedar Springs Road [in a planned improvement project that is part of a bond program], and we simply don’t know when they will be finished,” Turnbow said to explain the main reason for moving the parade next year. “We asked them if they weren’t finished by September, could they halt construction long enough for us to have the parade. They said, ‘We don’t know.’ We asked if they could halt construction until after June. They said, ‘No. We can’t do that.’

Jaron Turnbow

“The original plan was for the construction to be done by September, but they can’t guarantee that for us,” Turnbow continued. “We don’t want to plan to have a parade on The [Cedar Springs] Strip only to realize a month before, when we don’t have time to reschedule or change plans, that they won’t be finished.”

In addition, he said, part of the project involves tearing up and replacing sidewalks along Cedar Springs, and “even if the actual street were finished, the sidewalks might not be. We can’t have 50,000 people on the street without sidewalks.

“So for 2019, at least, the parade is moving to Fair Park,” he said. “Then if we need to revisit that for 2020. We will do that. To me, [having the parade at Fair Park] is not a permanent thing as of right now. For 2020, we can discuss moving it back to Cedar Springs, or maybe even moving it downtown. Some people have suggested having it in downtown, but we just can’t afford to have the parade downtown in 2019, although that’s not to say it won’t happen in the future.”

But regardless of where the parade might be held in 2020 and beyond, Turnbow said it will happen in June from now on, on the same weekend as the Music Festival.

Tavern Guild members voted last summer to move the Miller Lite Music Festival to Fair Park in June because “we knew then that there would be construction in [Reverchon Park, where the festival has been held], even though we didn’t know then the timing or the extent of the construction,” Turnbow said.

But imminent construction on the ballpark at Reverchon — which city officials have said would not impact the ability to hold the Pride festival or other events there — was not the only reason for moving the festival and maybe not even the main reason.

“We moved from [Oak Lawn Park, formerly Lee Park] because we had run out of room there. And we have been talking for years about not having enough room at Reverchon, either,” Turnbow said. “There’s so much we have to consider there — the logistics of getting everything done while still following all of the city’s rules about where we can and can’t put certain booths and, if it rains, where we can and can’t put the stages. There are just a lot of issues that Reverchon presented.”

He said that there are “no other large parks” in the Oak Lawn area that could accommodate the festival, and while there were some that suggested moving the event to Klyde Warren Park, “that park is actually smaller than Reverchon, and our goal is to expand the festival, not shrink it.”

Last September’s festival drew more people than ever before, he said, and the growth is expected to continue. “We were running out of room there, and we had to do something,” he said. “We don’t want to wait until we are forced to move; we want to do it now, on our terms. We know what’s coming [in terms of the city’s regulations and requirements], and we want to circumvent all that ahead of time.”

Fair Park, on the other hand, “is built to hold events like this,” Turnbow continued. “There are just so many benefits to being at Fair Park in general. We will have so much more room there to grow and expand. There is plenty of parking there,” including adequate handicapped parking, and DART’s Green Line includes a stop just outside the Fair Park gate nearest the Centennial Building and Esplanade, where the festival will be staged in 2019.

“When it comes to the festival, our goal is to make it more inclusive and welcoming for everybody, which is something we haven’t been able to do in the past. Currently, we have been pretty much catering everything to those who stay in the bar area, but there are a lot of us who aren’t in the bars,” he said. “We just want to incorporate more from the community. We want to expand the Family Pride Zone, have more for those in the deaf community, including ASL interpreters on all the stages.

“We just haven’t done a really good job of being inclusive in the past, and I want to change that.”

He also stressed that holding the parade in Fair Park will allow for a longer parade route than the one down Cedar Springs and a much larger and more efficient staging area. And, he said, holding the parade in Fair Park will give organizers control over where spectator tents can be erected along the route.

“A lot of people have been upset about the tents people have been putting up on the sidewalk on Cedar Springs for the parade. They say the tents block the sidewalks and they block the view of the parade for other people, and they are mad at us because we don’t do something about it,” Turnbow said. “The fact is, we don’t have any control over that. It’s a city sidewalk, and we can’t tell people they can’t put their tents there.”

Some people have also complained that they won’t be allowed to bring their own coolers — in other words, they won’t be able to bring their liquor — into Fair Park for the parade. Turnbow said those people need to understand that while they have been able to get away with drinking on the street on Cedar Springs, it is actually illegal, and Pride organizers have been told that the city was going to be cracking down on that.

Turnbow said the Dallas Pride Steering Committee “is still discussing the possibility” of having some kind of event on the Cedar Springs Strip in September to keep alive that tradition, but “for right now, the idea is to keep the festival and the parade together, in the same weekend each year.”

Turnbow acknowledged that moving the Pride celebration back to June and out of the gayborhood is a controversial decision, and that there are many people upset over it. But, he said, he hopes people will give organizers the chance to prove they have made the right decision.

“I know there are people in the community who think we are out to get them, that we are trying to destroy Pride. But that’s not it at all,” he declared. “All we are asking is that you give us a chance. A lot of us have been doing this for a very long time, and we have an amazing group in this steering committee. We are all members of the LGBT community.

“We love this city, and we love doing this event. That’s why we spend countless hours working on it and so much of our own money to make it happen,” he concluded. “Just give us a chance.”

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Dallas Pride 2019
• The Miller Lite Music Festival will be held Saturday, June 1, from 11 a.m.-10 p.m. in the Centennial Building and on The Esplanade in Fair Park.

• The Alan Ross Texas Freedom Parade will be held Sunday, June 2, in Fair Park.
Dallas Pride organizers say watch the DallasPride.org website for more details, coming soon, including information on booths at the festival, parade entries and grand marshal nominations and voting.