By Oona Mackesey-Green
Northside News
On a chilly Saturday in May 1989, over 7,500 people traveled from across the state to gather and march around the Wisconsin State Capitol in downtown Madison as a part of the city’s first Gay Pride Rally and March. This August, OutReach Magic Festival: a Madison Pride Celebration will bring Pride to the Northside for the first time in the celebration’s 30–year history in Madison.
The festival will take place Sunday, Aug. 18 from 1–6 pm at Warner Park and is hosted by OutReach LGBT Community Center, which moved to International Lane on the Northside three years ago.
The Magic Festival marks both a shift in venue and in format for the annual celebration. In past years, Madison Pride has included a parade and rally downtown. OutReach’s decision to host a festival rather than a parade follows community conversations about the impact of police presence at Pride and logistical challenges with the City of Madison, but also returns the celebration to roots many decades old: Magic Festival is intended to recall the historical M.A.G.I.C. (Madison Area Gay Interim Committee) Picnic that followed earlier annual gatherings and spanned 1978 to 2008, predating the 1989 rally which officially inaugurated Madison Pride.
“One of the reasons for having this event was so that it could be more inclusive,” said OutReach Executive Director Steve Starkey. Both Starkey and Dr. Sami Schalk, Assistant Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a member of Community Pride Coalition, emphasized that the new format of the festival may make it possible for people who haven’t participated in the past to attend the event.
“We’re trying to work really hard to make [Pride] a space that is more comfortable and accepting to a wide variety of individuals,” said Schalk. “It’s a real investment for queer people of color and I also think more accessible to disabled people — [people can] come to the festival and have places to sit out of the sun, there is direct parking near the festival, food access, [people] don’t have to march in a parade, [so] it’s more open to a variety of people.”
Jill Nagler, president of the OutReach Board of Directors, noted the additional strengths of the Northside location. “It’s accessible to working class people, it is near diverse areas where people live and may be accessible to people who would otherwise not be able to come to a downtown event. I think it will be really exciting to have a community event that is open and free to the public in an area that is, in terms of a lot of events, somewhat of an afterthought.”
As conversations about inclusivity within the LGBTQ community ripple across Madison and around the country, Magic Festival organizers hope that the event will create an opportunity to build unity. While accessibility is a crucial part of that inclusivity, so too has been addressing the political roots of Pride as an opportunity for LGBTQ community members to come together and connect, to celebrate and to build the partnerships that have powered movements for LGBTQ rights.
“The first pride parade was a political event, to be out and be public and demand an end to the explicit violence and oppression that was happening for queer folks but was particularly targeted at trans women, queer people of color, sex workers and poor and transient queer folks,” said Schalk. “[We were] demanding a right to live as ourselves, and publicly without punishment from police in particular, who would harass people — that’s where pride protest emerged.”
Last summer, conversations about police participation in Madison’s Pride Parade suddenly became public when OutReach responded to calls to ask Madison Police Officers not to march as an official, uniformed contingent in the parade. Those calls stemmed from both the history of Pride, as well as from LGBTQ people and particularly LGBTQ people of color speaking about the ongoing impacts of police violence in their communities. Community Pride Coalition formed in order to advocate for Pride celebrations that, without official police involvement, would feel safer and more welcoming to many members of the LGBTQ community. This would allow individual police officers to participate without their uniforms but with friends and family, as community members and allies. Local publications Madison365 and Our Lives Magazine reported extensively on the conversations that at times turned vitriolic over the last year. Additional information about the decision, as well as responses from public officials and the organizations involved, are available in the articles published online at madison365.org and ourlivesmadison.com.
The tension around police participation in Pride has sparked intentional efforts to create opportunities for community connection at this year’s Magic Festival. While last year’s parade involved 90 separate units participating, each with their own shirts and banners, said Starkey, the parade dispersed quickly, without an opportunity for in-person conversations to address the conflict. “They marched up the street and then it was over. It didn’t give people a lot of opportunity to have conversations, and meet new people, meet new organizations, and do some of that community building work that really needs to be done now, in our community.”
Schalk participates in a committee that is organizing a tent to serve as a designated safe space for queer and transgender people of color (QTPOC) at Magic Festival. “That will be a place where people can gather. We’ll have tables and chairs. We’ll have our own DJ, there will be dancing and games. I’m really excited for that.”
The QTPOC safe space tent is sponsored by Our Lives Magazine. Our Lives, a bimonthly publication which celebrates Madison’s LGBT & Allied Community and was until recently based on the Northside, highlighted the long history and many iterations of Pride celebrations in Madison in their July/August 2019 issue (available at local businesses, online and via free subscription).
The issue also includes their annual list celebrating LGBTQ leaders of color in Wisconsin, and a timeline of LGBT Rights Milestones in the U.S. beginning with the 1969 Stonewall Rebellion led by transgender women of color, Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, to fight back against police harassment and violence. 2019 is the 50th anniversary of the rebellion, also called the Stonewall Uprising, that sparked a movement for LGBTQ+ rights in the United States and inaugurated annual Pride celebrations worldwide.
Our Lives closed their Northside office this summer both to reduce overhead costs and due to safety concerns. Last summer, someone shattered the glass door of their office, and a recent story from Channel 3000 reported that the magazine’s distribution boxes around Madison have been repeatedly vandalized — as often as multiple times in the same week.
Schalk tied the return to Pride’s political roots to the backlash many LGBTQ communities are currently experiencing around the country. “As the politics of our nation have changed,” said Schalk, “there has been a national trend of more and more cities and radical activist groups pushing back on the presence of police and corporations in pride parades, and demanding a return to [Pride’s] political roots. We are in another moment when particularly trans women of color are being murdered at incredible rates, there is push back on queer rights,” and, said Schalk, “we need to return to our strong politics.”
The Gay and Lesbian Visibility Alliance (GALVanize) coordinated the first Pride rallies in Madison, and Starkey pointed to the word “visibility” in their name as an example of the ways that Pride, as a public gathering of LGBTQ community members, whether in protest and/or celebration, is and has always been inherently political. “We want to be visible,” said Starkey. “We want the media to come out and understand that we’re a big, powerful part of the community and active, and we’re proud of who we are and we’re not going to hide in the closet anymore.”
For Nagler, the Magic Festival is both the result of, and the next step from, the many uncomfortable conversations taking place within Madison’s LGBTQ communities. “Having heard all of the testimony that I’ve heard, and having witnessed all of the different factions and fractures and fissions in Madison, I could not see our Pride celebration being any other way than it will be. It is extremely important to me to have this space, this intentional space where families are welcome, where the focus isn’t necessarily drinking, where we have activities, where we have community.”