Celebrating Denver Pride: Community, Resilience, and Change

Stories of the people, spaces, and ideas shaping queer life in the Mile High City.

Staff June 7, 2021

Denver Pride Parade in 2018. Courtesy of Evan Semón Photography

Being something to everyone isn’t easy. Yet every June, Pride Month tries its best. This year, it’s leaning into the complexities, and we like that.

A celebration rooted in rebellion. A space to mourn. A time to indulge the pleasures of the body and the mind.

If the past year has taught us nothing else, it’s how connected we are. How much we need one another. So when the Center on Colfax, the group responsible for planning the annual (and epic) Denver PrideFest, moved the event online last year to protect the community from COVID-19, it was difficult not to feel a sense of loss. To march down the street wearing the rainbow was not a right easily won. Perhaps more than any year since the AIDS crisis, 2020 brought the importance of Pride back into focus. It reminded us of the history of the LGBTQIA movement, its tensions, and the tenuous nature of progress. It was a record-breaking year for transgender murders that re-emphasized the pervasive violence against those women who pushed Pride into the open at Stonewall. And it showed us all that there are more stories to make, to share, to amplify—and most of all, joy to be had. We’re so excited to start here.