Bethel LGBTQ Parade Marches Onward, Online

BETHEL, CT — The coronavirus pandemic may have canceled the town's traditional annual Pride Parade, but the event will still go on, live and online, this weekend.

Bethel CT Pride, which has been putting on the parade every year since 12-year-old Hailey Gesler managed to turn a language arts project into a celebration of LGBTQ rights in 2017, was 0undaunted by the pandemic, and has prepared a full slate of activities. The celebration will be held Saturday, Aug. 1, from noon to 5 p.m.

Organizers will be streaming music from LGBTQ artists, selling from online shops, and presenting book readings, a drag performance, and a virtual parade. Outside in the real world, vendors will still be selling downtown, and there will be a socially distanced scavenger hunt for Pride-themed rocks throughout town.

The festivities were originally scheduled for May, as they always are, but organizers made the decision to move it to Aug. 1 in late March. At the time, they were still looking at a full-on, in-person parade.

"By April we realized it still wasn't going to be safe, so we decided to do it virtually," organizer Emily Denaro told Patch. She then began putting together the components for a virtual event. That included shooting and editing a number of what in simpler times would have been live acts, and setting up the event's Discord server.

That's a new wrinkle in the live or even virtual events business. Discord is a communication platform that became popular in the gaming community. It's similar to business collaborative software Slack, and is particularly popular with the LGBTQ community, according to Denaro. Bethel CT Pride runs its own server, and will be setting up chatroom-like channels for different interests as part of the event.

"The nice thing about Discord is that it is very secure," Denaro said. "There are filters for languages," and live administrators who will be keeping an eye on the proceedings.

If all this sounds like more work than organizing a live parade, it was, according to Denaro. But the pay-off has been more than worth the effort.

"It's so enormous now. We don't have to seek out people, they're seeking us."

Denaro said that a big reason for the group's success is that their events are skewed to the young.

"Since Hailey started this 4 years ago, there has been smaller groups coming together from across the state, but that's largely because a lot of people are either not close to a large metropolitan area, or maybe they are not comfortable in the cities. Other groups," she says, "are adult-oriented, and maybe because we were started by a young student, we have always tried to really focus on the kids who need support, and don't really find it in the community."

For the full rundown of events and vendors, see Bethel CT Pride's website.