On the evening of Friday, June 27, Frederick residents took to the streets of the city’s downtown area dressed in colorful costumes and waving a variety of flags. The day before the community’s annual Frederick Pride event was an area first: Before this year, Frederick had never had its own pride parade.
Representatives from a multitude of community organizations marched in the parade, including students from Hood College, congregants from the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Frederick and the United Church of Christ, members of the Downtown Frederick Partnership and several candidates in the upcoming mayoral race. County Executive Jessica Fitzwater even made an appearance, waving a flag of her own.
Overall, more than 50 community partner organizations participated in the parade.
The Frederick Center, Frederick’s local LGBTQ support services nonprofit, organized the parade and has been organizing Frederick Pride since the event was first held in 2012. The event frequently welcomes Frederick-area families and youth.
“Frederick Pride has been a signature family-friendly event since day one. It’s a place where people can take part in all kinds of activities with our vendors throughout the festival. We have a youth area where they’ll have arts and crafts, story times and performances, and they just have a huge a lot of fun over there in our youth area,” says Kris Fair, executive director of The Frederick Center. “It’s really got a little bit of something for everyone, including a car show. People are always amazed by that, that there’s this big car show happening in the middle of a festival.”
Area residents who attended Frederick Pride had been requesting a pride parade in town for years, but it was not initially possible.
“We [had] looked at the logistics of planning a parade, and the costs associated with those logistics of planning a parade, and found that it was simply economically and logistically unfeasible for us to do it over and over and over again,” Fair explains. “Due to the commitment from the City of Frederick to make this parade happen, we were able to overcome some of those major obstacles this year and finally bring our first-ever parade to fruition.”
In 2024, the City of Frederick instituted the Pride Visibility Grant in its annual budget, which supplies funding for LGBTQ-related events in the area. Local groups can apply for grants to help offset their organizational costs.
Before the Frederick Pride Parade came to fruition, Frederick residents would have to travel elsewhere to attend a pride parade, and would often have to drive for over half an hour to attend parades in Hagerstown or Columbia. Now that they have a parade of their very own, local LGBTQ community members, their loved ones and allies don’t have to make the trip.
Fair explains that the parade took seven months to plan, and that The Frederick Center worked with the mayor’s office, the Department of Public Works, Frederick County Parks and Recreation and several other local organizations in order to make it all possible. The parade’s route — from East Patrick Street to West 2nd Street — was closed off for the event.
He adds that having a pride parade and events that celebrate the LGBTQ community are especially important as LGBTQ people across the country face challenges to their rights.
“The Frederick Pride Parade and Frederick Pride provide a unique opportunity for everyone in the community to see what the LGBTQ community is all about,” Fair says. “We’re a community that talks about compassion, loving one another and respecting each other. … As we have these unfortunate conversations on the federal level, we’re hearing that events like this help underscore what the LGBTQ community is trying to communicate to the general public, which is that we are a resilient, kind, compassionate, diverse community that can’t be erased.”
