Yesterday I was able to take a weekend day off of work in order for us to go to Denver Pride. (Wish it could have been the whole weekend, but alas.)

It was a nice time!

We got a slightly later start than intended, but we made it down there by about 11:00. We took the train, as usual, because no one wants to deal with parking down there. The 16th Street Mall is still torn up in spots, so the mall ride bus does some weird zigzags, and no longer goes all the way to Civic Center Park, but it still gets close.

We actually did not see any counter-protestors (often there's at least a small group screaming things at the entry lines. They may have been there earlier, but by the time we were there they were gone if so.)

It was a bit less crowded than previous years, both in terms of attendees and in terms of booths. (There were a couple stretches that were just empty, which was weird to see.) A lot fewer big corporate tents in general; still some, but fewer than previous years. More mid-sized corporate presence, "big" but local companies and organizations, rather than national ones. A few exceptions. I know that was a big thing this year, in terms of a lot of companies pulling out from doing Pride sponsorships. I'm not like, corporate pride's number one fan or anything, but it's definitely a bellwether for general social and cultural support, so... Not Great. Also not great because this is the main fundraiser for our biggest LGBTQ+ organization, and having big donors pull out from supporting it is a blow to them and their services.

However, Denver Pride had previously gotten some (kind of deserved) criticism of how corporate a lot of it had become a few years back. It may not be the case now, but a couple years ago it certainly was, and there was some reasonable complaint about how so many actually queer-owned and -operated businesses had been priced out of participating.

For the last couple years they've had a specific section set up for smaller creators, with a lower booth rental cost. It's kind of just a gay craft fair, ha. (We didn't get to that section last year, so this year we started there.)


I bought an ace pride crochet snail for Alex. It was deemed the emotional support snail.


And we got Bella a bandana.



I spent way too much on cute enamel pins (my weakness), plus stickers, and some other random stuff, like my art friends' tarot deck (which has been sold out every time I finally try to buy it), and a couple rings. I'm happy with the stuff we got, and that a lot of it was from smaller creators. Still spendier than we should have been, but oh well.

We did make a whole circuit of the park, but it's quite possible we missed some booths that were there. (It's easy to miss, when there's stuff to both sides, and fairly heavy foot traffic. It was also really hot, and we were wilting.) I know we were dehydrated, because between the two of us we finished off four large bottles of generic-brand gatorade, and neither of us needed to pee, ha.

We stayed for several hours, and headed back around 5:00 or so. The train we wanted to get home had been cancelled "due to lack of operator availability", but we only had to wait 20 minutes or so for another.

It was a nice day, we had some good conversations, and I'm glad we got to go. <3