It was a blazing day as thousands came in the summer swelter to watch the parade and participate in Kentuckiana Pride. The temperature was in the 90s. This was the 25th year of the Kentuckiana Pride Festival, according to Kentuckiana Pride Foundation President Rodney Coffman. Coffman stated that the Pride was expected to have 25,000 attendees this year in what Coffman stated was a “great turnout despite the heat.” You could feel the moisture linger in the densely humid air.
However, the LGBTQIA community and its allies still turned up to the Big Four Lawn. Many attendees parked miles away from the entry to the festival and trudged in the blistering heat to make the pilgrimage to the celebration. These denizens stood orderly in line once they made the majority of the trek to the festival, each finding their place in first-come, first-served fashion, as the sun violently beat down on them as they all made progress steadily, with the line whipping around what constituted several blocks.
If one stood in the long line at the mouth of the entrance to the festival, one could watch the tail end of the Pride Parade that began in NULU. Many walked in the Pride Parade alongside their organization’s floats, such as longtime veterans for queer rights in the state, such as Chris Hartman, who is the executive director for the Fairness Campaign, a statewide organization that has been advocating for housing protections, employment, anti-discrimination ordinances and legislation for the LGBTQIA community since 1991.
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Once one obtains entrance into the festival, one could see a sprawl of booths offering a diverse range of things, from large corporations to small businesses advertising services, vendors selling Pride-flavored wares, informational booths from city and statewide queer organizations, and food trucks of many varieties.
One such booth was the Louisville Transmasculine Alliance; this was the group’s first time tabling at Pride. One member, Roan Hendrix, who is in a leadership position with the Alliance, says that the group has been around since 2014 and is a social and support group for what their website lists as folks who are “AFAB and Intersex people who identify as FtM, transmasculine, non-binary, and questioning.” Hendrix felt that the group tabling and sharing information on trans resources was a huge deal because we get trans folks and trans resources.”
Hendrix, who has spent 10 years in Louisville, said he feels that Pride allows people to feel their most authentic selves.” This statement was echoed by Coffman earlier in the day when asked what Pride meant to him; this was in contrast to what Coffman, who has been in Louisville since 2001, stated was the situation for queer people in his youth, mentioning there was “more fear” when he was younger.
Taking a spectator’s view of the crowd, one can see every size, shape, race, age, and ethnicity expressed at this year’s Pride as they roam between alleys made by the rows of booths on the Big Four Lawn. One can glance at a surface view of the festival as a sea of representation of the diversity of the LGBTQIA community in full colorful bloom, acting as an annual fixture in the city, bringing this diverse array of identities together each year by the river.
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This article appears in Jul 4-31, 2025.