Hundreds of thousands of LGBTQ+ people are expected — coming from 35 countries on two continents and the Caribbean — to visit Broward County next year for the Pride of the Americas festival.
The spate of events April 21-26 will include concerts (no big names announced yet), a series of events at local resorts, parties at Wilton Manors’ nightclubs and restaurants, an awards banquet, a 5K run as well as conferences and symposiums.
“It’s our first one. We hope to have many more,” says Miik Martorell, president of Pride Fort Lauderdale, which is coming off the success of being the first organization to have a beach-side parade earlier this year.
Some of the highlights will include an opening reception at the Museum of Discovery and Science followed by a concert across the street at the Broward Center for the Performing Arts on Wednesday, April 22. The following night, on Thursday April 23, there will be a runway fashion show at the Seminole Hard Rock Resort and Casino in Hollywood.
A hub of activity will be along Fort Lauderdale beach where the official parade will take place on Saturday, April 25 and where a festival — with live performances, an art fair, vendors, food trucks, service/information booths, etc. — will be staged that Saturday and Sunday.
Call for volunteers
Producing this sprawling countywide festival where the invitation list includes the Western Hemisphere requires plenty of volunteers, say the organizers of Pride of the Americas, a partnership of Pride Fort Lauderdale and the Greater Fort Lauderdale Convention and Visitors Bureau.
Toward that end, Fort Lauderdale Pride is having a series of open houses calling for volunteers.
“The idea is we want to bring the community together, people who are interested in getting involved in this international [event], the first one of its kind,” says Martorell. “We’re excited because our community really makes up all the pieces of the Western Hemisphere, so we feel like we’ll make a great host, but we’re going to need great people to help us pull it off.”
About 25-30 people showed up for the first open house at Hunters Nightclub in the Shoppes of Wilton Manors on a soggy Wednesday. Here’s what some of them had to say about why they were there and what they’ve already heard about Pride of the Americas:
Michael Stara, Fort Lauderdale: “I don’t know if a lot of people here have heard that much about it, but my friends in Colombia, a gay couple, have heard about it. They are very interested in volunteering and they asked if I would go to this meeting. I want to volunteer too, but they’re the ones who got me interested. Both my friends and I are both bilingual and have been to a majority of countries in South America. [We thought we’d help by] possibly going to the airport and welcoming people as they come in.”
Kim Miller, Hollywood: “I’m registered at the Pride Center, so a lot of events happening in the area automatically come up on my phone. I have volunteered for Pride before, just doing the security kind of thing. I wanted to get involved.”
Roger Cruttenden, Wilton Manors: “I think it’s going to be really important to bring people across the world down here to South Florida, to the Fort Lauderdale area to see what we have to offer. And also a large communal event where people across the globe celebrating diversity and celebrating, you know, just who we are.”
Jim Fahy, Fort Lauderdale: “I do hospitality work at cruise embark and disembark. So I’m used to panic and people losing things and trying to find their way around. Well, I think it’s a historic event. I’m trying to get a lot of my friends that live with me in Coral Ridge [Towers] to get involved.”
The next volunteer meeting will be sometime in January. Learn more at prideoftheamericas.com/volunteer
Why invite half the world?
The Pride of the Americas grew out of a disappointment.
Originally, Pride Fort Lauderdale (with the support of the Convention and Visitors Bureau) wanted to host WorldPride 2021 but lost out to Copenhagen, Denmark. That failed bid led to the group thinking of alternatives, according to Richard Gray, the senior vice president on diversity and inclusion at the CVB, who had been working closely with Pride Fort Lauderdale for the last few years, most recently helping them navigate local government for the festival on the beach in February.
“I knew it was the right thing to do,” recalls Gray. “First of all, we’re [CVB] a global leader in this the LGBTQ platform … since 1996. We were one of the first … to market to the LGBTQ public. Very, very quickly, in five years, not only did we have a new confidence as a LGBTQ destination, but it turns out there was gold at the end of the rainbow.”
CVB estimates that every year Greater Fort Lauderdale welcomes 1.5 million LGBT+ visitors who spend $1.5 billion.
Fort Lauderdale is home to the global headquarters of the International Gay and Lesbian Travel Association.
According to the the 2012 U.S. Census, Fort Lauderdale has the highest number of same-sex couple households in the United States.
There are hundreds of gay-owned and operated businesses and organizations, including one of the largest Pride Centers in the U.S. and the Stonewall Museum, one of the only permanent spaces in the country with LGBT+ history and culture exhibits.
“I think Pride of the Americas will re-emphasize that we are thought leaders and we want to share our knowledge, not only with the other destinations, but with other countries,” Gray adds. “But there’s more to it than that. We have more people of color, more Latinos here than there are white people. We have almost 100 languages spoken. Fort Lauderdale is a gateway due to the airport with Jet Blue, Spirit and Southwest. Those are our three carriers traveling and aggressively marketing their flights to the Caribbean, Central and South America.”
He also says he was glad Pride of the America will have conferences for issues faced by LGBTQ families, seniors, the disabled and corporations (the Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce will have a conference at Citrix headquarters).
Martorell says that coming up with varied programming was something he learned by visiting other Pride events around the globe, attending 30 this year alone and 68 over the last three years. He says he not only observed, but volunteered as well. And yet, it was Fort Lauderdale itself that inspired the idea for Pride of the Americas.
“We started to examine our community, the people in our community, most of which represented all the different parts of the Caribbean and Central and South America,” Martorell says. “Personally, I am of Cuban descent. My roommate is actually Bahamian. So a lot of us live here as refugees of our own country because we can’t be ourselves there.”
