‘We are here to stay’: Pride draws crowds to Grand Rapids
Katie Rosendale
·6 min read
GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. (WOOD) — Downtown Grand Rapids was filled with music, vendors and plenty of rainbow flags Saturday for the city’s annual Pride festival.
Now in its 36th year, Grand Rapids Pride has become one of the city’s largest single-day events. It serves as a fundraiser for the Grand Rapids Pride Center.
“We’ve definitely gotten bigger,” Jazz McKinney, executive director of the Grand Rapids Pride Center and chair of the Grand Rapids Pride Festival, told News 8.
The festival featured over 100 vendors, from food trucks to local artists. This year, special guests like Big Freedia — an artist who was featured on “Break My Soul” by Beyoncé — joined.
McKinney, who uses they/them pronouns, described the event as “a big old party.”
“We really just want to focus on making sure that we’re experiencing queer joy, allowing folks to be themselves, allowing folks to be in community with each other,” they said.
“Pride started as a riot and protest to brutality. And it still is that. It still is definitely making sure that folks understand that we deserve to be ourselves, we deserve to be who we are and be able to live out free and proud and happy,” they explained. “And so it definitely still is that and rooted in that, but (we) definitely have expanded. We wanted to focus more on queer joy as well, and not just the negative sides of other people’s reactions or anything like that.”
“Let’s just be ourselves. Let’s enjoy ourselves,” McKinney said. “As you can see, it’s an amazing turnout. This is just showing the world that we won’t be stopped. We won’t be silenced. We are here, and we are here to stay.”
The festivities kicked off at noon and ran until 10 p.m. at Calder Plaza.
Copyright 2024 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
A reliable gadget leaker, named Evan Blass, just published images of a bunch of unannounced Samsung devices. There’s the Galaxy Watch 7, Watch Ultra and new earbuds.
TikTok is gearing up to challenge Amazon's Prime Day event in July. The social network announced on Thursday that TikTok Shop is holding a "Deals For You Days" sales event in the U.S. starting on July 9. The announcement comes a few days after Amazon revealed that its annual Prime Day sales will take place on July 16 and 17.
The FCC wants to make it significantly easier for consumers to unlock their phones from their carriers, proposing that all devices must be unlockable just 60 days after purchase. Mobile phones purchased from a carrier are generally locked to that carrier until either the contract is up or the phone is paid off. FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel announced the Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, or NPRM, in a press release today.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced on Thursday that the company will begin to surface AI characters made by creators through Meta AI studio on Instagram. The social media company's announcement comes on the same day as a16z-backed chatbot company Character.ai is rolling out the ability for users to talk with AI avatars over a call. In a post on his broadcast channel, Zuckerberg noted that these chatbots will be clearly marked as AI so users are aware.