Musician BdotCroc performs at the inaugural St. Paul Pride festival on June 10, 2023, in Rice Park. St Paul Pride aims to lift up LGBTQ voices with a particular focus on racial justice and economic development for youth, organizer Kyle Rucker said. (Photo courtesy St. Paul Pride)
St. Paul Pride is returning this summer for its second year — and it’s growing.
The downtown festival, which aims to lift up LGBTQ voices with a particular focus on racial justice and economic development for youth, will be held all day Saturday, June 15. Organizers have added a parade, an expanded footprint and other new programming to this year’s schedule.
The day is set to kick off with a morning block party near Mears Park in Lowertown, followed by a midday parade from there to Rice Park, where the festival continues till 10 p.m. Throughout the whole day, attendees can expect plenty of live music, food vendors, artist exhibitions, job fairs and other speakers, organizers said.
Last year’s inaugural St. Paul Pride took place at Rice Park and featured performers including Nunnabove, Mikko Blaze, BdotCroc and others.
Headlining performers for the morning street party and afternoon Pride Festival in 2024 will be announced closer to the event. Some names are already confirmed, including local singer Lil Crush, who will be helping preview a Minnesota-centric hip-hop festival called SotaSound that will take place in 2025, festival producer Kyle Rucker said.
This year, organizers are also planning St. Paul Pride Week leading up to the festival: five days of live music, comedy and art shows around Lowertown with local business and restaurant partners. A full schedule for those days, June 10 to 14, is still in the works.
Another component of the festival that’s still under wraps involves the parade: Rucker intends to break a Guinness World Record, he said, but he can’t share more details yet. It involves musicians in the street, he teased.
A significant priority for St. Paul Pride is providing meaningful economic opportunities for queer youth and youth of color, including — and especially — those without stable housing, Rucker said. Rucker, who runs a talent management agency, was himself homeless for a time when he moved to St. Paul as a teenager.
One such opportunity this year, Rucker said, is that homeless youth artists in downtown St. Paul will be hired to design the festival’s official T-shirt. Rucker is working with Face to Face’s SafeZone program and youth arts organization 30,000 Feet to identify artists, who will receive royalties and other payment for the shirt designs.
Last year, Rucker said, the festival represented a reinvestment of about $56,000 into the city’s youth, from festival jobs to artist stipends to other forms of economic development.
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