Queer Lib Caucus Presents: StoneWall Was A Riot - WTF Happened With Philly Pride?!

Philly’s first Pride event was held in 1972, but an annual tradition did not set in until many years later in 1989, when a spontaneous parade formed. After that, Philly Pride Presents was founded. For 28 years, Philly Pride Presents was led by Franny Price. It started in 1993, when Philly’s LGBTQ+ community was defined largely by white cis gay people who lived and/or owned businesses in the Gayborhood in Center City. 

However, problems and criticisms inevitably arose because Philly Pride Presents was not accountable to or even accepting of everyone. It consisted of Franny and her friends, specifically a white cis man named Chuck Volz, who began working with Philly Pride 29 years ago. Besides Price and Volz, the work of pride was largely done by volunteers working under them year-to-year.

Pride everywhere has largely become co-opted by corporations and business interests, and police were increasingly visible and eventually even celebrated. Police presence at Pride is presented as for our own protection, that the police are there to make us feel safe from homophobic protestors and potentially violent interlopers. In 2016 there was backlash when Philly Pride Presents tried to make the Gay and Lesbian police officers association the grand marshals of June pride. The police group actually turned the award down after the backlash started; Price and Volz were determined to make them the grand marshals even despite the backlash.

This kind of insensitivity, even outright racism, was, and still is, rampant in the gayborhood. Racist door policies and dress codes at gay establishments were the norm; Bars had vague policies agains “athletic wear” or certain brands of clothing, always the ones popular in black or brown communities. These rules were, of course, selectively applied most often against those same communities, while whites wearing the same or similar clothing were allowed to enter. Months after the grand marshal debacle involving the police officer’s group, video surfaced of a local gay bar owner using the n-word repeatedly when speaking to a staff member. It took the labor of many black and brown activists, including Abdul-Aliy Muhammad, the Black and Brown workers cooperative, and journalist Ernest Owens, to bring all of this to public light. The gayborhood establishment, especially the business establishment-- overwhelmingly white, cisgender, wealthy and older-- were fine with Pride the way that Price and Volz ran it, because they shared the same values.

Later that year, as we know, Donald Trump was elected. Chuck Volz actually outed himself as a Trump supporter on social media. His history of misogynistic, transphobic, and racist posts became public, to further outrage. Calls for him to resign and for PPP to be a more transparent and community-accountable organization grew louder than ever. But Franny Price wouldn’t budge. She defended Volz and his right to air his views, and again claimed that they were the only people doing the work for Pride, that their labor placed them beyond reproach, and that anyone criticizing them had no right to do so.

For the next few years Pride continued unchanged, but a series of social media posts this past May led to the organization quickly imploding and disbanding.

Be on the lookout for more blog posts from us, as we gear up for our second Stonewall Was A Riot event, on 12/5 at 5 PM