Well, this is fucking awful.
The official Eugene [Oregon] Pride Rally and March has been cancelled, just days before they were set to happen along with the festival.
I know that the org would only do this as a carefully considered last resort. Which means anti-queer sentiment has really gotten this bold & violent even here with such a large per-capita queer population & a solid history of bold protests in the face of adversity.
From their blog:
Our usual rally and march from Kesey Square will not take place as planned this year. There are several overlapping reasons for this unfortunate circumstance, including various threats made against our organization and a lack of trust among many in the community and the Eugene Police Department. You can read more about the situations that have led to this unfortunate decision in our blog post below. However, there is currently no way to keep everyone safe, insure the event (including the festival), and accommodate the legitimate demands of activists within the community. If an unaffiliated rally and unpermitted march are planned, we will pass along that information. Given the challenges we are all facing at this moment in time, it is important to remain united as a community. Division will only enable the oppression we are resisting. We are sorry for any disappointment this decision may create, although we are still looking forward to a fun and safe celebration of LGBTQ+ arts and culture and queer and trans joy at the Lane Events Center.
—
A lot of comments on the cancelation Instagram post are just filled with know-it-all ignorance and false assumptions about Pride just doing the permits wrong, so I think it's really important to shed light on the background civic politics of why this would happen in a supposed liberal and queer bastion city whose last governor and last mayor were both openly bisexual. Even when members of the community are in power, they only get there by ignoring that community's concerns. Or maybe more precisely they end up so surrounded by people who sound reasonable pressuring them to compromise that the unreasonable starts to sound reasonable in comparison.
Eugene Pride has typically consisted of 3 things:
A rally at [Ken] Kesey Square in the center of Downtown.
A short protest march to the Eugene Pride Festival site that heralds the opening of the festival.
The main event: the Eugene Pride Festival that's the best bits of a protest rally, stage performances, queer organization tabling (including free private HIV testing), and craft fair all in one. While it is a big party, it has not lost the intensity or spirit of its purpose as a protest and remembrance. The bigots haven't killed us all yet, so we're going to take the day to celebrate life and look to the future with the past in our hearts.
Black, trans, and formerly incarcerated members of the queer community spent years very rightfully pointing out that a police presence at Pride, even in a theoretically protective capacity as public safety to protect from bigots as requested by the city permitting process was not safe at all and was preventing vulnerable members of the community from attending out of fear. Which was having the effect of Pride being even whiter than the already dismal 80% of the general population of the city being white. Pride leadership was torn between wanting to listen and address those concerns, and wanting the permitting and insurance process to go smoothly enough to make the event happen because it was entirely organized at kitchen tables by people with day-jobs and limited capacity.
Two major events shifted their priorities to resist demands by the police:
The 2020 George Floyd protests that brought discussions of police violence into the forefront. Among the local queer community it became much harder to minimize or de-prioritize those concerns.
In 2022 far-right influencer Andy Ngo used social media, mainly Twitter, to encourage other extremists to attack Old Nick's, an unofficial queer tavern, over a drag queen story hour being held there that was hosted by an 11-year-old drag performer.
A drag queen storytime event at a local pub is under attack from right-wing extremists who are flooding social media with toxic comments try
"A group of 40 to 50 right-wing protesters who gathered across the street from Old Nick’s to vulgarly protest the 11-year-old girl participating in a drag storytime event inside were met by an even larger crowd of around 250 counter-protesters on Sunday, Oct. 23."
"At first, the two groups stayed across the street from one another, only launching verbal insults and quips — but eventually, the harsh words turned into even sharper rocks."
The police were there, but they did jack shit as tensions escalated and these mostly-out-of-town pricks threatened to hurt queer people for "sexualizing" children, including—and I cannot emphasize this enough—threatening an actual child who just wanted to dress up in fun costumes and read to other children. Even when the bigots were showing they were armed with guns and threatening to use them. Fortunately, they were bigger chicken-shits than the queer counter-protestors, some of whom were also visibly armed.
"Slowly, the left-wing counter-protesters pushed the Save The Children protesters out of the park around 12:30 pm and onto Washington and 2nd. After being forced out from the area surrounding the pub, several righ-twing protesters began shooting paintball guns, throwing rocks and lobbing yellow smoke canisters at the pro-drag and LGBTQIA counter-protesters."
“Let kids be kids,” said Allison Black, a security guard and bartender for Old Nick’s Pub, “A little girl wanted to read stories to other ki
As of 2024, Eugene Pride had 12,000 attendees and 250 booths according to the Eugene Weekly. The city doesn't want to issue permits for an event of that size without a safety plan in place, which is logical on the surface, but in practice means they think the Eugene Police should run and dictate that public safety. The events of the 2020s have really shown how utterly out-of touch that request is. The more Pride has asserted that the police do not keep this community safe, the more the police have painted Pride as irresponsible, uncommitted to safety, and unwilling to work with them. They've repeatedly "lost" paperwork sent by Pride, been glacially slow to respond, and just overall done as much to administratively stall as possible.
This fully came to a head in 2024 when Pride's organizers requested community attendance and comments at the July 22 City Council Meeting because they were still dicking them around about permits, parking, and safety plans for the Pride In The Park on August 10th. Among many other things, Pride wanted to use private security instead of police security so they could ensure the actual safety of all community members. Many good speeches were made, including the owner of the Spectrum queer bar (which had recently closed for a combination of factors, including wanting to put the resources towards building a sober queer community center than a bar with alcoholism rates being so high). The event went on, but that was the last straw for being at Alton Baker Park.
In November of 2024, Eugene Pride became a founding member organization of The Lavender Network, a queer community center and shared space for the city's queer organizations to work from to pool their resources. Both money and people. It's a lot easier to work together across the hall than across town. This was the first time in three decades of existence that Eugene Pride wasn't going to be run from kitchen tables. It's been a really great space, and has allowed a whole lot of small-scale very punk (and more disability-friendly) maker markets that have really brought the community together throughout the year.
For a look into the protection arm of the queer community, I highly recommend reading Eve Weston's June 2025 front-page article in the Eugene Weekly about why some members of the queer community, including her, choose to arm themselves. Some people were big mad about how even running this piece would "justify" straight people's fear of queer people, especially trans women since Eve holding her gun was the front cover. Supposedly this is "bad queer representation." Which is just model minority bigotry dressed up as concern by people (queer and not) who don't want to have a nuanced and difficult discussion about queer reality in the face of systematic violence (including how guns can be a serious risk to queer people who own them due to mental health from facing bigotry. What is “queer representation" if not queer people sharing their perspective? This isn't directly related to security at Pride, but I think it's really important and too often unspoken community context.
“Why do you own a gun?” My answer to that frequent question is always this: Because I feel that I have to. Being a transgender woman today c
The 2025 Eugene Pride was held in June on the anniversary of Stonewall at the Lane Events Center. Which is a large Lane County owned exhibition center. This notably allowed them to use (unarmed) private security made of the local queer community and their allies. In their email to the venders, performers, and queer organizations participating in the festival they urged us to remember even more urgently that Pride is a protest commemorating a riot and we must be loud in the face of increasing adversity to hold fast to each other. I never got away from my table because I was completely slammed with people buying my highly political and often cantankerous queercore button pins. But from what I could hear it very much succeeded in that. Made sure to be close to one of the stages this year so I can hear it all.
We've had one Pride, but what about Second Pride. The much smaller Queer Creative Bloom craft fair started in 2025 at the Farmer's Market Pavilion, and just had its second year last weekend. Much smaller and more chill, but a great time, and much less expensive for exhibitors to be more accessible. Many of the same people are at both. Two different cakes instead of competition each with their own strengths. Great space for people who don’t want a big spectacle of a festival and all that comes with it.
This year there's also a Queer Makers Market put on by Queer Eugene at the Lavender Network on July 5th, and the Whiteaker Community Market weekly outdoor craft fair + farmer's market will have a Pride Fest on July 26th. There are probably even more mini Pride festivals all over Eugene-Springfield this summer. We are a queer enough community to support all of them. But none is as big or mission-critical for queer aid organizations, performers, and local queer artists as Eugene Pride is. Perhaps more precisely, all the other events are delicious cake, and Eugene Pride is the meal that lets everyone do everything else.
So here we arrive to 2026 and the police are only growing more hostile and more useless. I don't know any details of why the rally and march were canceled, but I know enough about the event and its organizers to believe them when they say there were credible threats, no way to guarantee safety, and most importantly that they would literally lose their event insurance and the ability to hold the most important part of the event.
Eugene Pride is not a rich organization, and they deliberately have only limited corporate or even larger local business money. They keep enough to fund the next one and use the rest as a scholarship fund. A last minute cancelation of the whole event would be disastrous for the organization and the community. The big party is what attracts people to finding out about all the other groups and artists they can support and be supported by. The community would be fucked and in chaos without it. They know it, and everyone participating knows it. The only people who don't know it aren't actually paying attention to the boots on the ground community.
So that's the choice: cancel the official rally and march over safety concerns (knowing that either other activists will organize one or people who didn't get the memo or don't care will show up anyway) or lose the whole event and all future events. It's a fucked choice. What's really fucked is that anyone has to make it at all.
We've backslid so far so fast. I rewatch Bros (2022) and it's already such a time capsule of what it looked like at the top of the pendulum swing when we fully believed it would keep swinging up. Instead the bottom dropped out. Largely because billionaires like Elon Musk, JK Rowling, and Jeff Bezos are actively funding the dismantling of these rights legally, politically, journalistically, and as public sentiment. It's all just so twisted. There's nowhere that's untouched by this abuse of power and control. We have to fight tooth and nail for better days because the ones we had are behind us.
And that's the story of why I have 4 days to come up with some good subtle to overt anti-cop queer pin designs because the need for them over the 5,000 other ideas I have just moved up the list.
