He's Throwing Worldpride in Trump's Backyard. Who's with Him?

Yomiuri Shimbun

27-05-2025

Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post
'This is not the time to retreat,' Bos says.
Ryan Bos has a huge party to pull off – or several parties, spanning weeks and involving road closures all over Washington, more than a hundred contracts, 25,200 reusable drink cups, a 1,000-foot long rainbow flag and Shakira.
Bos is the executive director of Capital Pride Alliance, which this year is in charge of planning and executing the festivities around WorldPride, which run through early June. It's a huge feat of logistics, and that's before you consider the politics: This year, the LGBTQ+ celebration is being held in the backyard of a government that has targeted transgender rights and made major cuts to HIV prevention programs. At the Kennedy Center, President Donald Trump has promised 'NO MORE DRAG SHOWS, OR OTHER ANTI-AMERICAN PROPAGANDA'; the alliance relocated some events from the arts institution to other venues 'to ensure our entire LGBTQ+ community will be welcome.' Some corporate allies have withdrawn their financial support or asked not to be explicitly associated with the celebration.
The party is still very much on. But it's not clear how many people, welcome or not, will ultimately decide to take part.
On a rainy Tuesday in mid-May, Bos sat, arms folded, in a glass-paned conference room on the second floor of an office building in Logan Circle, tapping his brown dress shoes and hearing from his team. 'The 'Queer Eye' guys are out,' a staffer said at one point. 'They were not able to line up their schedules.' Maps denoting public restrooms needed printing. Someone had to inform the celebrities that their private security couldn't carry weapons in Washington. And, no, they wouldn't be getting rain insurance.
And then there was this:
'All of the existing parade signage that we have that says 'presented by Marriott International' or 'Marriott Bonvoy' is not usable,' another staffer informed the group, 'because Marriott, although not taking their sponsorship down and still wanting to use the Bonvoy logo, no longer wants to have it say 'presented by' – at least in this climate.' (Marriott did not respond to The Washington Post's requests for comment.)
The June 7 parade – a hallmark of every Pride – was less than a month away.
'So,' the staffer added, 'that leads us to the questions of which signs we need to reprint and redo.'
Bos is throwing a parade; corporate America is walking a tightrope. In February, the consulting giant Booz Allen Hamilton, which has millions in contracts with the federal government, canceled its sponsorship of the celebration. Deloitte, Comcast and Darcars chose not to donate as they had in years past, Bos said. (Booz Allen told Politico that its withdrawal from the event doesn't mean 'any pullback of support to this community.' Its media department did not reply to emails from The Post last week. Deloitte and Comcast also did not respond to emails from The Post. Darcars declined to comment.)
Bos says the organizers expect to get about $6 million in corporate money, about half of what they hoped for.
A handful of other corporate sponsors are still contributing, Bos said, but covertly. As in, they don't want to be named or have their logos displayed.
'It's somewhat counter to Pride,' Bos said in his office after the staff meeting. 'You know, we appreciate their financial contribution. Pride is about standing up and affirming and being visible.'
He hadn't seemed fazed by the news about the Marriott signage. At least the hotel franchise hadn't pulled its funding. And it is still listed on the WorldPride website as a 'Proud Presidential' partner – its biggest corporate sponsor.
'My concern,' Bos added later, 'are those that, in essence, have gone in the closet.'
There's still enough money in the coffers for the organizers to have put together a full program with some big draws. Among the marquee events is a concert by Shakira on May 31 at Nationals Park, preceded by 30 minutes of programming about Pride. On June 6, Jennifer Lopez is set to take the stage at RFK Stadium for a ticketed music festival; Troye Sivan will do the same on June 7. The rainbow-festooned parade floats will wend their way down 14th Street toward the Capitol starting at 2 p.m. that day, and a Doechii concert on Pennsylvania Avenue will follow on June 8. Bos said he didn't know yet whether uniformed police officers would be marching in the parade – a subject of contention at other Pride festivals in recent years – but he said it would be part of the discussion with law enforcement, adding that, as a community, 'I think we have to keep an open mind about this conversation.'
Celebrations planned by certain subcommunities are already underway, including trans pride, Latinx pride, Black pride, API pride for Asians and Pacific Islanders, 'silver pride' for older people, and (a new addition) military pride. Other events include a human rights conference and a protest rally.
But some queer people may not have much of a desire to make themselves visible here, now. In October, the D.C. mayor's office said it expected up to 3 million visitors. In March, a Capital Pride Alliance official estimated that 1.5 million would come. Earlier this month, Bos said he has 'no clue' how many people to expect. 'I'm hopeful that we're still going to surpass the million mark,' he said. The alliance purchased hotel blocks, but as of last week, 'the hotel bookings aren't where we expected them to be,' Bos said.
Nat Wallace, board member of the Toronto Purple Fins Gender Free Swim Club, was planning a trip for about a dozen of his club members to participate in an LGBTQ aquatics championship that coincided with WorldPride. But after the inauguration, Wallace and his teammates grew worried that some people could be detained at the border or turned away if their documents didn't match their gender identity. Although the U.S. government says that a visitor's gender and beliefs about sexuality don't render them inadmissible, Wallace, who's trans, was skeptical. The team ultimately decided to skip the competition – and ditch the rest of the celebration, too. 'It's a concern – whether or not WorldPride as an organization can really consider the [United] States as a country that's safe to host these events,' he says.
The Human Rights Campaign has fielded hundreds of questions from prospective visitors, said Brandon Wolf, the organization's national press secretary. Wolf, a survivor of the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting, was at a fundraising dinner in South Florida a couple of months ago, where guests asked him about where to party but also about how to stay safe if they went to pro-LGBTQ+ demonstrations in Washington. Wolf says he has reassured people that organizers are working closely with local D.C. police, 'which, as we know, is different than federal agents,' but also that 'you've got to look at your own circumstance.'
Beyond the Beltway, in states where local governments are also enacting policies targeting LGBTQ+ people, 'the vibe is a turn-towards-my-nearest-neighbor type of care,' says Zooey Zephyr, a Democratic state legislator in Montana. She's heard about LGBTQ+ groups in Montana organizing Pride events there, or working with local clinics to make sure LGBTQ+ people have health care, but not as much about WorldPride. 'I don't think that will be the primary driver for our community.' (Zephyr might attend the WorldPride rally, but she will otherwise be preoccupied with a fellowship at Harvard.)
So will this still be fun? 'I think we make everything fun,' Wolf says. 'That's just who we are, right?'
Bos says he understands that people need to evaluate their own risks when deciding to attend WorldPride, but 'this is not the time to retreat.'
He's been making events work, or trying to, for much of his life. When Bos was growing up in Indiana, his parents helped plan a big 'ethnic music festival' every year, and he and his brother volunteered to help out. ('It was an Oktoberfest,' he says.) He moved to the Baltimore area after college to work in education, and years later got involved with efforts to bring the Gay Games – an international sporting competition – to Washington, but those efforts ultimately failed. 'A lot of the undertone there was this misperception of D.C.,' Bos says, 'just not realizing we're more than the federal city, we're more than the Mall, or more than the Capitol, the White House.'
In 2021, InterPride – the global umbrella group of Pride organizers – first awarded the 2025 host designation to Taiwan, but that reportedly fell apart over a different kind of political tension: how to refer to the place where it was being held. Washington had been the runner-up, and the Capital Pride Alliance leaped at the chance to prove it could pull it off.
Bos and his colleagues argued that D.C. knew how to put on big events and that it was more than a seat of government, even as they acknowledged the 2024 election might affect the atmosphere. 'It was clear that even then, they knew that the election could go either way,' Bos said. 'There was a sense of importance of how having WorldPride in the United States of America, in its nation's capital – sort of that message that it could send.'
When the election went Trump's way, Bos went into a state of denial and fear. 'I couldn't watch news for probably four to five months,' he said. After the inauguration, the executive orders – on transgender people, on DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) – felt like 'gut punch after gut punch.'
Showing up at Pride matters more this year, Bos said, to show LGBTQ+ people who are not out that 'there are people fighting, especially when you see these corporations all retreating their support. For me, it feels like things are just crumbling around – like, the room, the walls are caving in on you.'