As East Hampton prepares for its fourth annual Pride Parade, set to kick off in front of the Presbyterian Church on Saturday at noon and culminate in an afternoon of “celebration, family fun, and live musical performances” in Herrick Park, organizers are anticipating their largest and “most vibrant” showing to date.
“I understand why people feel it’s more important than ever,” reflected Tom House, founder of the nonprofit Hamptons Pride, who put together the inaugural parade in 2022 at the request of Mayor Jerry Larsen, and has been at the helm of planning each year since. This is the parade’s first year under a presidential administration that, according to the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, was already credited with the most anti-L.G.B.T.Q. actions in the country’s history before returning to the White House last year with an “accelerated” agenda.
“I don’t think we necessarily feel it as much on the East End because we have people like the leaders of East Hampton Village and the town who are not going to budge one inch,” said Mr. House. “I’ve always agreed with Mayor Larsen that Pride saves lives, and I think it’s really important for people to see that, though things are changing on the larger scale, we have so much support here.”
Mr. House initially established Hamptons Pride in 2021 with the goal of raising money to build an outdoor social area on the former site of the storied Wainscott gay bar the Swamp, where he had tended bar for many years, after the Wainscott Citizens Advisory Committee revealed plans to erect a bench on the spot dedicated to the L.G.B.T.Q.+ community. (He had responded to the proposal in a 2020 guest essay in The Star, “What Kind of Bench?”) His efforts gained traction locally, and in January of 2022 he was told by a mutual friend to expect a call from the mayor, who floated the idea of a parade.
“I don’t think that we should allow national politics to interfere with what we’re doing in our local communities,” Mayor Larsen said in a phone call last week, noting that the focus of the parade has always been local. “There was a young boy who was struggling with his identity, and he wound up committing suicide. And I was thinking of what we could do to help people that are in that situation. I said, ‘Maybe if somebody who is on the dark side of something right now knew that there was a lot of support out there, it could make a difference’ — the whole idea was if we could help one person, that changes somebody’s world.”
The parade was eagerly embraced by the community. In its first year, turnout was more than three times what Mr. House and the village police had anticpated, and it has continued to grow since. Last year the Long Island Rail Road added an additional train from Speonk on the morning of the parade, timed to get more Long Islanders into town in time for the lineup, and this year there’s a big-name grand marshal: the Tony Award-winning performer, writer, and filmmaker John Cameron Mitchell.
“Mostly he’s going to perform for us at the park,” said Mr. House. “And it’s kind of like our gift to the community — knowing there are quite a few people who are really big fans of his, and then getting to introduce a new generation to him.” Mr. Mitchell is best known for writing and starring in the 1998 Off Broadway rock opera “Hedwig and the Angry Inch,” and its subsequent film adaptation, which Mr. House called “way ahead of the curve of the issues that were going to become really important in the L.G.B.T.Q.+ community” over the next 20 to 25 years.
Hamptons Pride has made it a priority to keep the parade as open as possible. It does not charge registration fees, raising all of the money for the event at a single annual fund-raiser, with this year’s set to take place at the LongHouse Reserve in East Hampton on the evening of June 21. “So far that’s worked, and we hope it will continue to work. We want as much of the community involved in the parade as possible,” Mr. House said. “My quote that I keep repeating is that the parade is for L.G.B.T.+ and allies, and we hope one day that means everyone.”
“Organizing a parade will never be an easy thing,” he added. “It’s a very, very big enterprise. But I do feel that it’s starting to gain its own momentum. I’m really curious to see what this year brings.”
