Rainbow knee socks, caps and more reign on Capitol Mall as Sacramento Pride roars back
Two young women, one 19 and the other 20, waited Saturday along with scores of other people to enter a fenced-in, five-block world of acceptance along Sacramento’s Capitol Mall where they could share a secret with strangers that they didn’t feel safe telling their own mothers.
The women wished to remain anonymous because they haven’t revealed their sexual preference to their parents.
“I came out to my two best friends after a birthday party,” said the 20-year-old, her eyes embellished by rainbow eye shadow. “I realized I was having different feelings during high school, and I didn’t really know what they were. I wasn’t really sure how that was gonna affect friendships, relationships, stuff like that. Unfortunately, I’m not comfortable telling my mother, but with my closest friends, I feel very comfortable to be myself and be like, ‘I’m bi.’”
That’s ‘bi’ as in bisexual. This is Sacramento Pride, a two-day festival and march that celebrates people often marginalized or victimized in society because they’re not straight, or heterosexual. Their LGBTQ alliance encompasses many sexual orientations: Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer or questioning, intersex, asexual, pansexual and nonbinary are some of the terms attendees use to describe how they identify.
The 19-year-old attendee, who had experienced her first Sac Pride in 2018, was thrilled to welcome the event back and had invited her friend to come with her. Pride and other big events had been canceled two years in a row amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
Pride festivals and marches occur all around the nation and world, but in the United States, their origin is generally traced back to 1969 when the modern fight for LGBTQ rights began. That year, a police raid at a popular gay bar known as the Stonewall Inn drew a crowd of bystanders who rioted over arrests targeting people for their orientation. Local LGBTQ activists organized Sacramento’s first Pride parade in 1979 after a police raid on a gay disco in midtown known as the Upstairs/Downstairs.
On Saturday, scores of people strolled the five-block village on Capitol Mall as the festival kicked off at 11 a.m. A welcoming rainbow flag, representing the diversity of the LGBTQ community, flew just blocks away at the California state Capitol. Its six colors represent the spectrum of human sexuality and gender.
Attendees embraced the color scheme in their apparel. They toted bags, fans and umbrellas with the rainbow colors on them. One woman placed dots of each color where her eyebrows would have been.
Strolling around the festival with her grandmother, Cash Saldana draped herself in a flag with shades of pink, orange, white and red in its bands. It’s the lesbian flag, she explained, and it represents her orientation.
The 18-year-old’s journey to that discovery, she said, actually began in middle school. She didn’t know any LGBTQ people, she said, so she had to do online research to figure out how she identified. The discovery, however, made her life more difficult, not because of her family, but because of her classmates.
“In middle school, I went to a racist school where I was the only brown person,” she said. “I was bullied often just for my skin color, and now that I was a lesbian, I was also bullied for that. It was very difficult to get through that because every day I was just being called slurs, told to go back to my country, told I don’t belong here, that I’m not right, that I shouldn’t be alive, stuff like that. Then I moved down here. I finally came out to my parents at the start of high school.”
Her grandmother Mary Rowland said she wanted to support Saldana in whatever way she could, something that she feels is crucial because she’s met many teens whose families abandoned them or treated them cruelly after they revealed their sexual orientation. The Saldanas have fostered a number of LGBTQ youth in their home.
“They were beaten on, picked on, kicked out, just because they came out,” Rowland said.
The nice thing about Pride, Saldana said, is that if you’re part of the LGBTQ community, you will find people here who likely identify with the same orientation as you, but if you are a person of color, you will likely see other people who look like you.
John Kraynak, a member of the Sacramento Gay Men’s Chorus, said that’s one of the things he most loves about performing at Pride events.
“Society in America, especially, is so segmented — old people, young people, white people, people of color, and they all have their own special niche,” he said. “What’s fun about Pride is that everybody’s there, mingled together. (Americans) don’t always get to see that very much.”
The chorus, which includes heterosexuals, women and others in its ranks, also has sung at Placer Pride, Lodi Pride and also will be performing at Davis Pride on Sunday afternoon. The entire chorus and their director were named as grand marshals at Sunday’s Pride march, along with four other local residents.
Saldana and Rowland arrived in time to hear the chorus kick off Pride on Saturday with ‘80s tunes such as “I Need A Hero,” Toto’s “Africa” and “It’s Raining Men.” In an interview after the chorus’ performance, Kraynak and his husband said they highly recommended people come to the drag shows that will be held Sunday evening.
Those who buy VIP tickets will get a chance to meet the drag queens in a zone set aside for this purpose, said A La Mode, a drag performer who won the title of Miss Gay Sacramento in 2021. She wished to go by her stage name only because she feared losing opportunities in her full-time career if some employers knew she performed in drag.
Without the LGBTQ equality movement, A La Mode said, she would not be able to approach mainstream bars as a performer and demand a certain rate for doing a show. At age 30, she said, she’s been watching “RuPaul’s Drag Race” on television since she was a sophomore in high school. Now, she will emcee the VIP meet-and-greet Sunday.
“I’ve always wanted to do Pride,” she said. “You know, I moved here in 2018, so I spent a lot of time building relationships and fostering connections in the community. And this is my first Pride, performing as a host, so I’m really excited to be given that platform and grateful to be given that platform.”
Sunday’s Pride events
11 a.m.: Pride march begins at Southside Park and ends at the Capitol.
Noon: Queer/LGBTQ artist Manda Malina
1 p.m.: Maya Band, a Latin tribute band
3 p.m.: Sac Dance Lab performs “A Prideful Cabaret.”
4:30 p.m.: Sacramento-based artists Planet Booty
5:30 p.m.: Singer-songwriter Lyle Anthony, an Afro-Pop and dance sensation
6 p.m.: Los Angeles-based pop artist Madison Rose whose work is inspired by drag queens
6:30 p.m.: Mila Jam, a transgender singer, songwriter and dancer
7 p.m.: RuPaul’s Drag Race Showcase
This story was originally published June 12, 2022 at 5:00 AM.
