The board of Boston Pride, whose July 2021 announcement to dissolve the organization behind Boston’s cherished parade and festival shocked the LGBTQ+ community, has quietly reversed its decision and will not shut down after all.
Boston Pride President Linda DeMarco says her board members—still comprising five of the six at the table when they voted to dissolve: Malcolm Carey, Martha Plaza, Tina Rosado and Deborah Drew—made their decision not to disband last fall, posting on their website a brief statement about their intentions moving forward while not specifically stating a reversal of the decision that sent shockwaves through the community almost two years ago.
DeMarco tells Boston Spirit that her organization’s focus has now shifted away from the annual parade and festival to preserving the 50-plus years of the history of Boston Pride.
“We want to make sure that the history of Boston Pride will remain on the record. In order to do that, we decided not to dissolve and continue to focus on that project,” DeMarco says. “We are still in the process of developing our new mission, but our goal is to archive the history of Boston Pride and present it to the community.”
“We are also in the process of doing research from The Boston Globe, Boston Public Library, and Northeastern University archives,” she continues. “We are gathering photos [and] documents which we will store on a drive and create presentations to share with the community. We are going to use the Boston Pride website to present it.”
Boston Pride has also continued to support other Pride and pro-LGBTQ+ organizations, distributing funds through its Community Fund grant program.
DeMarco says she and her board’s original decision to close the 50-year-old institution came after accusations about a lack of diversity and inclusion within the organization reached a crisis point in the summer of 2021.
A year before, in the summer of 2020, many Boston Pride committee members resigned from the organization and started a new group, Pride 4 the People, calling for a boycott of the parade and festival and planning events of their own (most of which were derailed by COVID). As they stated on their website, the former Boston Pride committee members left Boston Pride to protest “repeated failures to adequately address racism within this organization. After years of advocating for structural change within the organization, we decided there can be no Pride for some of us until it represents all of us.”
The board responded by hiring a consulting firm, which the board members worked with for about a year to address the issues, and by creating a transition team to help transfer power to a more diverse group of leaders. But pressure on the board did not let up, DeMarco said, and with serious threats targeting her and fellow board members on social media and a continued call for the boycott, the board issued its July 9, 2021, statement that read, in part, “It is clear to us that our community needs and wants change without the involvement of Boston Pride. We have heard the concerns of the QTBIPOC community and others. We care too much to stand in the way. Therefore, Boston Pride is dissolving. There will be no further events or programming planned, and the board is taking steps to close down the organization.”
But Jo Trigilio, a co-founder of Pride 4 the People and one of the former Boston Pride committee members who resigned in protest says “The purpose of Pride 4 the People was never to `take down’ Pride,” but rather it was “to make it more accountable to the community—especially with respect to concerns about racism, transphobia and corporatization. We wanted dialogue and transformation. We were absolutely shocked when the Pride board announced it was dissolving.”
Nevertheless, the full weight of putting on the parade and festival fell to Pride 4 the People.
The group got to work creating a new organization, which eventually became Boston Pride for the People (BP4TP), now including only three of the original members who left Boston Pride—Trigilio, Dan Ortega and Katie Quinn. Over the past year and a half, other community leaders, organizers and activists stepped up and replaced the other original protestors. After successfully hosting a “Pop-Up Pride” on Boston Common last summer, BP4TP will, on June 10 this year, hold Boston’s first Pride parade and festival since before COVID (see related story on page <?>).
DeMarco says that she wishes BP4TP “the best of luck.”
When asked if she will attend the Pride parade and festival in June, DeMarco says she “probably won’t this time. It’s a new era for Pride, and we don’t want to get in their way. I think it’s good for us to step aside. I hope [to attend] in the future.”
The purpose of Pride for the People was never to ‘take down’ Pride. It was to make it more accountable to the community — especially with respect to concerns about racism, transphobia and corporatization. We wanted dialogue and transformation. We were absolutely shocked when the Pride board announced it was dissolving.
Jo Trigilio, Vice president, Boston Pride for the People
A new era
The newly organized BP4TP is ramping up for its first post-COVID Pride parade on June 10, a much-anticipated celebration that has in past years brought more than a million people into the city.
The new group faces many logistical challenges as its leadership plans New England’s largest LGBTQ+ parade and festival—challenges, its board members maintain, that could have been avoided if DeMarco’s board had been more accommodating.
“It would have been helpful to start with things like operational data and notes, permitting information, expense information, startup funding, etc.” wrote Adrianna Boulin, president of BP4TP, in a prepared statement for Boston Spirit.
But DeMarco, whose organization came under attack for what many people, including some affiliated with the group, claim was for years a lack of inclusivity, diversity and transparency, says her hands are tied financially, because she is not legally allowed to give money to a group that has not attained 501c3 charity status—something BP4TP members say the new organization is in the process of securing.
Regarding the question of why she and her board have not been more helpful on other fronts, DeMarco says that they decided not to share information “with a group that was attacking us and wanted nothing to do with us.”
“Why on one hand did they want us to dissolve and go away, and then it was oh, wait a minute, we want everything you’ve done?” she says, adding that her organization is giving the new group a 10- by 12-foot storage unit full of Pride parade and festival items that she estimates would cost $10,000–$12,000 to replace. She also says that Boston Pride’s attorney advised against sharing certain information—including the names and contact information of those who signed up to march in the Boston Pride parade, since “they signed up to march with Boston Pride, not Boston Pride for the People.”
DeMarco cites a policy displayed on her organization’s website that states: “Boston Pride is committed to protecting the privacy of all members of our community who interact with our organization and/or who participate in our events or programs.”
And while DeMarco admits that not all of the new BP4TP members were involved in the controversy that led to her board announcing in July 2021 that the organization would be ceasing its operations, she maintains that those who have approached her were, in fact, among those who called for DeMarco and the board to step down.
“The only people [from BP4TP] who have been approaching us are the people who led the charge to get rid of us,” she says. “This is the group that got very hateful and nasty … they were the ones who caused the problem.”
The problem
The problem to which DeMarco refers arose in the wake of the May 25, 2020, police killing of George Floyd, when Boston Pride released a watered-down statement about the incident that included the removal of a “Black Lives Matter” hashtag. The board’s decision to change the wording of the statement drafted by the communications team without including those who helped draft it led to the resignation of many of the organization’s volunteers and the call for the current board to step down, according to Pride 4 the People statements posted on its website at that time.
This, however, was not the first time the organization was called out for being racist and not inclusive enough. For example, in 2015, a group of Black LGBTQ activists stopped the city’s Pride parade by blocking the road and issuing a series of demands, including more diversity in leadership roles. In addition, the activists criticized at that time—and the leadership of BP4TP, they say, maintains today—that Boston Pride had become too commercialized and not discerning enough about its partnership with corporate sponsors. But it was the changing of the wording in response to the George Floyd murder, according to DeMarco, that proved to be the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back.
DeMarco says that an inadvertent failure to include “#blacklivesmatter” in the board’s statement in May 2020 triggered the call to boycott Boston Pride and the wave of hateful threats targeting her and fellow board members on social media. The latter included death threats and a “Wanted” poster on Facebook with pictures of Boston Pride board members, she says.
“They were vile [and] hateful. They wrote letters to our companies, [our] places of work, calling us racists. My family was taunted on social media … and I was told they were going to cut out my eyeballs,” DeMarco states. “People who were not even part of the community joined in. The [alt-right, Woburn, Mass.-based] group that organized ‘straight pride’ wanted to join the parade and help with the protest.”
Trigilio, now vice president of BP4TP, says they know “many people were angry with the Pride board,” but that “hateful, personal attacks are not appropriate.” They stress that Pride 4 the People “never engaged in such activity. It’s terrible [DeMarco’s board] experienced that.”
They wrote letters to our companies, [our] places of work, calling us racists. My family was taunted on social media … and I was told they were going to cut out my eyeballs. People who were not even part of the community joined in. The [alt-right, Woburn, Mass.-based] group that organized ‘straight pride’ wanted to join the parade and help with the protest.
Linda DeMarco, President, Boston Pride
In response to the ongoing criticism of Boston Pride, the board announced in June 2020 its hiring of Dorrington & Saunders LLC, an Atlantic City, N.J.-based consulting firm that specializes in diversity and inclusion. Their job was to address the long-held perceptions that Boston Pride does not give voice to all members of the LGBTQ+ community, including racial minorities and transgender people.
Judah-Abijah Dorrington, a partner at the firm and former co-chair of Black Pride New England, did not return multiple calls and emails seeking comment for this story. However, in a Dec. 29, 2020, Boston Globe article, Dorrington said that the consulting firm hoped to guide Boston Pride “not only to right a wrong” but to “not be complicit in this kind of structural racism, white privilege, and authoritative decision-making process” moving forward.
In the same article, DeMarco said: “All the existing board members have felt horrible about this whole thing that happened. But they [the board members] didn’t leave.” She added: “Yeah, we are white, but we’re not bad people. But we can do better.”
DeMarco and her board vowed to work with the consulting firm, as well as the advisory committee, Transformation Advisory Committee (TAC), which they appointed to help build a new board and be more inclusive of TQBIPOC people and everyone else in the LGBTQ+ community.
Lee Santos Silva served on TAC for close to eight months. “We made a lot of headway in our work. We were designing an application process … that would make a more equitable and inclusive process for making a more diverse board,” says Santos Silva, director of the Center for Equity and Cultural Wealth at Bunker Hill Community College. “I thought TAC had formed a really strong community. We were designing a process to bring more voices to the table for a Boston Pride that had been notoriously noninclusive.”
Santos Silva says he was caught off guard when he received what he says was a courtesy call from DeMarco just hours before the announcement was made that Boston Pride was dissolving.
“It was shocking and disheartening,” he says. “I felt a combination of sadness and frustration because we invested our time and energy in this because we believed in a cause, in our work.”
Dorrington, the consultant, said in a Nov./Dec. 2021 Boston Spirit article that they learned of the board’s plan when it was publicly announced. “I didn’t have anything to do with writing this announcement. This was the board. We and the TAC pushed them because they started dragging their feet again. We made it clear that until they were gone, nothing could move. June was the deadline for them to be gone,” Dorrington said. By being gone, Dorrington meant turning over the leadership within the organization, not shutting the organization down.
DeMarco says that given the tempestuous situation, “it was good for us to step away.”
“The board met, concerned that any event in that climate would be plagued by hatred and potential violence, and decided to disband rather than risk someone getting hurt,” she says.
Remembering with emotion her first Pride event at 16, she says that “knowing it was always going to be someone’s first Pride” drove the decision to discontinue running the event.
“None of us wanted someone’s first Pride to be a protest against us,” she says. “That is not what Pride is about. Pride is about equal rights for everyone.”
Casey Dooley, former chair of Boston Black Pride and a community volunteer with BP4TP, agrees with DeMarco that “nobody wants to hurt anyone’s first Pride, but,” she adds, “Pride continuing as it was was hurting many people in the LGBTQ community.”
Dooley says that calls for change from the community—like the one at the 2015 Pride march where Black LGBTQ activists blocked the parade to insist on more diversity and inclusivity—have been peaceful.
“This was not and is not a hateful campaign, but an accountability campaign from the community,” she says.
Following the money
In a Nov./Dec. 2021 Boston Spirit article, Rev. Irene Monroe, a Boston-based LGBTQ+ activist, speaker and columnist, reported on concerns raised by a source at Boston Pride who requested anonymity around possible financial misappropriation within the organization, questioning whether this had something to do with the board’s reluctance to turn their books over to new leadership.
Additionally, the article raised questions about DeMarco taking her team, in 2019, to an InterPride conference in Athens, Greece, on Boston Pride’s dime. When asked about the trip, DeMarco says: “Yes, it was budgeted. I believe four board members and two employees we had at the time [attended]. I do not recall the cost. As a founding member of InterPride 40 years ago, Boston has always been active with InterPride.”
The Boston Pride leader has long been involved in LGBTQ+ advocacy in the Bay State and beyond. She was recently honored by the US Association of Prides, an organization that works “hand-in-hand” with InterPride, according to USAP’s website. In January 2023, USAP named her to the Hall of Fame for “her many years of leadership and service for our community at Boston Pride,” according to a USAP Facebook posting.
After Monroe’s article was published, a representative from the Massachusetts Attorney General’s office contacted Monroe and asked about these financial concerns. In a recent follow-up call to the AG’s office, a spokesperson tells Boston Spirit, “The AG’s office reviews information brought to our attention about possible misuse of charitable assets. We decline to comment about the presence or absence of an investigation.”
DeMarco says that all of Boston Pride’s financial records are in order, and that a 2019 audit by Wakefield, Mass.-based accounting tax advisory firm Tonneson & Co. found everything valid.
Tonneson & Co. partner Richard Eagleston tells Boston Spirit, “Based on our audit procedures performed, we did not find anything that indicated any financial malfeasance. We noted no fraudulent activity.”
DeMarco says that based on her organization’s 990 filings to the IRS, Boston Pride had $509,000 in cash in fiscal year ending in September 2020 and $220,840 in fiscal year ending in September 2021. Filings for September 2022 are “on extension,” meaning they are still being calculated. She says that any remaining funds were used “for budgeting purposes of the organization such as expenses and such.”
Last year, as part of its annual community fund grants program, Boston Pride gave out $27,000 to 18 different nonprofit (501c3) organizations, and has only $2,000 to $3,000 left in its grants program, DeMarco says, adding that the funds were set aside in 2019 and not distributed at that time because Pride events throughout Massachusetts were on hold due to COVID. “We decided to distribute [them] in 2022 when Pride events around the state started up again,” she says.
Meanwhile, BP4TP is hoping to raise $750,000 for start-up costs and to hold the Pride parade and celebration in June. The group has partnered with Roxbury-based Multicultural AIDS Coalition, Inc. as a “fiscal partner,” meaning that funds can be collected by BPFTP via the Roxbury organization, since it is a registered 501c3 organization.
Pride in 2023
“The group of community members who have come together to reimagine our Pride celebration has been doing a remarkable job,” BP4TP President Adrianna Boulin says in a statement to Boston Spirit. “We really started from scratch, with none of the vast resources that the former organization enjoyed.”
And even though BP4TP would have liked to have been given assistance from the former Boston Pride organization, Boulin says that her organization “hasn’t operated from a mindset of scarcity, but rather one of abundance. We are so grateful for the outpouring of support from community leaders, organizational partners, and individuals … as well as the city of Boston. We are proud to say that this is truly a community effort.”
Boulin said at a recent online Town Hall forum that based on attendance at the 2019 Pride parade and festival, she expects the June event to once again bring more than one million people to Boston.
When asked during the forum what she is looking forward to most about this spring’s Pride celebration, Boulin did not hesitate: “For me,” she said, “I’m most looking forward to the joy.”
We are so grateful for the outpouring of support from community leaders, organizational partners and individuals… as well as the city of Boston. We are proud to say that this is truly a community effort.
Adrianna Boulin, President, Boston Pride for the People
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