June 21-27 event to help celebrate community diversity.

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Matt Carter

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The month marks the first installment of Capital City Pride Fredericton 2009, a celebration of diversity in our community. Between June 21 and 27, the festival has a number of events designed to educate, celebrate, and participate in.

"We're having events all week," said Sarah McAdam, co-chair for this year's event. "Things start on Sunday the 21 with a gay friendly church event followed by an art show. The Unitarian Fellowship Church at 878 York Street will be hosting the events on our opening day," she said.

A number of guest speakers will take part in a lecture series at Boom Nightclub on the Monday night, covering a wide range of topics pertaining to alternative lifestyles and their public perception.

"Lisa Fox will do a talk on the six pride colours and where they come from," said McAdam. "Adrienne Park is going to give a history of homosexuality and diverse sexuality in Canada. Ryan Murray is going to talk about religion and sex and how the two thing correlate, I'm going to talk about sexuality overseas verse how we look at it over here in Canada."

Many of the events planned for the festival focus on bringing the community together, with a number of social activities ranging from a friendly no-experience-necessary dance competition to inner tubing down the St. John River.

"We have a lot fun things planned," said McAdam. "Tuesday we're going to float down the river on inner tubes, Wednesday is a sports day, Thursday is a drag show and gender-bender karaoke, Friday is a leather show and dance competition, and Saturday is an outdoor concert with wandering minstrels as part of Random Act of Kindness Day."

Other celebrations of Pride Week have taken place within the city but not of the scale Capital City Pride Fredericton 2009 is working towards.

"It's happened in smaller forms before where Boom has put on something for Pride Week but the events have never taken place outside of the club and they didn't run all week long either," said McAdam.

With a committee of just four people, putting together an event of this size has proven to be a challenge for McAdam and the others on board.

"Organizing an event like this is crazy. It's a lot of work. There are only four of us on the organizing committee but thankfully, we've got a lot of helpful volunteers. Without them, we wouldn't be as far along as we are for sure. And of course we`ve had a huge amount of support from Boom. The Delta Hotel has also been a major help to us as well. As soon as we proposed having an outdoor concert on their grounds they offered us a great deal."

Starting small with little to no operating budget has presented more than one obstacle for the committee to face, but thanks to a hefty e-mail network, the word is getting out and the response from interested participants is growing week after week.

"We've got a really good network. There's a lot of e-mail lists between here, Moncton, Halifax, and Saint John. We found about six of these e-mail networks catering to alternative lifestyles in each town so we're hitting about 6,000 people in each city every time we send out an e-mail. Between those four cities, we're expecting to reach a lot of people."

Incorporating June 27's Random Acts of Kindness Day into the fold presents an exciting platform to reach out to the greater community and what better way to embrace the community than by doing nice things for strangers?

"On the Saturday, we're going to flood King and Queen Streets with people doing nice things. We're going to have six different teams based on the six different pride colours with each team doing something different. Wandering minstrels will entertain, other people will offer friendly greetings, and we're even going to be picking up garage along the streets. It's all about doing nice things for everyone."

"One of the visions behind the festival is to broaden gay and sexuality awareness beyond the immediate gay community," said McAdam. "When the chairperson asked me to be on the committee, I explained that I'm not gay and wouldn't be interested in helping organize a festival that I couldn't be part of. So we agreed that a good focus of the week should be simply taking pride in who you are. As long as you are not hurting anybody, then your sexuality is alright by us, so come on out and have a good time with your fellow Frederictonians."

To find out more about the events planned for Capital City Pride Fredericton 2009, visit them on Facebook or contact them by e-mail at capitalcitypride@live.ca