Philly Pride, a contentious event in recent years, is scheduled for June 4, 2023

Philly Pride will take place on Sunday, June 4 this year, with a morning march beginning at the Constitution Center and an afternoon festival featuring music and vendors in the Gayborhood. The event is being hosted and planned by the longtime LGBTQ direct service organization Galaei.

There will be food trucks, two stages, an area celebrating the Philly ballroom scene, and a “wellness and resource” station offering STI testing and meetings with case workers.

Philly’s annual Pride has gone through upheaval in recent years, a tale with enough tension and drama that it became the subject of a five-part podcast by WHYY. Pride’s in-person events were canceled in 2020 because of COVID. In 2021 Pride was again canceled, this time because the organization that had hosted it for more than two decades, Philly Pride Presents, abruptly disbanded in light of accusations of racism and transphobia within it.

After that, a new group called the PHL Pride Collective, made up mostly of queer and trans Black and brown volunteers, formed to re-imagine and produce the annual event. They teamed up with Galaei, a Philly nonprofit originally founded to serve the queer Latinx community. Galaei now serves a broader range of queer Black people and other people of color.

With Galaei as fiscal sponsor, the Collective organized a Pride march and festival in 2022 that drew tens of thousands of people.

Organizers of the 2022 Pride event agreed to certain key values beforehand: to not collaborate with police, citing the long history of police brutality against queer people; to prioritize community involvement over corporate sponsorships; and to be led by Black and brown Philadelphians.

The Philadelphia Gay News called the ensuing 2022 Pride “a festival that fostered a place of joy, celebration, education and empowerment.”

But soon after, the PHL Pride Collective splintered from Galaei, with some members citing disputes surrounding ownership of the event, engagement with the police, and financial transparency afterwards. Now the PHL Pride Collective no longer has a public presence and does not seem to be planning a Pride event. Galaei is hosting this year’s Pride on its own.

Abdul-Aliy Muhammad, who first organized the Pride Collective but is no longer involved with it, said no nonprofit or institution should be a major decision-maker when it comes to Pride, because it’s an event “rooted in resistance to organizations that try to control community.”

Still, this year’s Pride will likely look similar to last year’s.

Galaei’s “Love, Light, and Liberation” Pride event has a budget of roughly $150,000, which will be raised through grants, vendors, sponsors, and donations to the nonprofit, said Tyrell Brown, newly appointed executive director at Galaei, in an interview. In keeping with the ethic of last year’s event, Galaei will hire a private security firm to work the event and will steer clear of most corporate sponsorships.

“It’s not my intention to take anything from anyone,” said Brown. “We need a big resource event for our community. I’m invested in producing that thing.”

Brown said they do not view Pride as a monolithic event, and that while Galaei is hosting what many will recognize as the major annual march and festival in Philly, “if someone decides to create another festival the same day, in a park somewhere, because they prefer greenery, that’s Pride too.”