Local LGBT Community Holds Gay Pride Event In Lubbock

[TexasTowelie]

Kat Cade, a Texas Tech student and lifelong Lubbock resident, organized Lubbock Pride. Photo Credit Joshua Abreo

LUBBOCK, Tex. — The rainbow flag did not fly at Lubbock’s fourth gay pride festival on Aug. 23. Instead it was tied to a chain-link fence behind a community center east of Interstate 27 in a rundown industrial part of town. Despite the humble location, the daylong event with speakers and live music attracted about 400 people and was a milestone for the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community in this mostly conservative and religious Panhandle city.

For the last three years, Lubbock Pride has been organized by Kat Cade, a 24-year-old Texas Tech University geography major and lifelong Lubbock resident. (The first Pride event, in 2011, was held by a different group.) After coming out as a lesbian in 2010, Ms. Cade started networking with local support groups like the South Plains College Gay Straight Alliance, the Texas Tech University Gay Straight Alliance and Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays.

While she kept running into the same few people at meetings, she suspected there was a larger gay population in the area. She and a friend believed an annual event could help extend support to those people.

Not knowing about available resources, Ms. Cade said, is “such an immensely lonely feeling. And then the minute you realize, ‘Oh, there’s a group of people just like me,’ it’s so uplifting.”

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/31/us/community-makes-itself-known-with-discretion.html?_r=4

Additional coverage at http://www.burntorangereport.com/diary/15645/local-lgbt-community-holds-gay-pride-event-in-west-texas .

Cross-posted in the Texas Group.