Although many of its local news media outlets seem to have ignored the event, Huntsville, Alabama, hosted its annual Rocket City Pride Parade on Saturday. Organizers are calling this year’s event the largest and most successful Pride parade ever to be held in Huntsville.
The parade was the culmination of a week of Pride events held in the city. It is only seven years since Huntsville’s first Pride celebration in 2012, and the number of participants and observers involved in the events this year encouraged organizer Allen Gordon. Local television station WHNT reported that “Gordon said the crowds that showed up to support the parade showed him and the entire LGBTQ+ community how progressive the city has become. ‘We're a very progressive city but we're just having to break down those walls. I definitely think that it's getting there, we are finding our allies and we're finding our community in Huntsville finally,’ said Gordon.”
Gordon’s view that Huntsville is a “progressive” city might be seen as questionable by outside observers. The city is located in Alabama’s 5th Congressional District, represented since 2011 by Republican Mo Brooks. (If you can stomach it, do an online search for Brooks. He’s best known outside the state for the offensiveness, insanity, and downright stupidity of every position he takes and every statement he makes.) Brooks was re-elected in 2018 with 61% of the vote.
Then again, in the 2016 presidential election, while Alabama voted for Donald Trump 62.9% to 34.6% for Hillary Clinton, in Madison County, of which Huntsville is the seat, Trump’s margin over Clinton was 55.9% to 39.2%. So on a sliding scale, if we compare that with, say, DeKalb County’s 83.5% for Trump to 14.1% for Clinton, then Huntsville qualifies, in Alabama terms, for a mostly white area, as progressive.
Whether the city is progressive or not, you could feel the joy and the sense of freedom in the streets of downtown Huntsville at Pride on Saturday. People of all ages, genders, and races marched, rode on floats and in open convertibles, and watched along the parade route, cheering and waving rainbow flags and trans pride flags. Contingents of out employees from large companies such as Boeing (whose float might be one of the few in a Pride parade this weekend that featured a display of miniature Air Force missiles) and from a local church and synagogue, social organizations, groups from the local Democratic and Libertarian parties, and several small pockets of Bernie Sanders supporters were there, along with drag queens, roller skaters, allies, and people in T-shirts advertising “Mom hugs” and “Dad hugs” to all who wanted them.
The grand marshal for the 2019 Rocket City Pride Parade was Camika Shelby, whose son, Nigel Shelby, died by suicide on April 18 after enduring bullying by fellow students at Huntsville High School. To the cheers of the onlookers, those walking alongside Shelby’s car shouted, “We are Nigel Shelby!”
Rocket City Pride plans to hold a festival celebrating the LGBTQ community on Sat., Oct. 26.