San Antonio’s Pride Bigger than Texas festival to keep LGBTQ+ community connected digitally this Saturday

SAN ANTONIO – This year’s Pride Bigger Than Texas festival will be like no other due to the ongoing pandemic, but the mission of the event remains the same -- celebrating the strides of LGBTQ+ people who have fought for equality and those who continue to push for change.

James Poindexter, secretary of Pride San Antonio and event organizer of Pride Bigger than Texas Virtual 2020 - Celebrate PRIDE365, said the event’s official name change this year has an important meaning.

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“We feel that because we’re not going to be together in our big celebration with everybody, thousands of people together, that we’re all going to be kind of doing our own thing in our own venue, in our own place, celebrating Pride in our own way but also still being connected, yet distant,” Poindexter said. “We wanted people to show us how they celebrate Pride all-year-round, so we gave it an alternative title.”

This year’s virtual Pride celebration will feature a variety of entertainment, like years’ past, and an educational panel component. You can watch the celebration below:

“We’re going to have two different sorts of drag queen storytime segments that are really cute,” Poindexter said. “We have Tejano artists. We have pop artists. We have drag artists. There’s going to be some panel discussions about Black Lives Matter, immigration and the most recent Supreme Court decisions that affect the LGBT community. And we’re going to have shoutouts from community leaders, elected officials.”

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Poindexter says organizing a digital Pride festival didn't come without its share of difficulties.

"Putting on a virtual event to me seemed like a monumental task. I just wasn't sure if we were prepared for it, and we didn't have the background knowledge or anything like that. But there seemed to be a lot of support from the community and from our sponsors," he said. "We put together a team of people, and we tried to call on as many different skills as we could to help put this thing together, and it's come a long way."

"We feel that this is absolutely our best effort that we're putting forth with this virtual event," Poindexter continued.

He says this year's festival is still staying true to the meaning of Pride despite the limitations brought on by the pandemic.

"It's just going to be this quite a diverse variety of things. We've tried to do the best that we could to recreate digitally and virtually what we normally do on the stage, which, you know, was a whole new thing for us," Poindexter said.

This year’s event will be held from 6-9 p.m., Saturday. Click here for more information on the Pride Bigger than Texas Virtual 2020 lineup, as well as more information on how you can watch the event.

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