Saturday kicked off the first of several days of predicted rain.
It was also the day of the annual Pridefest 2025, which was presented by Out RVA as the culmination of Pride Week, which began Sept. 20 and runs through Sunday.
As rain fell steadily, event attendees walked with umbrellas and plastic ponchos from the parking lot toward the 15-acre Midtown Green event site. Vendors lined the perimeter of an open area off the center of the performance stage, selling food and drinks, gift items and souvenirs. The field was certain to have become a mud hole; puddles were quickly growing into shallow pools on the lawn.
Performers scheduled for the day included Saucy Santana, an American rapper known for his viral hits on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube who headlined Pridefest.
Santana was to join trans pop singer Mila Jam, club icon Kevin Aviance and RuPaul Drag Race star Aja as national acts who entertained crowds at the state’s largest LGBTQ festival.
“I don’t want to answer how many people are coming today in the rain,” said James Millner, Richmond pride director at Diversity Richmond. “I have no idea. If it were a sunny day, we’d see tens of thousands of people.”
“This is more than what we expected in the rain. We’re hoping the weather will clear up and that more people will come out. One of the things I want to say is that we don’t have the luxury of an alternate date for a festival like this. We made the decision to move forward, hoping the weather would hold off but it hasn’t so far.”
Although the warm weather made up for the rainfall, the event in its entirety was made possible by the sponsors who backed Pridefest 2025 and the vendors who arrived to get to know the people in the crowds.
“We have a record number of vendors, (and) we have over two dozen corporate and business sponsors who have leaned in for the LGBTQ community through this event,” Millner said. “We are enormously grateful to all of them because we know in this environment, we know a lot of companies are pulling away from supporting LGBTQ events because of anti-DEI policies that’s happening.
“Companies are having to make very difficult decisions. All of the sponsors we have today have stepped up the support.”
Dominion Energy has supported Pridefest for the past 10 years as a sponsor. The company also created the Pride Employee Resource Group for LGBTQ employees and allies, to “foster an inclusive workplace, provide educational resources and advocate for the community,” said the group’s web page.
“We believe that diversity of people creates a better work atmosphere and better work,” said group chair Tera Kent Pall. “The ERG started in 2018.”
Tyler Swansey, 25, was a Pridefest 2025 attendee.
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“I have friends that work in the Health Brigade and they told me about it, and I wanted to come out,” Swansey said. “It’s important to come to events like these especially during the entire political climate. It’s important to come together and show solidarity, that we’re here and that we’re not going.”
Swansey also spoke about how funding impacts the LGBTQ community in Richmond.
“This event shows that we’re a stable community, that there’s money in the community,” Swansey said. “At the end of the day, unfortunately, money is what talks. This event is showing that companies like Dominion, Virginia Lottery, they’re still here, they’re sponsors, and are still here. There’s still money in the community.”
Earlier this year, Korbin Schiltz, who is 17, came out to his mother, Amy Schiltz.
“This is our first year,” Amy said. “He came out earlier this year and we wanted to give him the experience of being surrounded by your community. It’s representation, to know who they can love and who they can be.”
She said that this was particularly important now, under the present administration because of the rights that could be lost to people like Korbin.
“I think what the Supreme Court is geared up to do is going to make a difference to a lot of people,” she said. “They’re rolling back like they did with the reproductive rights. Just the vocabulary of the administration surrounding what they’re doing is very scary and dangerous.”
Added Mark, Amy’s husband and Korbin’s father, “A lot of the rhetoric, regardless of who they’re talking about, they’re always framing everything as you-versus-them. They’re framing it in a way that they’re against you and, so you can insert whatever group they want to minimalize, and make feel less-than, they just insert that into the same sentences over and over again. They’re trying to pit everyone against each other.”
Troy Hill, 18, said she has been coming for almost four years now. To her, events like these support the LGBTQ culture through visibility.
“It represents our culture and what we’re doing,” she said. “It’s important to support the culture because our kind has been discriminated against for so long, so that’s why we do these events — to stay true to ourselves. I feel rights are under attack still. That’s why I feel like we have to do these events. They remind me that I’m still a star and I shine — nobody can take that away from me.”
Back off the event stage, Millner was smoking a cigarette as he wondered how the day was going to pan out with all the rain.
“The performers are in it, they are excited, they are fully ready to go,” he said. “We are in wing-it mode right now. We’re going to do the best we can, and make rainbows out of rain.”