The story
Nashville Pride Festival in Nashville
Nashville Pride hosts the city's largest LGBTQ+ celebration each June, pairing a downtown Broadway parade with a festival at Bicentennial Capitol Mall State Park, evolving from a modest 1989 gathering in a small downtown park into one of the largest Pride events in the Southeastern United States.
Nashville Pride's roots reach back to 1989, when local activists organized the city's first Pride celebration in a small downtown park, a modest gathering held during a period marked by both the growing momentum of the national LGBTQ+ rights movement and significant ongoing discrimination and stigma faced by queer communities across the country, and particularly in politically conservative Southern states like Tennessee.