This last weekend, we attended our final pride of the season. Tri-County Diversity’s Pride in the Park is a small pride up in Yuba City that serves the Northern Central Valley’s queer community.
This is our first time doing the event. They had been after us for a couple years to come up from Sac Town – about an hour’s drive north. We finally said yes this year when our calendar allowed for it, and had no idea what to expect.
And when I say we, I mean our Queer Sacramento Authors Collective (QSAC) group. Seven of us came to town to see if we could sell a few books and meet some new friends.
The weather was absolutely perfect – in the high 70s, with a very light breeze and entirely sunny, a stark contrast to earlier that week when it rained for days. That’s the risk of a fall pride here in California – you never know if you’re going to get gorgeous sun or torrential rain.
There were probably 40 booths offering a wide variety of things, but it was fairly light on the retail side, which is always helpful.
Things started out slow. It was only a four hour event, and the first hour we sold just a few books. It never really got super busy, and yet by the end it exceeded our expectations. In fact, it was tied for our best small pride festival this year – Placer Pride in Roseville – for the amount of book sales we did per hour, and with a far smaller crowd.
That’s the thing about these little prides. Sometimes they’re a bust. But sometimes people are so thrilled and excited to see queer literature in their town that they flock to our table and buy books in droves. So even though it never got really busy, there was a steady stream of book buyers.
It’s wonderful to see the look on someone’s face at one of these small-town festivals when they realize that they’re standing in front of a bunch of queer authors, right there in their community.
These smaller prides also remind us what pride is all about. Literally, being proud of ourselves in our community, but also making these connections with one another and realizing that we are not alone, even in small towns. It’s great that the bigger corporations come to our large pride events and support us, but they do that out of a pure profit motive. The folks who come to these events are all there because they want to be in community with other queer folks, and there’s a real beauty and joy in that:
The only downside? Apparently there are a ton of stink bugs in Yuba City… We were constantly flicking them off of the table, our shirts, and at the end, the two canopies we had set up for the booth. But bug-flicking was a small price to pay for such a great event.
Will we go back? Absolutely. I’m just sorry it took us this long to try it. Small prides rock!