Then just a fresh-faced youth, Atlanta lesbian Charlotte Hubbard spent her early 20s attending the city’s legendary Black Gay Pride celebration — one of the few places where she felt she could truly exhale.

“I loved just being in a place where I’m not seeking acceptance,” Hubbard says. “Just being able to be free felt really good.”

Then something shifted. Fist fights seemed to rise. The carefree vibe seemed to diminish. Eventually, for Hubbard, it stopped feeling like home.

“The turning point was when I was at Piedmont Park and every other corner I turned, there was a fight,” says Hubbard, who at 37, hasn’t attended Black Pride in a decade. “I said, ‘I can’t do this’.”

Atlanta Black Pride is lauded as one of the most visible gatherings of Black LGBTQ+ persons in the nation. Yet a vocal segment of people is increasingly opting out of the storied celebration, pointing to rowdy crowds and a general lack of growth that leaves them feeling the event represents them in name only.

Some are attending mainstream, White-organized prides. Others, like Hubbard, are leaning into online groups they feel offer drama-free socialization with people who share more in common than sexual identity.

All represent a pain point for a two-decade-old Black Gay Pride organization actively working to stay relevant amid increasingly diverse demands. It’s facing a community with ever-changing needs, as well as branding problems that have left Atlanta Black Pride bearing an undeserved reputation for drama. For example, the Piedmont Park event Hubbard referenced, while widely associated with ABP, is actually hosted by a different organization.

The result is diminished strength for what’s long stood as the community’s highest-profile Black gay space, at a time when everything from racism to gentrification is putting such spaces in jeopardy around the country.

This year’s Labor Day weekend celebration marked the 25th anniversary of Atlanta Black Pride and included roughly a dozen signature events, in addition to the weekend-ending community festival—held at Old Fourth Ward’s Central Park. Amber Moore, Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of Atlanta Black Pride, Inc., estimates that the two-day park event drew roughly 2,000 people in a city with one of the country’s largest Black LGBTQ+ populations.

Moore pointed to lingering Covid concerns, and audience confusion after the mainstream Atlanta Pride was canceled.

“We were pushing Atlanta Black Pride during the time they canceled and it affected us,” she says. “It wasn’t like the crowd we normally get, or we had hoped for.”

Aging Out and Moving On

It’s an Atlanta scenario so typical it verges on cliché: Black LGBTQ+ people turn 30, declare pride festivities to be “for the young folks' and shift toward brunches, galas, and other so-called grown and sexy functions.

Even among once hardcore Pride party attendees like Locust Grove lesbian Xmiekl McCollum, the shift seems almost inevitable.

“As I’ve gotten older, it is kind of like, there’s nothing really different going on [at Pride],” McCollum, 33, says. “It’s great for the younger people to get that experience, but I’ve gone to enough Prides.”

Aging out represents a recurring theme among those who shun Atlanta Black Pride and one the organization can’t afford to ignore as the LGBTQ+ community gets grayer. An estimated 2.7 million LGBTQ+ adults age 50+ live in the United States, a number expected to more than double by 2060. As many as 20 percent of them are people of color.

The pattern isn’t limited to the LGBTQ+ community—after all, even rapper Jay-Z famously shifted from the fitted ball caps of his youth to buttoned-down shirts and board meetings. But it has a unique impact in a still marginal community, where a loss of participation can have major repercussions.

One of the biggest areas of concern is finances. It’s common knowledge across all industries that dwindling crowd engagement is a precursor to dwindling corporate funds—a major source of funding for non-profit organizations like ABP.Moore says the organization lost sponsors this year due to Covid concerns. It was a significant blow to a group that prides itself on keeping nearly all events free of cost.

“To keep it that way we can’t always rely on the corporate sponsors,” she says. “We need to rely on the community.”

To reach potentially well-heeled older community members and newer audiences alike, the group has expanded marketing and community outreach, as well as adding new events both during Pride season and beyond.

This year, organizers added a Trans Life Awards celebration and celebrity ambassadors, similar to the grand marshals featured in Atlanta Pride. They partnered with promoters to target older crowds, helping advertise the types of high-class events 35+ folks often favor.

And they even ramped up year-round programming, hosting a Falcons tailgate and other events that directly appeal to those looking to socialize outside of the high-energy Pride scene.

But Moore says for their efforts to work, the community has to be as vocal about what they do want as what they don’t. ABP hosts community meetings on the second Monday of every month, starting in March.

“You must come to the table,” she says. “I challenge the community of Atlanta, LGBT Black and brown, to come to the meetings. Tell us what we’re doing good, tell us what we’re doing bad – otherwise, we can’t grow.”

The biggest challenge for the organization may lie in the courtroom. Perhaps never was that more apparent than on September 5. That night a gunman opened fire outside a party at The Marquette Restaurant and Lounge, injuring five patrons. Across Atlanta and the country, headlines blared “5 People Shot Outside Club Hosting Atlanta Black Pride Party”.

There was just one problem: It wasn’t an Atlanta Black Pride event. But that doesn’t stop ABP from facing negative fallout if their events go awry. For former attendees like Hubbard and McCollum, both women say they’re more apt to attend the mainstream Atlanta Pride, which they perceive as more organized and fun.

But LGBTQ+ leader Earl Fowlkes cautions against walking away from the celebration created by Black LGBTQ+ people, for Black LGBTQ+ people. Fowlkes is president of the Center for Black Equity, formerly the International Federation of Black Prides.

Whether they’re perfect or not, Fowlkes says Black Pride celebrations represent an important place for Black LGBTQ+ men and women to come together to support each other and our businesses. He pointed to the fall out of racial desegregation in the 1960s, a broader good that nonetheless hurt the Black entrepreneurs as their patrons flooded to newly available white businesses. The result was felt in the loss of local spending power as well as important social gathering spots.

“We have to have safe spaces for the other 362 days of the year,” Fowlkes says. “We have to be careful not to encourage people to give up their safe space to go to another space that may not be as encouraging.”