When Roberto Lopez first came to Utah, he said he felt “isolated and excluded” from spaces because he was a queer person of color. Then, he said, he found the Utah Pride Festival, where he met so many friends that it changed his life. “They were the people that when I became a father, I turned to.
People that when I got sick, I turned to. People when I needed food, [I turned to],” he said. “Every single time I sent out a signal for help, the same people showed up, and those were the people that I met at this event.
” Lopez is development director of SLC Pride , a new event that he said is aimed at creating that same opportunity for people in Utah’s LGBTQ+ community — especially for people who feel isolated and alone, like he once did. “I want it to continue forever, because I would not be alive if it wasn’t for the people that I found,” Lopez said. SLC Pride is scheduled for the last weekend in June at The Gateway in downtown Salt Lake City — four weeks after, and a few blocks away from the traditional Utah Pride Festival, set for the first weekend in June at Washington Square Park.
Bonnie O’Brien, the director SLC Pride, said many of the event’s organizers said they had friends who had stopped attending Utah Pride, “either because it was too corporate, too ‘whitewash the rainbow,’ too crowded or busy. A lot of the people that we hang out with just didn’t see themselves on the stage, in booths or in leadership. Or they were just straight up .