On a weekend intended for celebration and joy, Baltimore’s trans community instead faced violence and neglect from the city’s leaders and agencies.
Baltimore Trans Pride, organized by Maryland Safe Haven, returned in June for its fifth year with a weeklong series of community-led events, but for the first time, the highly-anticipated weekend festival was under the short leash of city government.
Maryland Safe Haven founded Baltimore Trans Pride in 2022 with the intention of making a space in Pride Month celebrations that specifically centers transgender people. The festival had been held on a different weekend than the Pride Center parade and festival until last year, when the city began exerting control over the festival’s date and location. This year, city officials quietly flattened both Baltimore Trans Pride and Pride Center of Maryland’s annual Pride Festival into a simultaneous celebration in Druid Hill Park.
“They claimed it was for security reasons,” Renee Lau, special projects coordinator at Maryland Safe Haven, said. “They didn’t want to be blocking off Charles Street that many times in a row.”
But Trans Pride felt anything but safe on Saturday, June 13, when the Baltimore Police Department used mace and chemical irritants on organizers, according to Lau, after officers arrived and shut down the festival earlier than scheduled. The police intimidation and violence, in addition to what organizers called negligence from city agencies, “felt intentional,” Lau said.
A letter of concern sent by Maryland Safe Haven to the mayor’s office on June 15 details the arrival of police officers to the festival’s main stage around 8:45 p.m. The letter states that officers claimed that the festival’s permit ended at 9 p.m. and ignored organizers when provided with copies of their permit showing approval for use of the space until midnight.
According to Maryland Safe Haven’s letter, “The conduct of the officers was particularly disturbing. Rather than de-escalating, they created disruption. Attendees were maced by Baltimore Police Department officers for not moving quickly enough and for not shutting the music off quickly enough.”
Over email, Lindsey Eldridge, spokesperson for the Baltimore Police Department, said that while Trans Pride applied for a permit, “the permit was never approved due to missing information and a lack of payment” and that the application “listed their events concluding at 5:00 p.m.”
Eldridge added that the department was not aware of “any officer using mace at the Pride Festival.”
A copy of Trans Pride’s permit shared by Maryland Safe Haven shows that the permit was authorized on June 7, and representatives from the organization say that city officials verbally agreed to waive the permit fee in exchange for compliance with their decision to change the festival’s location.
In a phone interview, Melanie Bryant, director of the Mayor’s Office of LGBTQ Affairs, went on the defensive in response to Maryland Safe Haven’s concerns, shifting responsibility for the permit dispute that led to the police altercation onto the organizers of the festival. She said that “there were no ultimatums given at all” to Maryland Safe Haven and that permits were offered at a 50% discount for both Pride festivals.
“I believe it’s a 60-day window for permits to be turned in, and on multiple occasions deadlines were missed,” Bryant said. “It’s their responsibility to get their permits turned in at a certain time.”
While there is no footage of macing, in a video shared by Maryland Safe Haven, an officer turns off the festival’s power generator. In another video, an officer can be heard discussing the shutdown time with festival organizers when another officer begins threatening to take the organization’s equipment.
“Turn it back on, you’re going to jail. Promise you that,” the officer says.
Now, Maryland Safe Haven has published a petition calling for the city’s accountability for the behavior of police officers assigned to the festival and the lack of care and visibility given to Baltimore’s trans community. Among the petition’s demands is Bryant’s resignation and full transparency around the role of the office in organizing Pride-related events.
Bryant confirmed receipt of the letter and her office’s intention to respond to the community’s concerns.
“In collaboration with the mayor’s team, with communications, and all of the interagencies, we are working to make sure that we respond in a way that is appropriately and in the forum that’s appropriate to do so, and we are moving forward with that,” Bryant said. “We are also having meetings internally with the organizations.”
Representatives from Maryland Safe Haven share that the mayor’s office has replied internally to their letter of concern and scheduled a mediation meeting at City Hall for August 10.
“I’m in hope that the city will come together and come up with a solution where the city will be able to make as much focus on Trans Pride as they do on Baltimore Pride,” said Alexis Blackmon-Newby, chief operating officer of Maryland Safe Haven.
Bibi Reiffen, a returning festivalgoer known for her “Lady Liberty” costume, was present Saturday night when police began shutting down the festival. For her, it marked the heightened danger trans people are facing locally and nationally.
“It didn’t start filling up until much later into the evening, and then once it started getting dark, I was like, okay, now the party’s really going to get started. Then the cops showed up,” Reiffen said.
“Nobody could hear what anybody was saying because there was all this chitter chatter and screaming … I feel like a little bit of trauma, stuff like Stonewall, all over again. Especially considering I was in Philadelphia the previous weekend, just when the cops were starting to raid the gayborhood because of ‘crowd control.’”
The city’s decision to stage both Pride festivals in Druid Hill Park was also a disappointment for Trans Pride organizers, who said their festival’s placement behind fences and significant tree cover uphill from the Pride festival drastically diminished the attendance at Baltimore Trans Pride’s main and youth stages. According to organizers, a lack of presence and communication from city officials worsened the matter as the festival’s setup was delayed by missteps from the the Department of Transportation.
“When DOT came out at 6:30 a.m. Saturday morning to set up stages and the bike rack and the tents, they didn’t even have a copy of the footprint,” Lau said. “If I didn’t have a copy of the footprint on my phone, they wouldn’t have had a clue.”
Lau said that sound for the stages was not set up until nearly 4 p.m. on Saturday, hours after the festival was scheduled to begin. The delay resulted in financial losses for Maryland Safe Haven as well as vendors, she said, as scheduled performances could not go on and the expected audience was diminished.
“I got some vendors who are very, very angry people and wanting to know if the city’s gonna reimburse them,” Lau said. “We were lucky if we had 500 people total.”
“During the Pride and Trans Pride Weekend, the Department of Transportation (DOT) implemented road closures in Druid Hill Park to support both the parade and festival footprints,” Kathy Dominick, a DOT spokesperson said in a statement to Baltimore Beat. “The placement and management of hard barriers (dump trucks) were coordinated under the direction of the Baltimore Police Department.”
Dominick did not address the substance of the complaints in the statement.
Lau says that organizers from Maryland Safe Haven attempted to reach city liaisons to rectify the setup issues, including Bryant, to no avail.
Bryant said that the Mayor’s Office of LGBTQ Affairs paid for the Trans Pride festival’s sound systems after Maryland Safe Haven expressed a lack of funds, but the delay in setup was due to organizers making changes to the original site plan.
“Their [Maryland Safe Haven’s] team set up their footprint completely backwards. That then caused the delay,” Bryant said. “We communicated throughout the day with the Safe Haven planning team, which included Alexis Blackmon, Renee Lau, and Jabari Lyles.”
The city’s involvement in the weekend’s events also posed obstacles for attendees of Baltimore Pride, as the festival celebrated its 51st year with the theme “Charm City Homecoming.” Saturday morning’s parade brought together thousands of Baltimore’s LGBTQ+ residents, organizations, and allies to walk the streets where Pride Center of Maryland was originally founded, but paradegoers were nevertheless affected by what they felt was carelessness from the city.
The traditional parade route through Charles North and Charles Village was threatened this year when city officials decided to change the location of the related festival, which historically took place at the end of the parade. Behind closed doors, the Mayor’s Office of LGBTQ Affairs signed memorandums of understanding with Pride Center of Maryland and Maryland Safe Haven giving the office final authority over the logistics of both Pride festivals for the first time. The city’s decision meant the festival would no longer be near Station North and Mount Vernon neighborhoods, historically centers of Baltimore’s LGBTQ+ community.
Bryant said that the new agreements formalized existing partnerships with both organizations.
“The City of Baltimore does not organize Pride or Trans Pride,” Bryant said. “Both of those organizers receive access to discounted permitting and discounted city services. We wanted to be able to kind of formalize that in an MOU to show that level of partnership.”
“It was not forced. It was not ‘if you don’t, then this.’ It was not. It was a voluntary partnership. Both organizations had the ability to go back to look at the agreement and to come back to the table. The only one that did that was the Pride Center of Maryland,” said Bryant.
As community members became aware of the change to the festival and the city’s growing control, their advocacy ultimately led the Pride Center to separate the parade and the festival in order to keep the former close to its traditional footprint.
When parade participants arrived at Charles Street on Saturday morning, they encountered a buzz of confusion as the side streets intended for them to line up were not blocked off. The Department of Transportation had announced the day before that the side streets along Charles Street would be closed to traffic from 6:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m., but instead parade walkers navigated close encounters with traffic nearly until the start of the parade.
“We were on 21st Street, and our street was not blocked off until 20 minutes to 12 p.m. So cars were going through as people were standing around. A couple people almost got hit,” David Lascu, a leader of one of the parade’s largest contingents, recalled. “The parade organizers were surprised, and they really didn’t know what to do.”
Organizational challenges followed from the parade into the festival at Druid Hill Park as festivalgoers experienced difficulty accessing concrete information on the festival’s schedule and footprint.
Dapper Dan Midas, a host for Baltimore Pride this year and longtime attendee, noticed that the marketing for Baltimore Pride seemed to be sparse, possibly because of the prolonged uncertainty caused by the city’s logistical decisions.
“I don’t think that the communication and the advertisement for Pride in general was done very well this year. It felt very last minute,” he said.
“It’s unfortunate that the city gets to make that final decision because I think really any organization should be able to say, ‘I wanna have my event here’ … The question for me would be, okay, the city wants these memorandums of understanding. Are you doing that with every festival in the city now? Or is this just for Pride?”