WORCESTER – The city of Worcester’s annual pride festival reported record attendance over the weekend, with an estimated 10,000 people celebrating of the local LGBTQ community.
“We had some big shoes to fill when we took over.” Festival Director Ariana DelloStritto told TWIW. “This organizing group has been running it for 23 years now. We’ve done historically a great job of putting on a pride festival at the city so this year we wanted to make sure that we made this one of note.”
According to DelloStritto, the year the festival had over 150 vendors, the most since Worcester Pride began in 2000.
“We shut down Main Street, which so many people have commented that they haven’t seen a festival do. We shut down Franklin Street, we shut down Portland Street, and we completely took over the common.” DelloStritto stated.
Besides the local vendors, several artists and musicians performed live at the festival. Dj Begbick, Gem Stoner, Lil Rennie, Rita Mookerjee and Worcester Royal Court were among a few of the many musicians to play for the crowd.
“I’m so proud to be here in Worcester today where so many people are coming out to show love instead of being back in D.C where so many people only come out to show hate.”
Congressman Jim McGovern told the crowd during a surprise appearance. “I heard just the other day how Canada is now issuing travel advisory warnings to their citizens warning them not to visit the US because of all the hate crimes and discriminatory laws being pushed that target the LGBTQ community. We are supposed to be the leader of human rights in the world and it’s time we start acting like it.” McGovern said.
Worcester’s annual Pride celebration is just one out of 30 events planned in the month of September by Pride Worcester to celebrate Pride Month.
More events can be found here.
