‘It was breathtaking.’ New group brings LGBTQ+ Pride back to Myrtle Beach after COVID hiatus
It was everything Craig McGee hoped for, and so much more.
Walking around the Market Common last Saturday, he saw children, families and adults all enjoying the sights and sounds of one of the best times of the year for the LGBTQ+ community — Pride.
Pride in the Park, brought back after a one-year hiatus due to COVID-19, easily outpaced the popularity of its first go-round in 2019. McGee said the event drew about 3,000 people, far more than two years ago. It was quite the feat. The organization running the event, as well as 11 others in the week leading up to Pride in the Park, got started just six months before.
“We were just really overwhelmed with the turnout on Saturday,” said McGee, the executive director of Pride Myrtle Beach and a member of the city’s Human Rights Commission. “We couldn’t have dreamed for a better event.”
This year’s Pride was the largest the Grand Strand has had since 1998, when the S.C. Gay & Lesbian Pride Festival came to Myrtle Beach for one year. But the S.C. Gay & Lesbian Pride Festival was a statewide operation, making this year’s events the largest ever put on by locals, for locals.
Pride in the Park was the first time Josh Pierce, 17, had ever gotten to attend a major LGBTQ+ Pride celebration.
He attended with half a dozen friends he’d met at a Pride Myrtle Beach event earlier this summer, which allowed him to connect with a lot more LGBTQ+ people than he’d had the chance to in the past.
“It was quite lovely. I had a very good time. I don’t know — I just I felt like I was in the right place,” said Pierce, who grew up in Myrtle Beach.
For Morgan Richards, a drag queen who performed at Pride in the Park, it was only the third Pride celebration she’d ever attended. A drag queen for decades, Richards stopped traveling as much when she moved to Myrtle Beach, and the region’s lack of Pride events for much of the last two decades meant she never really got the chance to experience such a gathering.
What she loved most was seeing dozens of children and families walking around Pride and watching her performance on Saturday. At 58, she grew up at the height of the HIV/AIDS crisis and in an era when it was much harder to be an LGBTQ+ child than it is today.
“To see the parents out there with the kids and everything, that really touches me every time, to just see where we’ve come,” Richards said. She felt her presence at Pride was especially important as a Black and gay person and to represent a community hit twice as hard by prejudice.
Beth Knight, a board member of Pride Myrtle Beach, attended Pride with her wife and partner of 24 years. She said she was amazed by how many people showed up, including people who hadn’t planned to attend but just stumbled across the event as they meandered around the Market Common.
“It was breathtaking, honestly. It was more than I expected as far as the enormity of it,” Knight said.
What really hit her, she said, was the ability to see drag queens perform during the day without having to go to a smoky bar at midnight. “They’re here for us. And it was beautiful. We just walked into the crowd and all the kids loved them and the adults love them and people are screaming for them. And I just thought they were there were rock stars.”
Pride Myrtle Beach is already working on its plans for next year. The nonprofit’s board meets next week to discuss picking a date and start contemplating what they want to change. Anyone who would like to provide input for next year’s event can go to PrideMyrtleBeach.org/contact-us.
Knight wants to continue to focus on improving events and programming for LGBTQ+ youth. In the last year, lawmakers around the country, including in South Carolina, have proposed anti-transgender legislation that would restrict the rights of trans youth to receive necessary health care or play in sports matching the gender they identify with. Knight says this shows how much support LGBTQ+ youth still need today, six years after the U.S. Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage.
With issues like the anti-transgender legislation simmering around the country, McGee said he was slightly worried about protesters showing up to Pride in the Park or something else that might have disrupted the festivities. The group had a safety plan to be safe, but their worries never materialized.
“It’s always in the back of our minds, when we gather, about safety,” McGee said. “But we really didn’t have any kind of indication from the community that there would be any of that ... and we tried not to let things overshadow the day.”
The LGBTQ+ community won’t have to wait until next October for its next gathering. An LGBTQ+ beach volleyball league will be meeting every third Thursday of the month to play in downtown Myrtle Beach, and Pride Myrtle Beach itself will continue to host its meet-ups at Tidal Creek Brewhouse on every third Monday of the month.
“I think it always will be important just to have the spaces where people can be themselves a few hours. It helps people,” McGee said. “A lot of people don’t have support in their families, a lot of people don’t have a support system at all. This at least gets some people a little bit of relief from that — to go somewhere and not have to worry for a day.”
This story was originally published October 8, 2021 at 5:00 AM with the headline "‘It was breathtaking.’ New group brings LGBTQ+ Pride back to Myrtle Beach after COVID hiatus."
