Two Carolinas cities held Pride festivities over the weekend.

In Charleston, community members gathered for their second annual Pride parade and festival, where 4,000 supporters showed up and no protesters. Charleston’s Post and Courier has more…

In Raleigh, local residents staged their first-ever local Pride event. The LGBT Center of Raleigh’s OutRaleigh street festival took over Fayetteville St. and Davie St. Raleigh’s News & Observer reports that approximately 2,000 people attended by lunchtime. Unlike Charleston’s activities, more than 75 protesters from local anti-gay ministries picketed the Raleigh event.

Stay tuned for qnotes‘ June 11, 2011, Pride Issue for more news and details on other upcoming Pride festivities across the region.


(NBC 17)

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Matt Comer previously served as editor from October 2007 through August 2015 and as a staff writer afterward in 2016.

4 replies on “Pride: Raleigh, Charleston”

  1. Wow – this article is completely false – I am the Chair of the first OutRaleigh festival. We had over 6,000 people attend the festival and no where near 75 protesters. I can’t believe no one checks their facts before posting this information! If you read the N&O article quoted, it clearly says “by lunchtime” there were 2,000 people – that was only 2 hours into the festival that lasted several hours longer.

  2. I agree with Mitch’s comments. The N & O print article clearly noted 2,000 attended by noon. Later online updates to the article noted 6,000 in attendance overall. I was there and it was well attended in spite of threatening weather; the Mayor welcomed everyone in his remarks at noon; the Mayor’s wife (Dr. Anne McClaurin) and member of the Wake County School Board, was also in attendance wearing a LGBT Center t-shirt;the city raised rainbow banners; and the area was marked with huge balloon displays of rainbow colors. Looking from the stage to the state capitol, it was quite a celebratory sight and a statement. It was a great event in its first year.

  3. You’re down playing the OutRaleigh Festival 2011 and reporting inaccurate attendance information is disturbing. As I recall, your paper did not cover the OutRaleigh Festival 2011, one of the most important GLBT Pride events in North Carolina and you seem to have depended on non-GLBTQ resources to gather information from to report to the community. It would seem to me that you would have at least checked in with the OutRaleigh Festival organizing committee to receive accurate Festival attendance numbers or have used other GLBT community sources such as The Triangle newspaper or the Raleigh GLBT Report email newsletter to help you with your reporting of the OutRaleigh Festival 2011. For the public record, there were approximately 6,000 people who attended this GLBT Community Pride event in Raleigh and this has been officially reported by many reliable sources. I further recall that back when the original organizing of what came to be named the OutRaleigh Festival, your reports included many upset statements from people and organizations you regularly support with your newspaper and advertisements, is your downplaying the OutRaleigh Festival 2011 an attempt to continue to undercut the GLBT Community as a whole in Raleigh and the tremendous progress that has been made in organizing and advancements? Let’s hope you will strive to be more reliable in the future with your gathered information and reporting. You really messed up on this one.

  4. For the record, the story J.Dilley refers to is “Capital Pride? Plans made for possible Raleigh Pride, LGBT leaders welcome expansion.”

    It can be found at:
    http://qnotes-launch.newspackstaging.com/5624/capital-pride/

    J.Dilley misrepresents the tone and content of that particular article. The overwhelming majority of the article included positive feedback from Raleigh organizers of a Pride event. I invite readers to read it and decide for themselves.

    We appreciate the feedback we have received here, but it is worth noting, in response to comments on the use of other organizations’ reporting, that this post was intentionally meant to be a short recap of others’ reporting not a bona fide news article; hence it was posted in our blog section (“bits-n-pieces from around the ‘net” clearly displayed at the top) not in our news section.

    QNotes is not attempting to “undercut the GLBT Community…in Raleigh.” Such a statement is ludicrous on its face. We spent weeks promoting OutRaleigh in our calendar section and have published several articles in print and online. Those articles can be found via search:
    http://www.google.com/search?q=outraleigh&sitesearch=goqnotes.com

    Further, a full-length news feature has already been planned re: OutRaleigh and will be published in our June 11, 2011, Pride Month issue.

    As always, we welcome your feedback. We hope future feedback on this subject is factual and that we will not have to respond to more inaccuracies like those included in J.Dilley’s outrageous accusations.

    Thank you,

    Matt Comer, editor

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