Spartanburg SC Pride announces shutdown

After nearly 20 years, South Carolina’s Upstate Pride celebration in Spartanburg has announced the event will no longer take place. In a statement from the organization, they offered an explanation.

“After much deliberation and consideration, the Board of Directors has made the decision to financially focus all our efforts on one annual Pride celebration that is held in downtown Greenville, SC and make this Pride festival our premier event of the year for all of the Upstate SC LGBTQIA+ community. We have also collectively decided to rename the festival to reflect our entire community, which is held in Greenville to Upstate Pride SC – Colors of Pride. This means that we will no longer be producing a pride festival in Spartanburg in the fall.”

Upstate Pride confirmed the decision was not an easy one and listed the following challenges as the primary factors behind the reasoning to discontinue Spartanburg’s Pride festival:

● A lack of public interest: the number of attendees for the fall event has dwindled each year to the point that financial losses continued to grow in recent years.

● Lack of volunteers: while the organization continued to canvas for and hold information sessions seeking volunteers, they confirmed a lack of response for production assistance to produce the fall event. “The amount of effort and people power it takes to put on the

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is immense,” they said in the statement. “and cannot be done without sufficient volunteers and promoters.”

● Feedback from sponsors and vendors: there are not enough attendees to the fall event to make it fiscally viable to participate in the event.

● The Colors of PRIDE Festival (formerly Known As: Upstate Black Pride SC) hosts over 20k attendees and is increasing annually, bringing increased revenue to the vendors and great visibility to the sponsors and the event as a whole. The Colors of Pride Festival reflects the collective commitment of the Upstate LGBTQ+ community, with residents across the region showing up year after year through both attendance and volunteerism.

Organizers for Spartanburg Pride made it clear they understood the decision was likely a disappointment for many in the community, and made a commitment to uphold the history of Pride in South Carolina’s upstate region.

“We are torn by the fact that it was Spartanburg who originally started holding Pride festivals and supported the event from the beginning,” the statement reads. “We will always tell the history of how Upstate Pride SC began and the roots of the organization, but ultimately, we must make decisions based on a positive impact for all of the Upstate community, not just Greenville and Spartanburg.”

Although the organization is adamant that sustaining a Pride festival in Spartanburg isn’t currently a possibility, plans are in the works to continue with a Pride celebration of some sort in Spartanburg each fall. “We would love that initiative to be community driven,” they offered.

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