From June 6-7th, non-profit OutFront Kalamazoo, which primarily serves the LGBTQ+ community and their allies in Southwest Michigan, hosted Kalamazoo Pride 2025. This event served as a fundraiser to support OutFront’s year-round programming and services.
We spoke with Kalamazoo Pride attendees about the importance of having events like Pride, especially in today’s climate.
“There’s still such a stigma and so many people are afraid to be who they are because there’s backlash of it,” conveyed Dr. Mason Merchant from Northern Michigan. “It’s now coming not only from a local level, from a family level, but from a federal level of saying that these people shouldn’t exist or don’t have the same rights. So, I think having the community, if we’re gonna do any impact to swing it back how it should be, it has to be in numbers.”
Another attendee, Kae from Grand Rapids expressed, “Pride is important just because it’s the essential found family for a lot of us just because so many of us get turned away and so many of us have struggled with finding acceptance, that being able to come in here and just have people come up and run up and hug you because they’re just excited to see you as you – it’s incredibly powerful and it’s really, really important that we have more events that we can make these welcoming spaces.”
