Apr 27, 2007  |  By: KATHERINE VOLIN  | COMMENTS     

April isn’t the perfect month to plan an outdoor event. Youth Pride, which is usually held during the rain-prone month, has suffered from bad weather and low attendance the past two years. Organizers are hoping for sunny weather and increased numbers this year.

“It’s hard to say who’s going to show up because I think hopefully this year, knock on wood, it won’t rain,” says Sara Mindel, this year’s director of Youth Pride. “[We’ve had] 1,000 youth the past couple of years, so we’re looking at over that [number].”

Even if the weather is bad, the event has plenty to tempt attendees. This year’s keynote speaker is recently out former NBA player John Amaechi.

After Mindel saw Amaechi on HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher,” she thought he’d be well-suited for Youth Pride and attended an Amaechi reading, staying afterward to ask him to speak at the event.

“He’s very dedicated to youth,” Mindel, 29 and a lesbian, says. Amaechi founded the Amaechi Basketball Centres, a Manchester, England-based non-profit athletic organization for urban youth.

“He’s also coming out, which really applies to our young people as well, so I thought that he could be a great spokesperson,” Mindel says, adding that his “humbling, dedicated” approach to the gay community and young people in general contributed to Youth Pride’s decision to have him speak at the event.

Amaechi joins queer performance artist Hanifah Walidah, Baltimore singing group Positive Voices and local gay dance group D.C. Cowboys as highlights of the daylong event.

YOUTH PRIDE ALSO features activities and information booths, which include dozens of local organizations. This is the second year a special scholarship named after Wanda Alston is being awarded to a local student who has worked as a gay leader. Alston was a prominent D.C. lesbian activist and the mayor’s GLBT liaison who was murdered in her Southeast Washington, D.C., home in 2005.

Local teen Josh Parel, who is co-president of his school’s gay-straight alliance, won the Wanda Alston scholarship this year. The GSA has been in operation at his school for 10 years, but has sagged a bit in recent years, so Parel says he’s working to revive it.

“We’ve gone to Gay Men’s Chorus [of Washington, D.C.’s] shows, we try to do small picnics, things like that,” Parel says. “Since we’re not that big, we can’t do too much, but we do what we can.”

This will be the second time Parel, 18, heads to Youth Pride.

“It’s just a good event,” he says about Youth Pride Day. “You learn a lot, get free stuff. And it’s youth-specific.”

Parel, who is gay, mentions the shirtless men parading in the streets as a bonus for the day’s events.

“That’s also fun,” he says.

NOT EVERYONE SHARES that sentiment about the day’s eye candy.

Tully Satre, 18, who also attended Youth Pride Day last year but is otherwise engaged this year, found the sexual note to many of the performances off-putting.

“Some of the people and some of the acts I felt were very distasteful — something that I’d expect to see at a club or something,” says Satre, who is gay.

Satre was there with his mother, running a booth for the organization he founded and used to run, Commonwealth Education Equality Virginia, an advocacy group for gay and transgender high school students. The presence of his mother made him particularly attuned to parents’ reactions to the more explicit performances.

“What would a parent think who was trying to come to terms with their child, what is being gay, what does that mean?” Satre asks. “I just know that some parents went around feeling uncomfortable.”

Satre says that he strongly supports free expression, but he felt the acts were inappropriate for Youth Pride.

“I feel that if we’re going to celebrate Youth Pride, if we’re going to show our pride, we should do it in a dignified way,” Satre says.

Paul Barter, 19, didn’t attend last year’s Youth Pride Day event, but did go to the Infatuation Dance Party last year at Nation nightclub during Youth Pride week. Barter says he doesn’t see Youth Pride Day as a political event so much as a place to be with other young gays.

“For me it’s a way for people like me to express myself and be around people of my own kind and … feel comfortable,” says Barter.

Leroy Hardwooden, who has attended Youth Pride for the past three years and plans to again, says that he doesn’t think the performances were too sexual, but that he would like to see more local gay youth participating in ...