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St. Pete Pride: Your final-weekend event guide
St. Pete Pride Month 2025 reaches its zenith with this weekend’s calendar of events, including the indisputable highlight: The largest Pride parade in the State of Florida.
Pride 2025’s big weekend begins with Thursday’s concert from singer and rapper Durand Bernarr at Jannus Live. Bernarr, enthused Pride President Byron Green-Calisch, is “an absolutely phenomenal R&B artist. We are going back to late ‘90s, early 2000s, that feel-good R&B music. He’s been on NPR’s Tiny Desk … just come out and enjoy the vibe with an absolute powerhouse of a voice.” (Concert tickets are here.)
Durand Bernarr performs Thursday at Jannus Live. Publicity photo.
Saturday’s parade, the 23rd in city history, is expected to bring out somewhere in the neighborhood of 300,000 LGBTQ+ supporters. It steps off at 6 p.m., south on Bayshore Drive by Albert Whitted Airport, and proceeds northward past the Mahaffey Theater, Al Lang Stadium and both South and North Straub Parks, finishing up in the shadow of the Vinoy Resort.
“I’m not that guy that’s obsessed with crowd sizes,” Green-Calisch told the Catalyst with a laugh, during a recent Arts Alive! podcast. “But it’s a LOT of people.
“And they do line the streets. It’s an absolutely amazing experience to come out and watch.”
The parade is the culmination of Saturday’s Pride Festival, 2-10 p.m. in both parks; there’ll be a stage in each one. “We open the floodgates to any and all vendors that wanted to engage with our queer community,” Green-Calisch explained. “So we really look for vendors that are inclusive and want to engage with us.
“We hire an absolute onslaught of local entertainers, and we give them the platform. We will share and elevate local entertainers – live artists, drag performers, the whole lot.” Community and civic groups will have information tables set up, too.
It’s a festive, family-friendly afternoon out. “I’ve had people say they got so caught up in the festival they forgot to see the parade,” he added. “It’s absolutely its own event; it could stand on its own.”
Stepping off at 5 p.m. is Pride’s annual Trans March. It begins near the Vinoy, and travels south on Bayshore until meeting up with the main parade participants near the airport.
Then the trans marchers join everyone else and head back towards the Vinoy.
It’s more than a show of unity and solidarity, Green-Clisch said. “This is one of the traditional historical pieces of any Pride March, that we want to not only give our trans siblings the space to have their own moment, but recognize that so much of queer history and queer revolution has been led by the trans community.”
The festival must shut down by 10 p.m. The City of St. Petersburg is a longtime local co-sponsor of Pride Month events, but still … there are rules to be followed.
“We don’t want to get a noise ordinance violation,” Green-Calisch said, “but no worries, because the party will continue down into the EDGE District, and Grand Central, with a few of our partners having parties.”
Six blocks of Central Avenue, in the Grand Central District, will be closed to vehicular traffic for Sunday’s Street Fair (12 to 5 p.m.), with performance stages, roaming street performers, vendors and (according to Green-Calisch) dancing in the streets. Approximately 100,000 visitors are anticipated.
Pride’s organizers see these events as celebrations for one and all. “You’re going to meet people that you’ve never met,” Green-Calisch said. “You’re going to engage with difference. You’re going to see people that may dress in ways that you’ve never considered dressing, or say anything different from your own life experience.
“But it’s in that beauty that you realize that we are all human. We all have this desire to live in a way that is joyous.”
Listen to the Arts Alive! Pride podcast (originally published May 29) at this link.
