DTLA Proud, celebrating Downtown Los Angeles’ LGBTQ community, returns in August

The DTLA Proud Festival — which celebrates downtown Los Angeles and its growing LGBTQ community — will return to Pershing Square and has expanded to two days. More than 9,000 people attended last year’s festival. Photo: DTLA Proud.

LOS ANGELES — The DTLA Proud Festival — which celebrates downtown Los Angeles and its growing LGBTQ community — will return to Pershing Square and has expanded to two days.

The event will take place August 26 and 27. Presale tickets, $5 single day and $8 two-day passes, will be available July 1 on the DTLA Proud website.

About 9,000 people attended last year, and organizers are projecting about 25,000 will attend this time, said Oliver Luke Alpuche, the president of DTLA Proud, the nonprofit that organizes the event.

“We are celebrating what’s happening downtown. We have three distinct gay bars,” said  Alpuche, who owns Redline. Bar Mattachine and Precinct are the other two bars.

“We are not throwing our own pride event or challenging other prides,” he said.

The festival will feature a pop-up water park, community booths, food trucks, live art installations, interactive exhibits and an area dedicated to Los Angeles queer history.

Drag star duo The Boulet Brothers will host the main stage, which “will showcase the diverse talents of both local and national performers in support of our mission to celebrate everyone’s story, to spread optimism, to grow our community and to expand our definition of diversity,” according to the event’s Facebook page.

DJs and performers will be announced in the coming months, Alpuche said.

About the author

Phillip Zonkel

Award-winning journalist Phillip Zonkel spent 17 years at Long Beach's Press-Telegram, where he was the first reporter in the paper's history to have a beat covering the city's vibrant LGBTQ. He also created and ran the popular and innovative LGBTQ news blog, Out in the 562.

He won two awards and received a nomination for his reporting on the local LGBTQ community, including a two-part investigation that exposed anti-gay bullying of local high school students and the school districts' failure to implement state mandated protections for LGBTQ students.

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