Sacramento State’s PRIDE Student Resource Center celebrated its 20th anniversary in the University Ballroom on Wednesday, Sept. 30, 2026, hosting nine different events centered around LGBTQ+ life, culture and academics. 

The event, called “Defiant and Divine: Launching 20 years of pride,” featured eight panels or sessions that included a variety of guests, including Sac State students, faculty and alumni. 

The anniversary kicked off with an introduction by the center’s director, Hei Fok and program assistant, Mono Hunter. The celebration began with a performance by the Sacramento Gay Men’s Chorus, who sang country songs like Shania Twain’s ‘Man, I Feel Like a Woman,’ ‘Take Me Home, Country Roads,’ by John Denver and country medley ‘Forever Country,’ by the Artists of Then, Now and Forever.

The people recruited to speak at these events were chosen by the PRIDE Center, and were originally intended to be more academic in nature, according to Fok. The anniversary was organized like a conference, with panels hosting concurrent talks on different topics. The idea shifted to have a more ‘celebrating’ feeling, stated Fok.

“I didn’t want it to be super academic, so I have different things going on in terms of student performances, and then also I want to have a variety of topics that are not all just like, ‘Oh, these are challenging times,’” Fok said. 

RELATED: PRIDE Center gives resources and support to LGBTQ+ students

Amy Burke-Jones, the coordinator of the PRIDE Center, stated the center reached out to its collaborators in the Sacramento area to bring a sense of community to the students attending these panels. 

Panelists included organizations like the Gender Health Center, the Sac LGBT Center and the UC Davis LGBTQ Center. Burke-Jones also credited the center’s student assistants for organizing some of the panels. 

Among them was assistant professor of graduate studies Daniel Cisneros, PRIDE center graduate intern Kateryna Karakulko and filmmaker Roberto Fatal, who attended Sac State during the beginning of the PRIDE Center’s creation. 

Fatal, who showed two of their short films at the anniversary celebration, said the Center during the late 2000s was a lifeline for LGBTQ+ students during the passing of Proposition 8, the state constitutional amendment passed by California voters to eliminate marriage rights between same-sex couples.

“It was a horrifying time to be a young queer person. But when you knew you’d come to school and you knew that there was a pride center, it was a place that you could have to feel safe,” Fatal said. “I can’t stress enough how much a physical refuge is so important for bodies that are under attack.”

The PRIDE Center began its development in 2005, after students spoke with former Sac State President Alexander Gonzalez about creating a space for LGBTQ students, according to Fok. 

The original PRIDE Center was hosted in now-demolished Foley Hall until Spring/Summer of 2007, after which it shared a space in the library with the Women’s Resource Center and the Multi-Cultural Center until 2009. The PRIDE Center and Women’s Resource Center continued to share an office from 2009 to 2019 in the University Union, after which both centers received their own separate rooms in the Union.

Another panel featured performers from Royal Sting, a junior drag court on Sac State campus. Motherboard.exe, the drag persona of third-year computer science major Kevin Fletcher, said that performance opportunities for students are important for performers like her. 

“I’m a baby queen, so opportunities presented by my club helps a lot to get in the scene,” Motherboard.exe said. 

Royal Sting also holds performances during other LGBTQ+ events and during the holidays, which helps performers safely get experience. 

Jimena Romero, a third-year public health major, said that she heard about the event through a professor’s class, and was surprised by how much she liked it. 

“I think with more advertising, there would be even more people,” said Romero. 

The name for the event, ‘Defiant and Divine,’ came from the PRIDE Center’s yearly theme. Fok said that the people who chose to speak represented those ideas. 

“Whenever we have to speak up, we have to stand up, that’s the defiant part. Divine is how we can feel the best about ourselves,” Fok said. 

Fok credits Burke-Jones with choosing the theme. Burke said that they and the rest of the PRIDE center staff chose it as their defining theme to ‘honor the two dichotomies’ within the LGBTQ+ community.

“Its been a celebration of the queer folks who have come before us who have really built a long history of resistance and defiance against norms and laws in order to help us move forward,” Burke-Jones said. “As well as the ‘divinity’ piece which we see in drag, see in queer joy, we see in self-care, we see in resiliency.”