The statement further clarified that the decision was wholly due to the inability of the Festival to comply with City requirements, despite the fact that this event has taken place 42 times prior with the same needs in place. <\/p>\n
\u201cOver the past several months, the City of Long Beach\u2019s Special Events team has worked closely with Long Beach Pride, the private organizers of the annual Pride Festival, to support their efforts to safely produce this year\u2019s event, which was scheduled to take place on May 15, 16 and 17. While the City now manages and funds the Long Beach Pride Parade, the Pride Festival remains an independently organized, ticketed event that requires the submission of detailed operational, construction and public safety plans in order to be permitted to ensure safety of the attendees.<\/p>\n
Despite continued collaboration and multiple deadline notices, the City did not receive the required documentation needed to complete safety reviews, inspect critical event infrastructure, such as the stage, electrical systems and tent, and emergency exiting plans to ensure compliance with public safety standards. With event programming scheduled to begin today, May 15 at 5 p.m. with Teen Pride and essential information still outstanding, there is no longer sufficient time to safely permit the festival this year.\u201d<\/p>\n
The statement also clarified that the Festival was alerted on Thursday that requirements had not been met, and that the City worked tirelessly with the volunteer organization up until the last minute, with the Festival still being unable to get everything in place. The City also made a promise to refund any businesses that had purchased special licenses or Health permits.<\/p>\n
So the truth was out. The fact that the Festival intended to vilify the City and use the community\u2019s spirit of activism to force the City\u2019s hand in moving forward with a weekend that could be unsafe to attendees did not go over well. Social media comments on the Festival\u2019s posts want more answers and they want the Festival to hold itself accountable. How has the Festival gone on for more than four decades prior without a cancellation, why this year? What happened? Yes, credit needs to be given for a volunteer organization to be able to produce the Festival year after year, but when an organization is 100% volunteer based, it is hard to hold people accountable. <\/p>\n
But there are always at least two sides to a story. Local drag queen Twiggy D. Warhol took to social media to hold the Festival responsible.<\/p>\n
An apparent committee member responded, saying all permits were sent:<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/Picturelbpride.png\")
<\/p>\n
As all of this just came to light less than 24 hours ago, there will be more facts that will need to be shared from both the City and the Festival. <\/p>\n
As much as local media picked up on the cancellation of the Festival, news channels and social media have also been promoting that the Pride Parade, funded and organized by the City of Long Beach, is still going on, along with five City-approved events. <\/p>\n
Visit Long Beach posted a fun video, assuring the community that Pride is still going strong, despite the Festival cancellation. The bars will be open, featuring their own Pride programming and no doubt the streets will be flooded with the community proving that nothing can keep us down. ,<\/p>\n
As many social media comments stated that Pride as a movement can never be canceled, and no one can ever take our spirit away. Where there is a will, there is a way. No doubt many more facts about the Festival cancellation will come to light. Perhaps this is the hiccup the Festival needs to reorganize and revitalize. And maybe this is the hiccup the Festival needs for the community to see that it needs more support from us to ensure this doesn\u2019t happen again. <\/p>\n
See you at the Pride parade! <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"SoCal\u2019s queer social media exploded into a frenzy when Long Beach Pride took to Facebook and Instagram to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":319187,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[98979,93,131,133,132,121539,133268,133269,3145,133270],"class_list":["post-319186","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-long-beach","tag-city-of-long-beach","tag-featured","tag-long-beach","tag-long-beach-headlines","tag-long-beach-news","tag-long-beach-pride","tag-long-beach-pride-festival","tag-long-beach-pride-parade","tag-pride","tag-tonya-martin-lez-prez"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/319186","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=319186"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/319186\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/319187"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=319186"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=319186"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=319186"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}