ommunity feedback gathered earlier this year made it clear that attendees wanted organizers to find a way back to Santa Ana<\/a>, the group said. The festival\u2019s first event was in Centennial Park in 1989 and it was hosted downtown for years before relocating to Costa Mesa\u2019s OC Fair & Event Center in 2024.<\/p>\nEver since OC Pride announced the move back to downtown Santa Ana (DTSA), organizers said they\u2019ve received an \u201coverwhelming outpour of community support\u201d from local businesses, local nonprofits, and other organizations, including what organizers described as the most applications for volunteer entertainment OC Pride has ever received. Applications are also being taken for the annual parade.<\/p>\n
\u201cEveryone wanted to be involved,\u201d said Terry. \u201cAnd so it\u2019s kind of snowballed a little bit.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cOur Voices All Combined,\u201d the theme of this year\u2019s festival, is about the power of coming together, said OC Pride Board President Brandon Chavez, who pointed to the diverse intercultural and intergenerational experiences and identities that make up the community. \u201cWe don\u2019t all have the same story, but we don\u2019t have to. Our strength comes from bringing those voices together and making space for every one of them.\u201d<\/p>\n
Organizers also described the festival layout as their take on Disneyland\u2019s themed attractions, with each zone built to cater to a specific corner of the LGBTQ+ community.<\/p>\n
Alongside the main Pride Stage and the Agoyo Latin Stage, organizers have added three additional performance spaces. The Rainbow Commons, new this year, is reserved for up-and-coming community acts, while the returning Sapphic Oasis takes a step beyond its past lounge-style setup with full programming, including a book swap, hosted at Native Son Bar, located above the Frida Theater.<\/p>\n
Rounding out the lineup is Transcentral, the festival\u2019s trans-focused space inside 4th Street Market, which will offer a more intimate slate of acoustic and spoken-word performances. Programming across the stages will also nod to Queer History Month and to Halloween.<\/p>\n
Eric Pineda, a 33-year-old Westminster resident, said one of his first experiences with Pride was in Santa Ana. \u201cTo be part of it, knowing that it\u2019s back in Santa Ana, is a big deal to me, because I get to not only showcase my friends but showcase how queer and safe Santa Ana can be.\u201d<\/p>\n
A promoter, Pineda runs Solita the Party, a queer dance event series featuring drag shows as the main event. He said he started Solita after watching many of his friends drive over an hour to find entertainment gigs, wanting instead to support their art and the local community he was building.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt gives me a lot of pride and joy to know that we are still being seen and still very visible in 2026,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Headlining the Pride Stage this year will be Charo, \u201cAmerica\u2019s Got Talent\u201d alum Mama Duke and Chris Conde, a queer New York rapper.<\/p>\n
The festival will officially wrap at 10 p.m., but Terry said the night won\u2019t end there: attendees can join an after-festival bar crawl through DTSA, with Native Son, Chapter One, Queens Lounge, Club 616, and Mission Bar already signed on.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Orange County Pride\u2019s annual festival is returning to downtown Santa Ana this year \u2014 a move organizers say…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":468212,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[163,165,164,7,2434,23,611,338,136],"class_list":["post-468211","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-anaheim","tag-anaheim","tag-anaheim-headlines","tag-anaheim-news","tag-california","tag-lgbtq","tag-local-news","tag-orange-county","tag-santa-ana","tag-top-stories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/468211","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=468211"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/468211\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/468212"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=468211"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=468211"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=468211"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}