Tampa Pride’s float at its 2025 Diversity parade. Credit: Dave Decker / Creative Loafing

When it announced a year-long hiatus last month, Tampa Pride claimed funding events, including its 2026 parade, wouldn’t be possible due to state and federal anti diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives. But other local LGBTQ+ leaders aren’t ready to give up.

On Sunday in Tampa, former St. Pete Pride president Nathan Bruemmer, PFLAG Tampa president Trevor Rosine and BlaqueOUt Magazine managing editor and DEI consultant Tamara Leigh host a discussion called “Convening on the Status of Pride.”

Rosine told Creative Loafing Tampa Bay that the meeting isn’t meant to form a new organization to replace Tampa Pride, but to help Bay area LGBTQ+ leaders coordinate their 2026 events.

“Pride does not live, breathe, and die with one organization,” Rosine said. “It’s a collective feeling we have as a community at these events, it’s not a tangible thing that can be canceled on a whim.”

While St. Pete Pride isn’t interested in throwing a Tampa parade, it will also be a part of the meeting. President Byron Green-Calisch told CL that St. Pete Pride is offering support to Tampa organizers.

“We believe that we have to do this together,” Green-Calisch said, saying his organization will lock arms and build coalitions to support Tampa organizers however it can. “It’s hard to set up a Pride organization quickly. We want to be able to use our relationships with stakeholders to pull any organizers into these conversations to make sure there is a Pride celebration in the city of Tampa.”

Former Tampa Pride board member Mark Eary is also joining the efforts to advise other organizers, bringing his experience as the nonprofit’s parade organizer for nine years. He left the board in 2023 out of frustration with leadership’s failed promises to bring in more diverse board members. Now, he’s hoping to make that difference with new community leaders.

“I would like younger, more energetic people. They have great ideas,” Eary said. “New leadership needs to be a little more open and all-inclusive. That’s the only way it’s going to work.”

Eary told CL that he believed Tampa Pride’s previous leadership “led to the demise” of sponsors to fund next year’s parade.

In its hiatus announcement, Tampa Pride also said it wouldn’t renew Carrie West’s contract as president. CL previously reported that West paid himself a quarter of the nonprofit’s 2024 budget, and paid his husband who was supposed to be off the board.

“We’ve been waiting for it to fold,” Eary told CL regarding Tampa Pride. “I knew it couldn’t keep sustaining the president’s salary of over $100,000 a year.”

Eary is confident in the community’s ability to pull off a Pride celebration next year.

“I don’t foresee a parade, but there are other events we can do,” Eary said. “We just need to get everybody on board.”

West responds

Rosine said Tampa Pride’s insinuation that it was losing grants and sponsors because of anti-DEI initiatives is false and hurtful to the efforts of other LGBTQ+ organizations.

“I want to do everything within my power to dispel that rumor,” Rosine said. “Carrie West is the sole reason that the nonprofit failed. He did not do the work he needed to procure donations with leaders who are now talking to organizations that will be at this meeting.”

In a conversation with CL, West denied accusations of mismanagement. Tampa Pride’s two remaining board members, vice president Derek Durum and treasurer Howard Grater, declined CL’s request for comment.

“We have a board and we have directors… we have a good transparency record,” West told CL. “There’s things we’re always working on and trying to do.”

He said he’s still paying bills from the parade and festival in March, and struggling to make up the losses of sponsors who pulled out—an issue other Pride organizations have faced locally and nationwide. Some organizations, local and national, asked for their money back, including a “big bank,” West said.

“Some had already been threatened, some had already been approached by organizational politics and told to not help any LGBTQ or Pride,” West said. “They are not to really be supportive of DEI items.”

West also said Tampa Pride’s hiatus was due to grants falling through, including the National Endowment for the Arts. This was the first year since at least 2021 that Tampa Pride did not apply for Hillsborough County’s FYE 2026 Special Event Partnership Grant Funding—which provided nearly $70,000 in 2025 and $84,000 in 2022. The application deadline was July 11.

When asked why he didn’t apply, West said the county grant wouldn’t have been allowed to get funding from the National Endowment for the Arts. The NEA only prohibits other federal grants, not local government funding. West did not respond to requests to clarify.

In response to outrage that he paid himself a quarter of Tampa Pride’s 2024 budget, West said that he was taking back pay for previous years where he did not get his usual $80,000 salary. Tax documents show West made between $31,000 and $48,000 from 2015-2017.

“I get a bonus if I reach about a certain amount of clients coming through,” West added.

Eary called West’s claim for backpay “bullcrap,” citing conditions placed on the director’s salary when he was on the board. “Maybe they made some stipulation the last year or so after I resigned, but I kind of doubt that,” he added.

West also responded to those upset that his husband, Mark Bias, was being paid after leaving the board in 2022 for controversial comments. Bias was paid $6,200 as a key employee, which West said was compensation for building storage areas for parade supplies and directing parts of the parade as a non-board member. Though West also said he and Bias hosted board meetings a few times a month at their home.

Though he formed Tampa Pride officially in 2014, West has been an entrepreneur and advocate for LGBTQ+ community for four decades. But he won’t be president of Tampa Pride again, he said, and the board will soon start its search for a new president.

“We’ll have somebody else,” West said. “I think that there are quality people.”

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This article appears in Oct. 9-15, 2025.

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