She’s seen people of color and members of the community simply refuse to attend pride events due to the presence of police officers. Now, she’s executive director of One Colorado, the state’s leading advocacy organization for LGBTQ Coloradans. Nadine Bridges used to work for the Center as director of Rainbow Alley, a space for LGBTQ youth to come together and find support. While Fuller understands these frustrations, he disagrees.“If I have articulated arguments from Black Lives Matter and trans activists saying, ‘We don’t think the police should be present at pride,’ and I then say I’m prioritizing individual officers over Black and trans activists, what kind of message about inclusion is that sending?” Fuller says. “How are we to be a part of the change if you won’t have us at all?” “Rather than fighting for inclusivity, you are excluding a group of gay, lesbian and transgendered people from participating,” Hummel writes. Over time, though, he grew more confident and began getting more officers involved with pride celebrations. In it, Hummel describes at first struggling to be open about his identity at work. The letter was also published by the Sentinel. Some say that the LGBTQ community, which has long stood for inclusivity, is not being inclusive to all.īill Hummel, a gay man and Aurora Police Department sergeant, wrote a letter to the Center on Colfax expressing his disappointment in the organization’s decision. We respect The Center’s decision to have law enforcement sit out this Pride Fest and look forward to building upon our relationships with The Center and LGBTQ community moving forward,” according to a statement from the DPD.ĭespite DPD’s statement, the Center on Colfax has received plenty of backlash to this decision, especially on social media. “The Denver Police Department considers the LGBTQ community valued partners in safety. Individual DPD officers have walked in past pride marches to show their support. Since 2015, DPD has sponsored Safe Place, a program meant to assist victims of anti-LGBTQ crime while also reducing harassment through public awareness. The Denver Police Department (DPD) has been publicly supportive of the LGBTQ community. The Center plans to hire private security. The parking lot will host a festival featuring food trucks, vendors, and live music.
(In order for PrideFest to take place on city streets, as it has in years past, organizers would have to request official permits and invoke the help of DPD to shut down traffic.) For two days this June, in-person festivities will be held at the Center’s headquarters. Part of the reason the Center is able to restrict on-duty officers from attending is because most of this year’s pride programming will remain virtual, with the exception of a few hubs for smaller events. The movement eventually became what is known as the Center on Colfax today. In 1974, a civil court in Denver ruled that police could not enforce laws in a discriminatory matter or arrest gay community members for hugging, kissing, or holding hands in public. After three hours of testimony from 35 different speakers (with another 300 in attendance to offer support), four laws that unfairly impacted gay men were repealed, including the one that allowed police entrapment through solicitation. The GCD took this information to Denver’s City Council in October 1973. The group, called the Gay Coalition of Denver (GCD), found that 98 percent of those arrested in the early 1970s for “offer of lewd conduct” were gay men-arrests that were frequently made after a gay man unwittingly accepted a proposition from an undercover officer. In fact, the Center on Colfax was founded when a group of five people came together in 1972 to create a grassroots movement meant to expose the unjust treatment of gay men by Denver police. Stonewall isn’t the only historical event that Fuller is talking about. I feel for individual police officers who have worked for years to gain acceptance on the force, but it ultimately came down to looking at the origins of pride.”
“The Black Lives Matter movements from last summer caused a lot of soul searching for us,” Fuller says.