A Tucson Pride Festival Could Reemerge. But Does Anyone Want It?

Some version of a Tucson Pride festival could happen next year. But after the city’s 49-year-old Pride organization collapsed, the bigger question is whether anyone actually wants to bring it back.

For nearly five decades, Tucson Pride was the organization behind the city’s largest annual LGBTQ+ celebration. Earlier this year it closed down — dissolved by its two-member board in January after years of financial and organizational problems — and in its place has grown a patchwork of queer groups offering competing visions for what Pride could become. 

Is it a grassroots collection of smaller events, a new large-scale festival, or something in between?

Some organizers are already moving forward. But others say Tucson’s queer community has made clear it doesn’t want another single organization to own Pride, at all. 

Tucson Pride shutdown

When Tucson Pride’s two-member board dissolved the organization in January and canceled its festival a month before the rescheduled Feb. 21, 2026 date, it ended the third-oldest Pride organization in the country.

It also ended the annual festival in a city that started Arizona’s first Pride in 1977 and passed one of the nation’s earliest gay anti-discrimination ordinances that same year.

The event’s demise was sudden, but not surprising to advocates, queer event organizers and other leaders in Tucson’s nonprofit community. In 2017, a former board president was charged with embezzling from the organization and pleaded guilty to felony theft the following year. Then the 2024 festival, held in late September amid record-setting heat, drew sparse crowds, leaving the organization $50,000 in debt. The 2025 event was postponed to November, then to February, and ultimately scrapped along with Tucson Pride.

“There’s a sense of loss, and there’s a sense of frustration and anger over the mismanagement of those funds,” said Carlos Hernandez, CEO of the Southern Arizona AIDS Foundation, who attended community forums after the shutdown.

But Tucson’s Pride community didn’t disappear when the organization that had run its biggest annual celebration did: “You can’t cancel Pride. There were queer events all summer long, more than I have ever seen in Tucson,” said Kelsey Erickson, owner of Circus Sanctuary, a community performing arts teaching center in Tucson. “And it was so beautiful.”

The question now, though, is what comes next?

“We don’t want to get people excited about stuff and then have to turn around and say, oh, it’s gone away."
-Dante Celeiro, Founder of Fluxx Productions

Without an official Tucson Pride organization, the city’s queer community is left to decide whether Pride should remain a collection of smaller, independent events or whether someone should take up the mantle of the annual festival (and if that group can be trusted to run it.)

Six months after Tucson Pride’s dissolution, a field of unaffiliated groups is trying to answer that question. They include a volunteer collective with no legal structure, a 24-year-old queer arts nonprofit, and Southern Arizona’s largest HIV services agency.

Each offers a different model for what Tucson Pride could become. And each comes with its own questions about money, oversight and accountability.

Can the grassroots grow?

Within days of the announcement of Tucson Pride’s closure, Alexis Walters, a promoter and DJ at Hotel Congress in downtown Tucson, called for anyone interested in staging a Pride event to come together.

About 40 people showed up at an open meeting to brainstorm how to continue the event. A core group of roughly 10, most of whom had never met, organized a festival called Loud & Proud in under 30 days. They held it March 1.

More than 500 people attended, organizers said. Every performer was queer, local and paid, and leftover proceeds went to Fluxx Productions and the Trans Empowerment Project.

The group, anchored by DJ Paul Hawkins, Circus Sanctuary owner Erickson and Shorty Morris, another DJ who has worked Tucson Pride events since 2007, has no legal entity, board or bank account of its own. And it has already had to cancel one subsequent event because of low interest.

Still, the group plans to create another LGBTQ+ event beginning in March 2027. It intends to file as a limited liability company, an entity that offers no public reporting requirements or independent oversight, before deciding on nonprofit status.

Erickson said the group has explored possible fiscal sponsorship with SAAF and Many Mouths One Stomach, the foundation behind Tucson’s annual All Souls Procession.

But the grassroots model is fraught. Without an established singular group in place, questions get raised on financial transparency, ownership, and accountability. 

Leading some to look at other places with a more well-established history to try and take up the task. 

“We’re the only people who are gonna take care of us.”

Splinter Collective staged a Pride event this year and puts on an annual Gay-la each winter solstice. The group was seen as a potential contender to take on a larger festival, but it’s pointed to another: “Fluxx, a longtime partner and aligned org and friends, have taken over Pride,” Splinter Collective Executive Director Natalie Brewster Nguyen wrote in an email. 

When Tucson Pride announced its end, Founder of Fluxx Productions Dante Celeiro said his phone “started ringing a lot that day.”

Fluxx Productions is a nonprofit organization that creates and organizes LGBTQ+ community events and services, Celeiro is perhaps the clearest candidate to produce a new Tucson Pride: it already has a 501(c)(3) designation and an established record of producing large events. Fluxx also carries a 14-year-old history with trying in the past to absorb the festival. 

In 2012, Fluxx was negotiating to take Tucson Pride under its umbrella. According to Celeiro, the existing board reneged on the agreement a month before the festival. Fluxx produced that year’s event anyway and made attendance free. It never worked with Tucson Pride again.

Now, Fluxx is planning Desert Pride Tucson, a program under Fluxx Productions with its own bank account and, Celeiro said, no affiliation with the people who were part of Tucson Pride.

Celeiro said Fluxx will disclose Desert Pride’s financials the same way it reports on its current programs, publishing tax forms and attendance counts in the impact reports already posted on its website.

The city has not approved a date, he said, and he cannot confirm a venue until it does. He said it won’t be at Reid Park, where Tucson Pride staged previous festivals.

“We don’t want to get people excited about stuff and then have to turn around and say, oh, it’s gone away,” he said.

Celeiro said admission will be free, unlike past Pride events, because, “I don’t believe you should have to pay to get into Pride. Plain and simple.”

Revenue will come from vendor fees and national sponsorships he is soliciting. Any surplus funds will go toward the next festival.

“There’s a big sour taste in many people’s mouths in regard to everything that happened with Tucson Pride,” he said, noting that potential sponsors may sit out this coming year.

Asked whether Fluxx would accept the role of torchbearer, Celeiro said Fluxx has publicly backed anyone else who wants to stage a Pride event.

“At the end of the day, I want all the community working together, because realistically, ” he said. “If there’s a rift within the community, that’s just not healthy.”

Tucson Pride’s Collapse: Years Of Warning Signs Before Shutdown

Federal tax records and a former board member points to years of strain that eroded the organization’s stability and trust.

LOOKOUTLorenzo Gomez (he/him)

A “Big Unknown”

Despite Fluxx’s eagerness, the organization with perhaps the greatest capacity to absorb a festival is also the one least interested in claiming it.

SAAF CEO Hernandez said his organization was approached about serving as a fiscal agent for any organization interested in moving forward with a Pride event. He remains “more than happy” to have those conversations, but no one has followed up.

At community forums, Hernandez said attendees favored a season of smaller grassroots events over anointing a successor. 

In March, at a conversation facilitated by the Center for Community Mediation and Facilitation, about 60 people voted 29-23 against creating a festival like previous ones. Instead, people favored smaller, year-round events, with a new nonprofit and board oversight to ensure transparency.

“Nobody has indicated that they’re ready for that,” he said, referring to a singular group taking on a large Pride festival. He added that more community forums are planned for the fall.

Hernandez also cautioned that SAAF’s fundraising muscle, built around health grants, may not translate to funding a Pride festival.

He said it’s a “big unknown” if the organization could “confidently raise all the funds needed.”

That leaves Tucson with a larger question that has not yet been answered, which is if the city needs another organization to take Tucson Pride’s place that could ensure financial viability for the future.

Whatever that next chapter looks like, the collapse of Tucson Pride has left one lesson hanging over everyone trying to build what comes next: Whoever takes up the mantle will also have to answer for every dollar, decision and promise made.