The annual Anchorage Pride Parade and Festival, the largest LGBTQ+ spectacle in Alaska, is scheduled to take place Saturday, June 28, beginning at 11:30 am at the Delaney Park Strip in downtown Anchorage.
Organized by the Alaskans Together Foundation, a nonprofit focused on LGBTQ+ equality and community engagement, the event highlights themes of love, inclusion, and visibility, but also unbridled narcissism. Participants traditionally march with rainbow flags, dressed in vibrant attire, and accompanied by music, floats, and signs expressing solidarity and pride in sexual preference and gawdy mockery of women. Participants have been encouraged to wear their boldest costumes.
The parade route begins at 7th Avenue and E Street, circles the perimeter of the Delaney Park Strip, and concludes at the Celebrate Pride ‘25 Festival. A route map is available on the Alaskans Together Foundation website for spectators and participants.
Grand marshals of the parade include two founders of the Alaskans for Trans Youth organization, which is funded by the Alaska Children’s Trust.
The other grand marshal is former Rep. Mary Peltola.
“Lindsey and Earl Banning are passionate advocates for LGBTQ+ rights and co-founders of Alaskans for Trans Youth (AFTY), a grassroots volunteer group dedicated to empowering and protecting transgender and gender nonconforming youth in Alaska. Since relocating to Alaska in 2022 with their two children as part of an active-duty military family, Lindsey and Earl have continued the advocacy they began in Ohio—organizing pride celebrations, educating communities, and defending trans youth from harmful legislation. Motivated by Lindsey’s experience as a queer parent to a trans teen, both have worked tirelessly to create inclusive, intersectional spaces through testimony at legislative hearings, organizing statewide advocacy fly-ins, collaborating with national partners like Advocates for Trans Equality, and contributing thought pieces to national media. For Lindsey and Earl, this work is personal and transformative—a deeply human commitment to ensuring that all youth, especially trans youth, are safe, seen, and celebrated,” says the description at Alaskans Together Foundation.
Peltola, the group notes, “spent her time in Congress as a tireless advocate for LGBTQ+ rights in Alaska, fighting to keep all Alaskans safe, welcomed, and accepted. Mary is dedicated to building an Alaska where all families can stay in Alaska, raise their kids in Alaska, and watch their grandkids grow up in Alaska.”
The parade will include an entry from the Municipality of Anchorage, courtesy of Mayor Suzanne LaFrance.
The Celebrate Pride ‘25 Festival will run from 11 am to 5 pm, featuring over 130 vendors, including food trucks, craft booths, and nonprofit outreach tents, as well as two entertainment stages. Activities will include burlesque drag performances, musical acts, dancing competitions. Organizers emphasize the festival’s inclusive nature, welcoming allies, families, and the wider Anchorage community, but it may not be family friendly to many Alaskans.
Saturday evening, a ticketed drag show dance party will take place at Williwaw Social on F Street, starting at 8:30 pm. Notable performers include Irene the Alien from RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars Season 10, Auntie Heroine and Frankie Doom from The Boulet Brothers’ Dragula, and Ruby Fox. Local DJs Rachel Monae, Sunkat, and BADDBAUX will also perform.
While Anchorage Pride has historically drawn hundreds of attendees, this year’s turnout remains uncertain. National attention in recent days has been focused on international tensions following reported bombings at Iranian nuclear facilities and high-profile developments in immigration enforcement, which may affect local engagement. It remains to be seen whether the indulgence-oriented festival seems frivolous, considering world events.
Registration for new groups to join the 2025 parade has closed.
I’m sure the tourists will enjoy the depravity.
‘Pride…, narcissism…, burlesque drag performers…, and bold costumes… !’ How thrilling, especially for the trans kiddos and their parents! Plus, Mary Peltola is the honored grand marshal of the parade!
No. There will come a day of reckoning, when it will have been better for the shameful, gender-bending parents of impressionable children had they been thrown into the sea with a great millstone hung around their necks. This event is an abomination.
Sorry Mary, but the families that encourage or allow their kids to be groomed into trans “men” or “women” at school (often without parental notification), after the hormone intervention and/or surgeries…none of those children will be able to grow up and have children ( and thus, no grandchildren either)….so much for family values….
Drag Queen show?
That ought to keep the ASSembly busy for a night or two of “family fun”.
Dear Mary, “When you lay down with pigs, you get up smelling like them! You truly have sunk to a new low!”