AURORA | In cities across the state, calendars for decades have boasted an especially colorful event each summer: Pride.
Pridefest in Denver was in June, Fort Collins hosted one in July and Boulder has one slated for September. Even buttoned-up Colorado Springs hosted one early last month.
But Aurora, despite having more than 350,000 people, despite being the metro area’s biggest suburb and despite being one of the nation’s most-diverse locales, never had that designated day to celebrate its gay community.
That changes this weekend.
The first ever Aurora Pride festival is slated for Aug. 5 at the Aurora Municipal Center with music, food, vendors and dancing. There’s even a drag show on the agenda.
“It was the biggest piece to the Pride puzzle, and it’s in my opinion long overdue,” said Jerry Cunningham, publisher of Colorado’s Out Front Magazine, one of the oldest gay-oriented publications in the country. The Out Front Foundation, the magazine’s philanthropic arm, organized this weekend’s event, and Cunningham said he hopes it becomes an annual tradition.
Cunningham has lived in Aurora for 30 years and said he started work on the festival last year when he and his staff realized just how few resources in Aurora there were for the LGBT community. Most of those resources, he said, were on the other side of Yosemite Street in Denver.
This year is the ideal time for the event, he said, because Aurora is shaking its old reputation, as what Cunningham called a “drive-through city” — somewhere people see usually on their way to somewhere better.
“It’s affordable, it’s got some great destinations, it’s hip,” he said. “It’s surpassing that reputation of the past.”
And, he said, the gay community tends to be the sort of trend setters and early adopters whose arrival often is a sign that a city is on the upswing.
“It’s booming now, it’s kind of hip and cool to be in Aurora,” he said.
The name of the event “Aurora Pride,” is deliberate, Cunningham said. Denver’s event is just called Pridefest and the location is generally considered a given. The event is a regional celebration, drawing from nearby states. With Aurora, that isn’t the case, and Cunningham said organizers have been careful to make sure there was no mistake the event isn’t just celebrating the LGBT community. It’s celebrating Aurora.
“It is about Aurora being proud of Aurora,” he said.
Editor Dave Perry’s column: Aurora Pride is about human rights and wrongs
At last month’s Pridefest in Denver, Cunningham said he and Out Front staff passed out 5,000 postcards advertising the event. As they strolled through the event, he said he lost count of how many people told him something like “Hey, I live in Aurora!”
That excitement bodes well for this weekend, he said.
“The delightful surprise on people’s faces was endearing and promising,” he said.
The event is also aimed not just at the city’s gay community, but at connecting with and including some of the region’s more conservative residents, he said.
“The more that we celebrate and include the conservative side of our state in these celebrations, the more our state will continue to grow and evolve,” he said.
For the city’s gay community, the event is an important milestone and something many say is a sign that is Aurora is growing into an exurb for LBGT families. While many say Aurora has long been accepting of its gay residents, the event goes a step beyond merely accepting the LGBT community, it celebrates them.
“It certainly shows that they are open and welcoming to the community,” said Robby Libuse.
Libuse first moved to Aurora about 15 years ago and he and his husband are now raising their 12-year-old son here.
The festival is being held on the city’s great lawn and Cunningham said city officials have been crucial to helping get the event off the ground.
Libuse said that city involvement is important to him and makes him proud to call Aurora home.
“It’s a great milestone and I think it really shows the acceptance and the diversity of the city,” he said.
The timing of the event is important too, he said, considering some of the recent policy decisions coming out of Washington, D.C.
Aurora’s pride festival will come less than two weeks after President Donald Trump announced a ban on transgender people serving in the military — an announcement decried not only by LBGT leaders and advocates, but many in the military as well.
Libuse said he initially moved to Aurora because it made his commute a little easier and because the homes were affordable and he wanted to be in the Cherry Creek School District. He said it wasn’t really aware of the city’s cultural diversity until he had been here for a while.
In his decade and a half here, he said being an openly gay man in Aurora has never been much of an issue for his neighbors or other community members.
When he served on the parent-teacher association at his son’s school, Libuse said it’s hard to describe how little anyone cared about sexual orientation. It wasn’t just that the other parents knew he was gay and didn’t care, the reaction was more than that.
“It was a non-issue,” he said. “It was such an incredible, warm, welcoming and supportive environment.”
He said the city probably won’t be a draw for younger LGBT folks the way Denver is because, while it boasts the top-notch schools and the sort of housing market he looked for, it doesn’t have the same draws Denver does.
“One thing it certainly lacks is that night scene for the young people in their 20s,” he said.
Still, he said he sees more and more “suburban guppies” — LGBT yuppies — flocking here.
But whether that is a product of an actual influx of those gay couples or merely he and his family spending more time out in the community and meeting more people, Libuse said he isn’t sure.
“I think that has more to do with me and my family being out more and seeing more people,” he said.
Leon Frizzell and Roger Lujan have called Aurora home since 2005, and the couple said they expect more and more gay couples like them to move here.
Frizzell said this weekend’s Pride festival is part of a larger trend for Aurora and Arapahoe County leaders showing they are accepting of the gay community. Gay people see Aurora police and Arapahoe County social services — the agency Frizzell and Lujan adopted their now 10-year-old son through — participating in the Denver pride festival.
They also took notice last week when Aurora police Chief Nick Metz responded to President Trump’s ban on transgender people in the military by saying transgender people are welcome to join Aurora police.
“Stuff like that is I think bringing people more to Aurora,” he said.
And, Lujan said, it’s just a nice place to live — somewhere with quiet, walkable streets, affordable homes and good schools.
“It really has everything you need,” he said. “You can go into Denver if you need but you really don’t have to.”
This weekend’s event is important, too, Frizzell said, because it’s not happening in a liberal, Democratic-leaning city like Denver, but in Aurora, a politically “purple” place where the GOP dominates City Council and the Mayor’s office.
“To have the city itself do that, with the Republican mayors we have had, is a huge stand,” he said. “And it shows the changing face of the local Republican party vs. the national party.”
The couple said they hope the event is also a way for other families in Aurora to see their gay neighbors and recognize that they are relatable.
Lujan and Frizzell said that is already on display at their son’s school where they said they are just another couple of parents to the kids there.
“Now it’s just Mr. L, Mr. M, and the kids accept that,” Frizzell said.
The attendees at many pride fests — men decked out in leather, lesbians on motorcycles or garish drag queens — are all crucial parts of the gay community, Frizzell said, and they have been vital to the community’s advancements. But those groups might not help the average family with a house near Southlands relate to their gay neighbor, he said. Maybe this weekend’s event can.
And being relatable, Lujan said, is an important form of activism in itself.
Just being an out gay family in the ‘burbs is an important piece of that ongoing push toward acceptance, he said.
“It is just as impactful just living your life, being who you are out in public as it is holding signs,” he said.
Growing community
Pinning down just how many lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people call Aurora home is tricky. The city of Aurora and the United States Census don’t compile much data on LGBT people in Aurora, and many of the estimates available are dated.
Rex Fuller, a spokesman for the GLBT Community Center of Colorado, said that data is hard to find.
“I am not aware of a lot of good solid data about LGBT families because not many organizations are really counting,” he said.
Same-sex marriages are up, but he said that is largely a product of the still-recent Supreme Court decision legalizing them.
The Williams Institute at the University of California at Los Angeles School of Law tracks LGBT issues and estimated more than 12,000 LGBT couples called Colorado home in 2010.
Based on 2010 Census data, the institute said Aurora ranked No. 10 in the state in terms of number of gay couples living together per 1,000 residents at 6.5. In all, Aurora had 792 gay couples living together then, the institute estimated. Denver had 15.65 gay couples per 1,000 residents, the institute said, and ranked No. 72 nationally. Aurora ranked No. 562 and trailed other Denver suburbs including Commerce City, Wheat Ridge and Westminster, among others.
One of the state’s leading LGBT advocacy groups, Denver-based One Colorado, cited the Williams Institute data in their sprawling 2010 survey of the state’s LGBT community. Austin Montoya, a spokesman for One Colorado, said the group is set to release a new survey later this month.
A 2015 Gallup poll that looked at the 50 most-populated metro areas around the country said 4.6 percent of people in the Denver-Aurora-Lakewood area were LGBT, the same percentage as Los Angeles. San Francisco led the way at 6.2 percent and the national average was 3.6 percent.
According to Arapahoe County statistics, since same-sex marriage was legalized in 2014, 660 same-sex couples have been married in Arapahoe County. That number peaked in 2015 when 260 couples were married and dipped last year to 190. So far in 2017, 94 same-sex couples have been married in Arapahoe County.
The Movement and Placement Project, MAP, a Boulder-based think tank that studies the LGBT community, estimates there are about 184,000 LGBT people in Colorado, about 4 percent of the state’s population. Of those, MAP estimates about a third are raising children.
The Colorado department of Public Health and Environment’s Healthy Kids Colorado Survey, which is based on surveys of middle school and high school students, said abut 14 percent identified as lesbian, gay, bisexual or unsure in 2015. Of that 14 percent, 7 percent said they were bisexual, 4 percent said they were unsure and 2 percent said they were gay or lesbian.
When asked about their gender identity, 13 percent identified as transgender and 8 percent said they were questioning.
Editor Dave Perry’s column: Aurora Pride is about human rights and wrongs