‘Be somebody, be you’: Henderson holds Pride festival at Sunset Park

In the hot, mid-June sunshine at Sunset Park in Las Vegas, not long after the start of the third annual Henderson Pride Fest on Saturday, Joey Doty and his partner Brian Gilbert reflected on what the LGBTQ+ gathering meant for them.

“Events like this are important just for us to come together as a community to show support,” said Doty, 30, of Henderson.

“Especially nowadays,” said Gilbert, 59, also of Henderson, “when there’s so much, I feel personally, things have been going well for the LGBT community over the last couple of decades, but just recently it seems there is an awful lot of pushback against the progress that we’re making.”

“I personally am really looking forward to the time when we don’t have pride events,” Gilbert added. “Because I think that that’s going to mean that it’s just OK and it’s normal and people don’t need to obsess over, you know, what somebody else’s sex life is about or who they love, you know?”

About an hour into the pride celebration, which ran from noon to 10 p.m., dozens of people — singles and couples, gay and straight — walked by rows of open-air canopy tents lining the perimeter of a grassy section of the huge park adjacent to a pair of baseball fields near South Eastern Avenue.

The booths promoted insurance and solar companies, a hair styling school, fitness center, jewelry and T-shirt sales and organizations like Planned Parenthood and Nevada State College. Another section featured food trucks selling coffee, teas, tacos, Chinese and Thai food, seafood and corn dogs.

To the left there was an inflated “pop-a-shot” basketball game, bounce houses for kids, a stage with a DJ playing tunes, a bar and a giant pair of inflated hands decorated in colors matching the rainbow pride flag.

‘Be somebody, be you’

“Where’s your dad?” Sania Dela Cruz, 45, asked their 5-year-old daughter, who was leaping in the bounce house.

Dela Cruz, standing in a strapless dress with a mesh tutu, portrays the pop star Pink in a drag show at Senor Frog’s at Treasure Island, and on Saturday, served as the host of Henderson Pride Fest.

“I’m here to bring people together, bring equality and bring … love,” Dela Cruz said. “It’s very important because right now this community is under attack in more ways than one and without unity and without self-love, this community is going to fall apart, so it’s very important that we all stick together and remain one.”

Brent Tyler, 57, of Las Vegas, stood at the entrance to his tent for The Phoenix, a national nonprofit fitness program aimed at helping people recover from addiction through mental health-building physical activities, from yoga, golf, batting cages, bicycling and rock climbing.

Members of the LGTBQ+ community are two to three times more likely to experience addiction, said Tyler, who works as a case manager for a drug and alcohol rehab center.

To Tyler, the reason why is that members tend to go through “a lot of suppression, a lot of not being allowed to be who you are and so when you get a little bit of space when you can actually support yourself, you go crazy because you then have the freedom to do whatever.”

“They all have different reasons for why they started,” Tyler said. “If I had to pick any one subset, it’s upbringing as a child, child abuse and neglect.”

Over on a slope, in the shade of trees, a conversation between Las Vegans Charles Travet, 36, and Jonathan Ikner, 30, was interrupted to get their takes on the pride event.

“It’s just getting a sense of community,” Ikner said. “It’s any orientation, any walk of life can come here to this party and know that you are accepted, know that you are loved, know that you can be somebody, be you.”

Contact Jeff Burbank at jburbank@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0382. Follow @JeffBurbank2 on Twitter.