Disabilities Beat: How can LGBTQ+ Pride festivals be more accessible? A look at Buffalo

Warm weather and sunny skies make summer the perfect time to go to festivals in Western New York and Southern Ontario. But for people with disabilities, festivals are sometimes set up in a way that is difficult to navigate, overstimulating or inaccessible.   

WBFO’s Grant Ashley took a deep dive into accessibility the LGBTQ+ Pride festivals held in Buffalo and Toronto this summer. Ashley sat down with disabled festival-goers, pride organizers and disability advocates to determine how accessible those festivals are, and what organizers are doing to improve them. Here’s what he found.

Note: This is part two of a two part series. You can find the first story here.

PLAIN LANGUAGE DESCRIPTION: Some festivals have barriers that make it hard for disabled people to attend. WBFO’s Grant Ashley spoke about accessibility with attendees and organizers of LGBTQ+ Pride festivals in Buffalo and Toronto. In recent years, organizers in Buffalo and Toronto have worked with disabled people to improve accessibility at Pride festivals. Some disabled people still found it hard or impossible to go to LGBTQ+ Pride festivals because of crowds, hot weather and COVID-19 risk. Some disabled people have created more accessible pride events, but they say big pride events should still be accessible.

TRANSCRIPT

Emyle Watkins: Hi, I'm Emyle Watkins and this is the WBFO Disabilities Beat.

Warm weather and sunny skies make summer the perfect time to go to festivals in Western New York and Southern Ontario, but for people with disabilities festivals are sometimes set up in a way that is difficult to navigate, overstimulating, or inaccessible. This week, WBFO reporter Grant Ashley has a deep dive into two local LGBTQ+ Pride festivals that happened this summer in Buffalo and Toronto. According to a human rights campaign analysis of CDC survey data, 36% of LGBTQ+ adults self-report having a disability compared with 24% of non-LGBTQ plus adults. With the likelihood these festivals would have a significant attendance from the disability community, Ashley asks what these festivals are doing to make their events more accessible. Here's what he learned. This is the second installment of a two-part series. You can find both parts on our website at WBFO.org.

Grant Ashley: Ron Ward went to the Buffalo Pride Parade this year, but he skipped the Pride Festival. Last time they attended the festival in 2022, Ward who is disabled and uses a cane had to wait in a long line because there wasn't a separate accessible entrance, and once inside there weren't a lot of places for him to sit down.

Ron Ward: There was a guy who was walking down the line and he was apologizing to people with mobility aids and stuff because he felt so bad that no one had planned ahead for people with disabilities to be able to kind of skip the line because there were tons of people with canes and walkers standing in this line for, I think I was in the line for at least an hour and I had a cane, and this man was like, "I'm so sorry that no one planned better for you."

Grant Ashley: Organizers of Buffalo Pride say they're aware of experiences like Ward's and they're actively working to make the parade and the festival more accessible. For the summer's festivities, organizers reached out to disability advocacy organizations for advice and they ended up implementing new accessibility features. Organizers put an accessible viewing platform along the parade route and they added an accessible entrance to the festival, purposefully located not far from the main stage's accessible viewing area. Although attendees with disabilities would still have to wait in the box office line if they didn't buy their ticket in advance. This year's festival also included a sensory cool-down tent with fans and earplugs and an alcohol-free sober tent, both of which were new.

Latrese Myers: We get together to start the planning and that planning starts with taking a look at the year before, like what worked, what didn't work, what can we improve? Because planning any event, it's really important for us to understand where are there opportunities for us to go further, do better, everything that,-

Grant Ashley: That's Latrese Myers. She heads the marketing and communications team at Evergreen Health, which organizes and sponsors Buffalo Pride. She says that her team's conversations with disabled activists were crucial to improving accessibility at this year's Pride events.

Latrese Myers: I learned a lot personally and also as a person who plans events about the ways that we could look at every event that we planned differently, and they gave us a lot of really good insight and pages and pages of notes, things that we were already doing and things that we were able to change and things that we're going to continue to do.

Grant Ashley: A large part of making events like Buffalo Pride equitable to disabled attendees involves making sure the event venue is accessible. Canalside, where the Buffalo Pride Festival is held is mostly grass and cobblestone streets, both of which can be barriers for people using mobility aids according to Dave Whalen, the Director of Niagara University's Institute on Disability Awareness. Whalen also informally advised Buffalo Pride organizers on how to make this year's Pride events more accessible.

Dave Whalen: Your choices are minimal. If you put mats down, the cost is extensive. When you're doing an outdoor event, you're only going to be limited to where you're at, and outdoor events are going to be mainly grass. If you're doing something that's going to be in the street, then you're good. The downside of that is if it's a hot day, who wants to be walking around on concrete for two hours?

Grant Ashley: But Whalen and Myers agree that there isn't really a better place to hold this festival. Despite its relatively inaccessible grounds, Canalside checks all the boxes. It's outside, centrally located right next to Buffalo's Metro line and big enough to accommodate 8,000 people in a stage. Myers says that Buffalo Pride organizers do everything they can in the weeks before the festival to make sure Canalside is as accessible as possible.

Latrese Myers: I'll say that the team at Canalside, they work closely with New York State and the city of Buffalo to ensure that Canalside is an accessible venue on a day-to-day basis, and we work arm-in-arm with them every single day, every single week leading up to the event to ensure that the event is safe and user-friendly for everyone. A month or so before the festival happened, we were out there with measuring tape, measuring out what size space do we need for the viewing area, what kind of platform do we need?

Grant Ashley: But while Toronto Pride's website extensively lists the accessibility resources available to attendees, Buffalo Pride's website doesn't. It mentions the main stage's accessible viewing area, and warns disabled attendees about the grass and cobblestone streets at Canalside. But as of the weekend Pride was held, it didn't say anything about the sensory tent or the accessible viewing area for the parade, according to the Wayback Machine. Organizers mentioned new accessibility features in at least one local news interview on WGRZ, and they posted about the new accessibility features on Facebook and Instagram, but we could only find one post on each platform about a week and a half before Pride weekend. When asked, a spokesperson for Evergreen said they posted, "Several times about accessibility." Many disabled people research the features that are important to them well in advance of an event. Courtney Deuro says she researches accessibility for events weeks in advance. Deuro is disabled and has chronic lung failure and chronic restrictive pulmonary disease, which means she has to bring oxygen tanks to concerts, festivals, and other events.

Courtney Deuro: It's not something you can just do a week, like three days before an event, let alone a week. It might take two weeks depending on how far in advance your ride may require you to plan. If you're relying on a family member, then they need to know ahead of time if they need to take work off or maybe they have childcare. They have to figure out someone to watch their kid so that they can drive you to the event. Things that able-bodied people don't have to worry about.

Grant Ashley: Ward says the lack of online information about accessibility is the reason they haven't attended since 2022.

Ron Ward: I went to the festival and because of the accessibility, I did not go back the next year, but I did look on their website in 2023 to see if they had mentioned improving accessibility, and they didn't mention it, so I was like, I'm going to figure they didn't do it. This year I didn't even bother to look. I was just like, I got my plans after the parade. I don't need the festival.

Grant Ashley: Disabled Buffalonians have also taken matters into their own hands by creating their own accessible events. Artist, Bianca L. McGraw who has chronic pain and a mobility condition has helped organize a free barbecue event called the Queer-B-Q in the past. This year's Queer-B-Q is held at a bakery on Buffalo's West side of the weekend after Buffalo Pride. McGraw says, the event is a more intimate free alternative to the Buffalo Pride Festival, which costs $15 to attend.

Bianca L. McGraw: People donate money for food. People just show up. They have DJ and everything, but it's all small space, and so people can come and sit on the little picnic tables, relax, eat a little food where people will help make food for them. So that's kind of nice, so little small stuff like that.

Grant Ashley: But while disabled people have forged their own ways of celebrating pride, Ward says that disabled people should have access to larger LGBTQ+ community events, including Buffalo Pride.

Ron Ward: Pride needs to be inclusive because if it's not for everyone, then it's not really Pride. There are so many watching the Pride Parade, seeing how many people have signs that are about like, oh, we need to make sure this group is included and this group is included, because if they're not included, it's not really Pride, and that applies to disabled people too.

Grant Ashley: Buffalo Pride organizers at Evergreen say they're in the process of reviewing feedback from this year's Pride events. They also said that they would continue to work with disability advocacy groups to improve accessibility, and they plan on applying what they've learned about accessibility to other Evergreen events. Grant Ashley, WBFO News.

Emyle Watkins: You can listen to the Disabilities Beat segment on demand. View a transcript and plain language description for every episode on our website at WBFO.org. I'm Emyle Watkins. Thanks for listening.