Albany Pride Festival is back for 2024 – and this year’s theme is We are Family!

Echoing the mammoth ’70s disco-hit by Sister Sledge, the theme for 2024 seeks to reiterate the things that bring and unify the LGBTIQA+ community together, with a focus on the importance of remaining unified against political forces and ideologies that seek to divide us in order to diminish us.

“The theme is about recognising our strength as a community, which comes from celebrating and supporting each other, particularly in the face of the opposition and attempts to divide us – such as the increasing anti-trans rhetoric, particularly,” says Mille Reid, the Festival Coordinator.

“Understanding our Queer history of holding each other up and accountable is so essential to our community. Remembering the legacy of the drag queens in the sparking of the Stonewall Riots and have continuously served our communities as entertainers with a strong political message, the lesbian and bisexual women that cared for gay and bisexual men with AIDS when they were shunned, and all the myriad of ways our community comes together to strengthen each other.

“The intersectionality between the Queer community and people of colour, people with disabilities, people of all backgrounds, shapes, experiences – we’re a broad and diverse group that transcend demographic markers. Unless we are championing every single one of us, then we are letting down our own family.”

Albany Pride Festival continue to build on the importance of the intersectionality and diversity within the Queer community, and this year’s theme of “We are Family” continues the message of last year’s message of “Let’s Get Visible”.

“The term family has a very special meaning in the Queer community,” says Tiger Bird, Albany Pride’s Media Coordinator, “In Queer slang, family refers to someone who is part of the community – for example, we’ll refer to another member of the LGBTIQA+ community as being family, a fellow member of the rainbow brigade!

“It’s not at all difficult to understand where this originated: ostracised people often found their family through each other, particularly when our own families didn’t want anything to do with us. We had to search for our people, and that’s where we found family. Obviously, times have changed, and greater numbers of LGBTIQA+ people are accepted by the families that they were born into – but this feeling of family still remains ingrained in our community and in our subconscious.”

Albany Pride Festival 2024 runs from 22nd February to 4th March, 2024. Tickets are on sale now!