Celebrating diversity doesn’t have to end at Pride month. Adding a variety of cultural events into your corporate culture calendar will build a loyal connection between brands and diverse cultures.
Explore the world through different lenses at a cultural art exhibit. This will help employees see how other cultures perceive the world around them.
The Golden Age of Hollywood
The Golden Age of Hollywood was a time when the movie industry flourished and produced movies with classic stars like Jean Harlow, Marilyn Monroe, Lucille Ball, and Charlie Chaplin. It was a time of glamour and success where studios could capitalize on their famous stars and produce vehicles for them to try out different roles and make money.
After the second world war slowed movie production down, the industry changed. People went into the military, and the focus moved away from escapism to more serious subjects.
In 1986, Greater Palm Springs Pride was founded. It started as a dinner and variety show titled Sizzle. Then in 1997, the city approved the first domestic partnership ordinance. In 1998, the Parade and Festival were moved to Demuth Park. It also became a 501(c)3 non-profit.
The Retirement Community
In a time of growing national anti-LGBTQ sentiment, Palm Springs residents are proud to have a vibrant retirement community that is accepting and inclusive. Whether you are a single gay man or woman, a couple or a family, the Palm Springs LGBT retirement community has something to offer everyone.
Greater Palm Springs Pride celebrates the anniversary of the Stonewall riots with a weekend of events including a Friday night reception, a Saturday Eartha Kitt show at the Palm Springs Convention Center and a Sunday country fair. The festival also features the first ever Pride on the Page book event with 40 LGBTQ+ authors, a concert by singer-songwriter David “Jax” Kelly and a talk by Golden Globe and Emmy Award winning actress Sharon Gless.
The parade includes a new 20-foot-tall character balloon depicting same-sex couples Adel and Eve and Adam and Steve. The grand marshals are the 4,000 same-sex couples who married in California this past spring and serve as a reminder of how far the fight for equality has come in just one year.
The City’s First All-LGBT Mayor
Until recently, Palm Springs was “a buttoned-up little town,” Gray says. The goody two-shoes glamour of the ’50s gave way to more permissive attitudes in the ’60s, but the city’s conservative old guard remained in control of the town council and local elections.
In 2017, that changed. Palm Springs voted in America’s first all-LGBT City Council, electing three gay men and a transgender woman to the five-member board. What a milestone! Yet in this wealthy desert oasis, the change went largely unnoticed. The city drew no rainbow flag over City Hall, held no parade to celebrate and hardly even made a proclamation. Instead, the council members went about their business and made decisions that addressed LGBTQ issues but also climate change, housing affordability and public safety. They joined legal briefs on national and international policy matters and worked on a variety of community development projects. Their work reflected a community’s deep dedication to making the world a better place.
Today’s Palm Springs
Long before Will & Grace, Brokeback Mountain or Queer Eye, local gay and lesbian artists and activists launched their own show with Nicholas Snow’s iconic public access TV series Tinseltown’s Queer. A brainchild combining media savvy and queer activism, the program reached up to 600,000 households on four different cable systems throughout much of the 1990s.
In 1986 Greater Palm Springs Pride began organizing a modest dinner party-style event for gay and lesbian community members to register voters, ratify safety measures and assert a sense of identity among marginalized groups. The events grew to include parades and festivals.
This year, the Desert Business Association named Greater Palm Springs Pride its Organization of the Year. A record number of attendees attended the three-day Pride weekend including the Daddy Warbucks Drag Celebration and Pride on the Page, a book festival featuring 40 LGBTQ+ authors. Despite growing national anti-gay sentiment, Greater Palm Springs Pride continues to stand up for the rights of all people in their hometown.
