Shifting,broadening,and diversifying: How gay pride organizations are reshaping their mission to build crucial relationships in a complex 21st century stakeholder network

Abstract

This study explores the 21st century context of ‘Gay Pride’. Leaders of gay pride organizations in major US cities revealed through in-depth interviews how they plan and execute what have become major events that attract millions of visitors annually. These leaders emphasized how their mission has changed over time. Forty years of progress toward lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender (LGBT) equality has helped create a more inclusive environment that demands more from today’s gay pride organizations. Accordingly, the leaders detailed how they are adjusting their operational and communication strategy to better forge and maintain productive relationships among today’s immensely complex stakeholder network. The findings contribute to social movement scholarship and offer insight regarding the intersection of relationship management theory and stakeholder theory.

Keywords

Gay LGBT mission pride public relations relationship management social movement stakeholder

Introduction

On 29 June 1969, police raided the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar on Christopher Street in New York City’s Greenwich Village. Police raids of gay bars were common in the 1960s, but this particular raid helped initiate a significant shift in the modern American gay movement. Stonewall’s patrons protested. Their protest carried outside and spread quickly through the local gay community. The ensuing Stonewall Riots lasted multiple days. For the first time, the gay community stood up and retaliated against continued brutality by the New York City police. In the subsequent months, a more vocal, national gay movement emerged. ‘Gay pride’ became the movement’s rallying cry. Annual gay pride commemorations of the Riots began in 1970 and soon spread nationally. Today, major cities around the world celebrate gay pride, collectively welcoming tens of millions of visitors annually.

This study, based on in-depth interviews with leaders of gay pride organizations in 10 major US cities – Boston, Charlotte, Denver, Indianapolis, Los Angeles, Miami, New York City, Philadelphia, Portland, and Washington, DC – outlines what goes into organizing today’s ‘gay pride’ events and explores how the mission of pride organizations has evolved in the 21st century. Today’s pride organizations have a much different operational context than the protest-centered post-Stonewall days. Greater support for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender (LGBT) equality has led to greater acceptance and has transformed these events into citywide celebrations. Accordingly, today’s events must accommodate a variety of stakeholders: the LGBT community; local, state, and national LGBT organizations; allies and ally organizations; religious leaders and religious groups; politicians and political activist groups; corporate sponsors; volunteers; and city governments. At the center of this study, therefore, is the question of what drives effective stakeholder engagement in what has become an extremely large and complex LGBT stakeholder network. Today’s gay pride organizations must manage effective relationships directly with stakeholders, and they must forge effective relationships among them. These organizations therefore provide an intriguing opportunity to explore best public relations practices in a unique, advocacy-driven context. Moreover, the findings offer a way to investigate the intersections between relationship management theory and stakeholder theory.

Literature review

The 1969 emergence of ‘gay pride’ shaped the movement’s messaging and strategy for decades. The ‘gay movement’, however, is not an organization. Rather, it comprises thousands of organizations that pursue specific causes that contribute to the movement’s long-term goals. Therefore, while the public relations literature provides the central theoretical framework for this study, it is necessary first to understand why and how movements coalesce.

Social movement theory

The root of social movement scholarship can be traced to Robert Park’s early to mid-20th century work on how collective behavior can serve as a productive instrument of social change (Turner and Killian, 1987). Blumer (1939) expanded on Park’s premises and explored more deeply how formal social movements develop out of collective behavior. He argued that movements typically begin as general social movements, characterized by slow, unorganized, and inefficient action. Movements eventually formalize, crystallizing around a specific issue or set of issues. Blumer identified four specific stages through which this transition occurs: social unrest, popular excitement, formalization, and institutionalization. Stewart et al.’s (2001) more-recent work supported Blumer’s premise, although they suggested slightly different stages: genesis, social unrest, enthusiastic mobilization, maintenance, and termination.

The LGBT movement best reflects a new social movement, a specific area of social movement theory addressing movements that form specifically around issues of identity (Huesca, 2001). Traditional social movement theorists question the distinction (Pichardo, 1997). New social movement theorists have argued, however, that new social movements emphasize the macro-level questions that emerged in the 1960s regarding the intersection of culture, politics, and identity, rather than the early 20th century social movement focus on systemic economic change (Buechler, 1995).

The emergence of ‘Gay Pride’ reflected core tenets of social movement theory. Certainly it highlighted the movement’s focus on identity, culture, and politics. It also marked a significant shift in the life stage of the movement itself. Some scholars have claimed erroneously that the Stonewall Riots marked the beginning of the gay movement (e.g. Carter, 2004). The movement actually began in the early 20th century; movement leaders and organizations emerged by the mid-20th century (Berube, 1989; Chauncey, 1994; D’Emilio, 2002). ‘Gay Pride’ reflected the better-mobilized and organized gay community of the 1960s and 1970s. It therefore arguably marked the transition, as posited by Blumer, to a more formalized and institutionalized movement structure.

Queer theory

This formalization and institutionalization of gay pride, however, has also reflected a core challenge of new social movements: How do a movement’s members preserve a ‘collective identity’ while accounting for individual identity? Here, sociology literature provides key background, particularly in understanding the transition from the ‘gay’ movement of the early 1970s to today’s ‘Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer’ (LGBTQ) movement. In the early 1970s, for example, gay and lesbian studies addressed sexuality as social constructions; what we know about an identity is constructed with a socially determined lens that reflects a specific context (Epstein, 1994; Seidman, 1994). Thus, the emergence of ‘gay’ became juxtaposed with ‘straight’. In the 1980s, queer theory emerged, arguing that identity is too unstable and too fluid to fit into concrete social categories. Queer theory challenged the validity of pre-determined categories of identity. As a result, however, queer theory’s premise presents a problem for the study of gay pride – especially in the 21st century context, in which the LGBTQ community has reclaimed and championed ‘queer’ identities. In short, if scholars are to focus on collective identity as the organizing element for the study of social movements, ‘queer politics raises perplexing questions about the relations between identity and action’ (Epstein, 1994: 198–199). Similarly, as Gamson (1995) asked, ‘If identities are indeed much more unstable, fluid, and constructed than movements have tended to assume – if one takes the queer challenge seriously, that is – what happens to identity-based social movements such as gay and lesbian rights?’ (p. 391).

Queer theory adds an important layer to the study of gay pride. Moreover, it reinforces why the study of social movement organizations – and how they balance individual identity with collective action – warrants the public relations lens. At the heart of mobilizing collective action in the LGBT community is the challenge of coordinating actions and building relationships across a complex, diverse network of stakeholders who each have specific goals and objectives for the movement itself. In many ways, the challenges raised in social movement and queer theory literature, therefore, are similar to the communication-specific challenges and mandates raised in public relations’ relationship management theory and organizational management’s stakeholder theory.

Relationship management theory

Relationships are the single, unifying concept in public relations (Ferguson, 1984), and relationship management’s framework focuses public relations practice on communication strategies that pursue long-term, quality organization–public relationships. As Ledingham and Bruning (1998) explained, ‘An organization–public relationship is the state which exists between an organization and its key publics in which the actions of either entity impact the economic, social, political, and/or cultural well-being of the other entity’ (p. 62). Organizations must focus on establishing with their publics: mutual trust, openness, involvement, investment, and commitment (Ledingham and Bruning, 2000), as well as mutual legitimacy, satisfaction, and understanding (Dimmick et al., 2000).

Leichty and Springston (1993) added that research also must examine how productive organization–public relationships develop over time. Bruning and Ledingham (1999), for example, developed a multi-dimensional scale that evaluates the most crucial types of long-term organization–public relationships: professional, personal, and community. A professional relationship requires an organization to demonstrate its commitment to a public’s welfare by providing products and services that benefit that public. Personal relationships develop from a sense of organization–public trust built over time. A community relationship is based on an organization’s support of and investment in those things that are important to social aspects of a certain community.

The mandate facing gay pride organizations reflects relationship management’s goals, particularly the professional, personal, and community focus in Bruning and Ledingham’s multi-dimensional relationship scale. These organizations offer a central, often-symbolic service for the LGBT community and movement. They must provide a forum through which members of the community and its allies expect to be seen and heard. Similarly, these organizations must establish personal relationships with pride participants and attendees; pride organizations must demonstrate that they can be trusted to work with each stakeholder equitably. Moreover, these organizations must demonstrate a long-term commitment to its local community and the social expectations of that community. As Coombs (2000) underscored, organizations and publics do expect certain things from each other. If these expectations are not fulfilled, or if the expectations between an organization and its publics are incongruent, then these crucial professional, personal, and community relationships could be jeopardized.

Stakeholder theory

Central to developing effective professional, personal, and community relationships is having a good handle on who the stakeholders are, their influence on the community, and their respective influence on each other and the organization. As Smudde and Courtright (2011) argued, in the daily public relations process, organizations must address ‘three dimensions of stakeholder management – creating stakeholders, maintaining relationships with them, and improving those relationships’ (p. 142). Accordingly, stakeholder theory – typically associated with organizational management and business ethics scholarship – adds an important dimension to public relations’ relationship management framework. The position of stakeholders, defined as ‘any group or individual who can affect or is affected by the achievement of the organization’s purpose’ (Freeman, 1984: 53), informs an organization’s relationship-building framework.

Much of the stakeholder theory scholarship has been limited to the corporate perspective, but the theory more recently has been applied to other contexts, such as non-profit (e.g. Knox and Gruar, 2007) and political (e.g. De Bussy and Kelly, 2010) contexts. Stakeholder theory focuses on the dynamics that influence an organization’s perspective regarding individual stakeholders and their respective positions to that organization. Mitchell et al. (1997), for example, argued that organizations can classify stakeholders based on their varying degrees of power, legitimacy, and urgency. Power reflects the ability of one stakeholder to influence another stakeholder to do something they would not have done otherwise. The extent to which a stakeholder adheres to socially accepted norms, values, and beliefs indicates a degree of legitimacy. Urgency indicates the extent to which a stakeholder requires immediate action. Friedman and Miles (2002) added four core questions that any organization must ask when evaluating stakeholder interaction: Why do different stakeholders influence organizations in different ways? Why do some have more influence than others? Why are certain stakeholders deemed more or less legitimate? and How the does relationship between organizations and stakeholders change over time.

Implicit in stakeholder theory is the question of power dynamics between organizations and stakeholders. While the literature traditionally has highlighted the organizational influence on stakeholders, stakeholder theory evaluates the influence (or lack thereof) stakeholders have over organizations (Smudde and Courtright, 2011). Social media have influenced the power dynamic between stakeholders and organizations. What was once unidirectional communication is now much more dynamic. Stakeholders can be in touch more easily and directly with organizations and with other stakeholders. Today, stakeholder management therefore requires a much more complex understanding of various relationship dynamics (Van der Merwe et al., 2005).

Relationship management and stakeholder theory scholarship complement each other in three key ways. First, similar to recent research that has begun exploring stakeholder theory beyond the corporation, scholars have challenged public relations research to do the same. Dozier and Lauzen (2000), for example, called for public relations scholarship to broaden its focus from traditional organizations to a focus on activist organizations.¹ Doing so does not imply that the public relations goals, or processes, are similar to those of a corporation; they are not. In this study, for example, corporations – as corporate sponsors – are key stakeholders of gay pride organizations. Broadening public relations’ focus allows for exploration of distinct public relations challenges faced by activist (and advocacy) organizations.

The shift in stakeholder research away from a unidirectional, organization-centric focus to a multidirectional, relational focus also parallels core mandates in public relations theory. As relationship management’s premise posits, public relations practice must focus on pursuing mutual trust, openness, involvement, investment, and commitment between organizations and publics. The focus is on establishing mutuality, better incorporating the public’s role in the communication process. It is important for organizations – especially the larger, more-powerful organizations – to seek increased involvement from their publics (Hon and Grunig, 1999). They added that organizations and publics must pursue control mutuality, which is the extent to which various stakeholders agree on dynamics related to power and influence.

Finally, and perhaps most applicable in the context of LGBT advocacy organizations, incorporating stakeholder theory and relationship management theory emphasizes the central role of legitimacy in the communication process. Relationship management places mutual legitimacy as a key marker of a quality relationship (Dimmick et al., 2000). Similarly, core studies in stakeholder theory argue that organizations actively must evaluate the legitimacy different stakeholders hold (Friedman and Miles, 2002; Mitchell et al., 1997). In the case of public relations scholarship, however, little research has explored how establishing and then managing legitimacy can become a more-active, central part of the communication process.

These core dimensions of relationship management and stakeholder theory parallel the challenges facing gay pride organizations. Pride events must give voice to the infinite diversity of the LGBT community and its allies, without privileging one voice over another. To do so, these organizations must establish productive relationships directly with various stakeholders, and they must establish relationships among these stakeholders, including the LGBT population, the broader community itself, civic and political leaders, city planning personnel, the religious community, media, additional LGBT advocacy organizations, allies and ally organizations, and corporate sponsors. As Smudde and Courtright (2011) argued, ‘organizations inherently exist through the communication of perceived needs and desires. In short, it is all about human relationships’ (p. 138).

In the process of examining how gay pride organizations forge productive relationships across a complex stakeholder network, this study investigates whether and how the fundamentals of relationship management and stakeholder theory are reflected. In the process, this study also helps broaden public relations’ domain by exploring the non-profit, advocacy context. Sites of social change provide unique opportunities to investigate best public relations practice and extend public relations theory. As German (1995) explained, ‘Public relations does not just contribute messages and products to the public dialogue, but it also creates relationships that hold consequences for the evolution of society’ (p. 284).

RQ. How do today’s gay pride organizations build relationships across a complex stakeholder network, and what does this indicate regarding the mission of 21st century gay pride?

Methodology

In-depth interviews with 11 directors of LGBT pride celebrations in 10 major US cities – Boston, Charlotte, Denver, Indianapolis, Los Angeles, Miami, New York City, Philadelphia, Portland, and Washington, DC – provided the data for this study (Table 1). Through purposive sampling, leaders of pride organizations in major 17 US cities were targeted initially based on geographic and political diversity. Included in that sample were Atlanta and San Francisco, two major cities that play important roles in the movement. Those pride organizations did not respond, however, to two attempts requesting participation. That said, New York City and Los Angeles prides did participate, which was crucial because of those cities’ significance in the broader LGBT movement. The Stonewall Riots occurred on Christopher Street in New York’s Greenwich Village, making that city’s pride the most significant historically. Los Angeles claims to have been the first city outside of New York to commemorate the riots, in 1970. Accordingly, the name of their organization is Christopher Street West.

Table 1.

Participating organizations.

City	Name of pride celebration	First pride	No. of attendees	Respondent title
Boston	Boston Pride	1970^a	1,000,000	Deputy Director
Charlotte	Pride Charlotte	1994 (break between 1995 and 2005)	10,000–20,000	Co-Chair
Denver	Denver Pridefest	1976	300,000	Event Director
Indianapolis	Circle City In Pride (part of Indy Pride, Inc.)	1981	65–70,000	VP, board of Directors
Los Angeles	Christopher Street West	1970^a	400,000+	President
Miami	Miami Beach Gay Pride	2009 (One held in 1998)	40,000–45,000	Operations Director
New York	Heritage of Pride	1969	1,500,000–1,700,000	Managing Director
Philadelphia	Philly Pride and Outfest	‘Late 1980s’	65,000	Senior Advisor
Portland	Pride Northwest	1970^a	40,000–55,000	President
Washington, DC	Capital Pride	1975	250,000	(Two respondents) President, Board of Directors; Communications Director
Approximate number of attendees across participant cities			3.67–3.905 million

Several major cities claim to have held their first Pride celebration on the first anniversary of Stonewall in 1970. The Los Angeles event, though, is widely considered the first official Pride event outside of New York.

Los Angeles’ and New York’s participation was also key because those organizations represent the LGBT community in the two largest US cities (U.S. Census, 2012). As of 2012, the US Census ranked 8 of the 10 participant cities (Boston, Charlotte, Denver, Indianapolis, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, DC) among the 24 largest in the United States (with Portland and Miami ranked 28 and 44, respectively). New York, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia ranked among the top five (U.S. Census, 2012). The researcher therefore deemed this representation sufficient in terms of garnering the specific perspective of major US cities.

Because of the national scope of this study, the 1- to 1.5-hour interviews were conducted via Skype and used a semi-structured interview format, directed by a central interview guide (see Appendix A, online supplement) that allowed for flexibility depending on individual responses (McCracken, 1988). Face-to-face interviews would have been ideal, in order to best gauge interpersonal and non-verbal responses. Because of budget limitations, however, and the importance of a national sample, Skype interviews were deemed sufficient. During those interviews, participants outlined the history of their organization, their role at that organization, the major planning considerations, the planning process, their approach to communication and outreach, and whether/how their organization’s mission has changed over time. The semi-structured approach allowed participants to focus on those aspects of pride they deemed more salient. This approach also allowed participants to explain their unique operating context. A separate, smaller set of findings resulting from these interviews specifically explored the role of social media in their broader organizational communication strategy. The overarching purpose of this study, however, explored the 21st century state of pride, and how these organizations – with small budgets and staffs – are able to accommodate (and engage) millions of stakeholders.

Interviews were transcribed by the researcher and then analyzed qualitatively through a constant comparative method (Charmaz, 2000), moving from open, to axial, and then selective coding (Corbin and Strauss, 2008). For example, while the researcher expected participants to emphasize the most/least-effective communication tactics and strategies, they instead consistently focused on the central changes to today’s gay pride mission and the opportunities and challenges that result from today’s more inclusive context, in which the LGBT community is welcomed as the broader community. The geographic representation, coupled with the consistency of participant comments, therefore provided requisite saturation. All participants, except one, agreed to use their actual name rather than a pseudonym. That said, to aid flow and readability, the findings reference the applicable city, rather than the individual. While the titles are specific, because most pride organizations rotate leadership regularly, their use in the findings does not present a significant risk to individual identification.

Findings

The participants provided a national picture regarding today’s gay pride celebrations and how the mission of gay pride has changed since the days immediately following Stonewall. They discussed the challenge of planning events that must accommodate millions of people, how pride fits within the broader movement, how the changing place of the gay community in society has influenced how these events are perceived, and what all of this means for ‘gay pride’ in the 21st century. The participants’ comments certainly reflected their city’s unique context, but they also reflected common trends. Accordingly, the findings first outline the operational framework that typically guides the planning of these massive events. The findings then describe the three ways in which gay pride organizations are changing their mission to accommodate changing stakeholder expectations: how they are shifting their mission to accommodate broader community acceptance, how they are broadening their mission to provide more support for today’s LGBT community, and how their mission must reflect a more diverse LGBT community than in the past.

Planning pride

Each gay pride organization must accommodate a unique operational context, but participant comments indicated that they typically follow common planning steps. These events require a yearlong strategic planning process, which typically begins in the weeks following the event itself. As Portland’s Pride Northwest president explained, ‘Our planning for the next year’s festival really begins the day after this year’s festival ends’. Participants explained that they first must have in place the most effective organizational structure and leadership. Organizers also determine the just-concluded event’s overall profit or loss, if they met their strategic planning goals, and what community feedback indicates regarding the success of the event. As the director of the Los Angeles event explained, ‘from August through September we’ll do some more refining of our strategic plan about what do we want to accomplish, what we’re not seeing accomplished … we’ll actually spend two months going through that process’.

Central to this evaluation step is a review of finances and financial need for the organization as a whole, and all participants emphasized that today’s Pride organizations must be run like a business. The director of Boston Pride explained,

We should have strategic plans, and we should have budgets … we’re a business. And it doesn’t mean we’re a for-profit business. It doesn’t mean that we’re not grassroots, but we have to run the organization like a business. I need to make sure that my budget is balanced … that my income and my expenses are healthy.

Los Angeles Pride’s president echoed, ‘Understand your business model. Truly understand where you make money, where you spend money’. The senior advisor for Philly Pride added that, especially for mid-sized Prides, ‘financing is an overwhelming burden … I’d rather set up a bingo table and tell people where their tent is going, but I had to find $35,000. Finances can consume you. You’ve got to be careful they don’t’. Moreover, participants also emphasized that it is important to share their financial state with the community. Being open with their evaluation and planning process, especially their financial state, helps demonstrate organizational transparency and build trust with key stakeholders.

Organizers use the results from their evaluation to then make key determinations regarding the next year’s event in terms of space, sponsors, entertainment, and volunteer needs. In Charlotte, Miami, and Indianapolis, for example, the Pride celebrations are growing rapidly, requiring the geographic footprint of the celebration itself to change almost annually. Among the larger, more famous prides, there is an expectation for headline performers.

With an updated strategic framework, these organizations start formalizing event plans. They secure key sponsors and entertainment as soon as possible. Larger prides also begin determining the next year’s theme, which establishes the base for messaging. Next, organizations secure city permits and, as in the case of Miami Beach Pride, apply for any needed grants.

With the operational framework in place – having secured the space, key sponsors, entertainment, applicable city permits, and event theme – these organizations begin outreach to key stakeholders, including volunteers and vendors. Indy Pride, for example, implemented a tiered deadline system for vendors, where the price increases each time an interested vendor misses an application deadline. Their goal is to have vendors registered well before the event. It also helps them effectively manage the number and variety of vendors. The final step in the planning process is the actual communication of the event, including the event’s theme, details regarding event logistics, scheduled entertainment, and information regarding how individuals and groups can participate. To that end, organizations communicate through a variety of mediums, including traditional and social media.

Participants emphasized that perhaps the most important aspect of their event-specific strategy is that it must support their organization’s broader mission and mandate. The role of these organizations within their communities is changing; their strategy and approach to pride therefore must do the same. Accordingly, guided by this common planning process, the findings below outline the three ways in which these participants see their mission changing: They must shift their mission to accommodate a more accepting broader community, they must broaden their mission to better support the needs of today’s LGBT community, and they must better reflect in their mission and programming the diversity of today’s LGBT community.

Shifting: From gay protests to cultural celebrations

Participants emphasized that they see 21st century gay pride celebrations as cultural, family-oriented celebrations. As always, the goal certainly is to give voice and visibility to the LGBT community, but the community has changed since the days of Stonewall. Denver’s Outfest, for example, recently added a second day to their Pride festival. The director explained,

The Saturday addition is our family day, so we offer expanded family programming. We do dogs in drag. We have a petting zoo. We have arts and crafts for the kids. We have field games for the kids. It’s just a quieter day overall, it’s more of a family focused day.

The senior advisor for Philly Pride echoed, ‘Everybody sort of respects that this is a family event … My kids are now 18 to 22. When I started, my kids were like four and six. I wanted to be able to bring my kids to these events’. The communication director for Washington, DC’s Capital Pride added that it is important to let the broader public see the central role of family in today’s LGBT community. He explained, ‘When the television crews came to the festival we had a family, a kids area. I tried to send them there as much as possible, because I think that’s something the general public wouldn’t necessarily associate with a pride event’. Boston Pride’s director added that she also wished mainstream media would focus on coverage of that organization’s family picnic, rather than pride’s more extreme aspects.

Giving more visibility to families within the LGBT community reflects the corresponding shift in Pride’s mission toward a cultural celebration rather than a gay protest. Certainly, the protest-focused voice remains important for these events, but participants emphasized that they increasingly focus on showing the place of LGBT identity as part of the broader cultural landscape. The director of Denver’s Pridefest explained, ‘As we gain full equality, LGBT will be a culture, like being Jewish, or like going to the Scottish festival … So there will be a lot of changes in Pride across the country’. Pride Charlotte’s chair echoed, ‘If you look at a Greek Festival, it’s not just Greeks that go there. If you look at St. Patrick’s Day, it’s not just the Irish that go there. So, our goal is also to try to make our festival just friendly for the community to come to’. In fact, Boston Pride’s director explained that her organization’s event is citywide celebration, which now is bigger than Boston’s St. Patrick’s Day parade – significant given the size of Boston’s Irish-American population.

As these events have transitioned from gay protest to community-wide celebration, however, pride organizations have had to address the question of ‘going mainstream’ and if doing so is a good thing for the broader movement. The senior advisor for Philly Pride argued, for example, that the idea of ‘going mainstream’ is not necessarily the issue. Rather, LGBT issues are mainstream issues. He argued, ‘We just want to do what everybody else gets to do’. Pride Charlotte’s chair added, ‘Just because you have more Bank of Americas or Budweisers at the festival, I don’t think it necessarily makes it anymore mainstream. Having said that, I think most of the LGBTs in our country are pretty much mainstream. We’re not particularly radical’.

Regardless, participants emphasized that becoming assimilated into the mainstream does not mean negating the uniqueness of LGBT identities. Rather, it means embracing the LGBT experience as an example of a community’s overall diversity and educating the public regarding the LGBT identity. Boston Pride’s director summarized,

It’s maintaining our cultural identity … An immigrant family that’s been here for 50 years may not remember how to make recipes from their culture because they’ve been assimilated into American culture. And it’s up to that family or that community to say ‘yes, you’re American, but there are these wonderful traits that come from your ancestry.’ It’s the same way I look at the LGBT situation. I think it’s fine to blend and just be an LGBT American, but at the same time I think it is very important that we continue to maintain our cultural identities and our traditions.

Broadening: From event planners to community resources

Embracing the distinct traditions and identities within the infinitely diverse LGBT community – even as that community becomes increasingly assimilated into mainstream culture – also requires pride organizations to broaden their overall mission. In fact, most participants indicated that their organizations have developed year-round community resources and support centers. For example, the GLBT Community Center of Colorado (The Center) grew out Denver’s Pridefest. The Center is now a full-service community center that recently moved into a newly renovated US$3.5 million facility and houses a drop-in youth services program; a legal initiatives program, which includes a staff attorney and legal helpline; a senior advocacy program; a growing transgender services program; and, of course, Denver Pridefest.

Many pride organizations, however, are still in the process of transforming their mission. Although the organization already hosts year-round events, Boston Pride recently started a human rights and education committee in order to develop more programming throughout the year for the local LGBT community. As the director explained, it is important for today’s pride organizations to ask, ‘How can we serve the LGBT community in ways that other non-profits, other LGBT organizations, are not?’ The president of Los Angeles Pride explained that one of their key goals is to host events year-round, arguing ‘Pride will always continue to change … So we’ll be looking at not just our pride events in June, but what are some other visible events that we can do’. The director of Portland’s Pride Northwest president echoed that pride organizations must evolve and explained that her organization is transitioning to a new model:

The community’s expectations are changing and we’re recognizing that Pride had gained a reputation for simply being ‘the party’ with no connection to the community that didn’t serve any real need. So then you have younger people wondering ‘what’s the point’ and you have older people not getting any real value out of it. It means more than that. The festival, while it’s the primary program we have, it’s a program. We’re not event planners. We’re a non-profit organization and we need to function that way.

One of the core stakeholder groups these organizations consistently mentioned as central to their broadening mission is LGBT youth. Philly Pride, for example, annually sponsors ‘Outfest’, which is 50% larger than their actual pride event and is the largest youth coming out today in the world. Boston Pride’s director emphasized the importance of educating youth on LGBT history. She explained, ‘Unlike other minority communities, their history is not taught in schools. It’s amazing how some of the kids don’t even use labels anymore, which is awesome. But on the flip side it’s our duty to make sure they still remember where their community is’. As a result, the organization is developing ‘new programming to work with youth and ensure that they’re aware of their community’s history’.

Diversifying: From ‘gay’ to ‘LGBT’ pride

Today’s pride organizations also are reinforcing their commitment to serve the entire LGBT community, which requires addressing the infinite diversity within the LGBT minority. As Indy Pride’s vice president explained, often the events can be perceived as dominated by gay, White males, rather than the true diversity of the community. The goal, he argued, is to represent as many people as possible, knowing that representing everyone equitably is idealistic. The director of Denver’s Pridefest added that organizations must start by ensuring their leadership reflects the community’s diversity. She explained, ‘The committee is not made up of my friends or all people who work at the Center. It’s people that we don’t necessarily interact with every day. We’re planning a pride event for everyone’. As a result, recently they have focused on hosting a more inclusive event, specifically one that better represents the state’s transgender community. The president of Portland’s Pride Northwest explained, ‘Our strength is that we don’t have a specific agenda. We don’t represent a specific piece of the community. We don’t represent a specific viewpoint. And that’s really hard for a LGBTQ organization to say’.

The organizers for Capital Pride in Washington, DC emphasized that the LGBT community should use gay pride events to get out of their comfort zones and learn about other LGBT constituencies. The communication director explained,

I don’t think the intent for pride is to hang out only with members of their immediate community they always hang out with … It goes against a lot of communication theory, [but] the most targeted approach might not be the best, because you want all members of the community to learn and know about all of the events.

Accordingly, organizations emphasized the increasing importance of collaborating with organizations that represent various stakeholders within the LGBT community. Boston Pride’s director explained,

The key is not trying to be the voice of everybody. I can’t speak for what it’s like to be a black lesbian. I can’t speak to what it’s like to be a mother. I can’t speak to what it’s like to be a disabled gay man. I can’t speak to everyone’s experience. So we really try to partner with other organizations that do their work well. There are a number of groups in the city; the Hispanic Black Gay Coalition is one of them. They have the audience. Their communities trust them and we work with them.

Pride Northwest’s president acknowledged that Portland is typically White and privileged. As a result, the organization has worked to foster relationships with different organizations, such as those that run the city’s Black Pride, Latino Pride, and Asian Pacific American Pride. Pride Charlotte’s chair echoed that part of their organization’s mission seeks ways to incorporate less-represented LGBT stakeholders. He explained, ‘We look at it as growing and pulling in more of our LGBT community’.

Guided by a yearlong planning process, these organizations are adjusting their mission in three key ways. They are shifting their mission to accommodate increased cultural inclusion, they are broadening their mission to better support the needs of today’s LGBT community, and they are focusing more on the diversity within the LGBT itself and how pride can better reflect that diversity. Ultimately, participants argued that their mission is not guided by specific political or social advocacy goals. Rather, a core part of their mission is to facilitate a dialog among stakeholders within the LGBT community who do have specific goals and to give equitable visibility and voice to organizations within the LGBT movement. As the director of New York’s Heritage of Pride explained, ‘At the end of the day we want to be the microphone for all of the other LGBT non-profits within the community and the world’. Denver’s director echoed, ‘We say that Pridefest is a platform for you to say what you want to say. Whatever LGBT organizations are out there, then this is the place for it’. Given the endless number of political advocacy organizations in Washington, DC, the organizers of Capital Pride explained their particularly difficult task:

We are not a political organization, and we still get calls asking for our opinion on DOMA or DADT …² I’d send them to the people who I thought were much better suited to answer that. It’s important for the overall benefit of the community to let people who are the experts speak on those topics … It’s not our role.

Discussion

Each major US city provides a unique context that gay pride organizations must navigate, but participants also indicated that they share a common, yearlong approach to planning these massive events. Today’s gay pride organizations, though, must do much more than plan a parade, and this study’s key finding is that today’s gay pride organizations are shifting, broadening, and diversifying their mission in response to a new, 21st century mandate. First, they must shift their mission to accommodate increased acceptance by the broader community; they must engage many more types of stakeholders, such as non-LGBT allies, politicians, celebrities, religious groups and leaders, corporate sponsors, and news media. Second, these organizations must broaden their mission to better support LGBT constituents; they must have a clear handle on today’s LGBT needs, such as the specific needs of the youth and transgender communities. Finally, as gay pride organizations determine how best to represent the entire community, they must acknowledge the legitimacy and expectations of the diverse constituencies within the LGBT community. They must ask themselves whether their organizational leadership reflects the broader LGBT community or whether it is all White and male or all White and female. Accordingly, they must ask whether and how they can collaborate with other community celebrations such as Black prides and Latino prides.

In other words, these organizations must embrace the fundamentals of relationship management in order to facilitate an intricate community dialog among millions of stakeholders. The participants understand the central importance of pursuing long-term mutual trust, openness, involvement, investment, and commitment between their organizations and these diverse publics (Ledingham and Bruning, 2000). They also emphasized the importance of establishing mutual legitimacy, satisfaction, and understanding between themselves and the LGBT publics they serve (Dimmick et al., 2000). Releasing financial reports and pursuing a transparent planning process, for example, help build trust with the community while encouraging community engagement. By expanding the services and resources they provide to the LGBT community, these organizations also are able to demonstrate involvement with and commitment to the important needs of today’s LGBT community. Finally, by ensuring their leadership structure reflects the diversity of the community itself and by collaborating with other celebrations and organizations within the LGBT movement, these organizations are reinforcing the legitimacy of multiple identities within the LGBT community.

Participant comments regarding the need to shift, broaden, and diversify their mission respond to Bruning and Ledingham’s (1999) multi-dimensional relationship scale, which evaluates the most crucial types of organization–public relationships: personal, professional, and community. Organizations that shift their mission to engage the broader community through a commitment to open communication respond to the scale’s personal relationship dimension. Organizations that broaden their mission by providing additional resources and services for their community’s needs are responding to the scale’s professional relationship dimension. Finally, organizations that focus on reflecting the diversity of their specific community stakeholder profile respond to the scale’s community relationship dimension. As participants clarified, it is impossible to respond to all expectations and to reflect all voices. The key, however, is to realize that the challenge exists; the pursuit of quality personal, professional, and community relationships therefore becomes central to their mission.

Participant comments indicated that effective relationship management depends on productive stakeholder engagement. As Smudde and Courtright (2011) argued, organizations must identify stakeholders, maintain relationships with those stakeholders, and work to improve those relationships. In the process, organizations must determine whether, how, and the extent to which different stakeholders can (or should) influence organizational decision-making. Mitchell et al. (1997) argued, for instance, that different stakeholders wield various degrees of power, legitimacy, and urgency. Accordingly, as gay pride organizations reshape their missions, they must make determinations regarding which stakeholder voices are, and are not, being heard; which stakeholder needs are, and are not, being met; and the extent to which their operational structure and leadership reflect the diversity of stakeholders internal to the community itself.

How these organizations forge productive relationships and engage stakeholders also informs social movement and queer theory. First, this study challenges the notion that social movements have a clear, terminating stage (e.g. Stewart et al., 2001). Rather, the findings suggest that movements evolve. The issues and challenges facing today’s pride organizations are largely different from those of the 1970s. As movement members overcame the original, mobilizing challenges, they mobilized around new challenges – indicated by pride organizations’ uniquely 21st century mission. Participants argued that it is crucial for the movement to constantly evaluate the evolving needs by new generations; movements are fluid, indeed messy. Social movement scholarship therefore must reflect a dynamic process rather than a static progression through pre-defined stages. Constant evaluation helps an organization, and in turn the broader movement, necessarily evolve and reinvent itself.

Second, participants offered important insight regarding how communication professionals can embrace the fundamentals of relationship management and stakeholder theory, while addressing the challenges posed by queer theory. In a sense, they argued that organizations must make queer theory – the premise that identities are fundamentally fluid and unstable – a central, organizing principle for their organization’s communication and management strategies. Embracing the true diversity of a community cannot happen when an organization develops programming and communication initiatives around mainly preconceived ideas regarding the relevant publics. Organizations constantly must evaluate which community voices are being heard and which are silent. To do this, organizations must invite the community into the evaluation process and seek open, public feedback. These leaders’ role as communicators is to serve as a platform for others to speak and to facilitate a robust community conversation. In the process, however, the findings show that it is just as important to acknowledge that truly equitable representation is essentially impossible. In other words, achieving productive, long-term quality relationships across such a complex, broad network of stakeholders requires organizations to be completely transparent regarding their successes and failures in engaging different parts of the community.

Conclusion

The central question this article raises is how the study of social movements, grounded in social movement and queer theory and guided by relationship management and stakeholder theory, can inform public relations scholarship. To that end, the findings emphasize the crucial link between organizational evaluation and evolution. Evaluation must move beyond standard quantified measurement of program and communication outputs. It must engage public feedback and qualitatively assess an organization’s direction. The end goal of evaluation is to help an organization (and in this case, a movement) evolve. As a result, Pride organizations have been able to proactively shift, broaden, and diversify their mission to respond to today’s community. They emphasized the importance of organizational mission to the overall process and how the need to evolve is central to executing an effective mission.

This article raises questions regarding how the link between evaluating and evolving can be better teased out in public relations theory. How, for example, does the standard public relations process of researching and defining, planning and programming, communicating, and evaluating (e.g. Broom and Sha, 2013; Lattimore et al., 2011; Wilcox and Cameron, 2012) help organizations evolve? Moreover, the example provided by these social movement organizations suggests that perhaps ‘mutual evolution’ between organizations and publics should be considered in the context of relationship management research.

Finally, the findings suggest possible links between stakeholder theory and relationship management theory. This study, for example, reinforces the merits of using Bruning and Ledingham’s (1999) multi-dimensional relationship scale to explore how organizations develop quality relationships. What this study does not do, however, is investigate how specific types of stakeholder dynamics influence those quality relationships. The question is how the different types of stakeholders (as defined perhaps by their relative power, influence, and legitimacy) inform the types of relationships (personal, professional, or community) an organization pursues or privileges.

Social movement organizations offer rich sites of investigations for public relations scholarship. The pride organizations examined in this article must facilitate an intricate dialog among the LGBT community; local, state, and national LGBT organizations; allies and ally organizations; religious groups; politicians and political activist groups; corporate sponsors; volunteers; and city governments. The community enjoys a great deal more acceptance and equality today than it had during Stonewall Riots, but these organizations understand that their work is not done. Gay or, more-appropriately, LGBT pride remains a central part of the overall LGBT movement for equality. By shifting, broadening, and diversifying their mission, today’s gay pride organizations are responding to a specifically 21st century context, with new challenges, new expectations, and millions of new stakeholders.

Limitations and future research

This study benefits from a wide, geographic sample, but only reflects the perspectives of 10 major US cities. Future research therefore should explore the perspective specifically of smaller US cities and towns. Moreover, the research was unable to garner participation from the Southeast and Southwest. Future research should investigate a bigger sample with broader geographic representation. In addition, because qualitative research focuses on more depth than breadth, these results are not generalizable. Finally, future research should continue to explore how the LGBTQ lens can inform public relations scholarship. LGBTQ individuals and organizations offer intriguing, but largely untapped, sources for new directions of public relations scholarship that could help complicate and develop public relations theory.

Footnotes

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes

Author biography

Dean E Mundy, PhD, is an assistant professor of public relations in the University of Oregon’s School of Journalism and Communication. His research explores the strategic communication and advocacy strategies used by social movement organizations. Focused primarily on the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender (LGBT) movement, he studies how LGBT advocacy organizations at local and state levels craft their communication strategies, the corresponding challenges/opportunities they meet along the way, what this might mean for other advocacy-driven organizations, and how those lessons contribute to public relations theory.

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