Denver Pride moves to 16th Street: Kim Salvaggio explains why

Denver Pride is changing things up. Due to construction in Civic Center Park, this year’s event will be held on 16th Street on Sunday, June 28, instead of in the park. The celebration is also shifting from a two-day weekend festival to a one-day downtown event, with additional events planned throughout June.

Ahead of the June 28 parade and PrideFest, Bucket List Community News editor Toni Tresca spoke with Kim Salvaggio, CEO of The Center on Colfax, which organizes the annual event, on our radio show about why Pride moved, what people can expect downtown, how corporate sponsorship is being handled and why showing up still matters.

The transcript below contains the entirety of our conversation, including a discussion about the origins of Denver Pride and how The Center is responding to the current political climate that we did not have time to cover on the radio. Enjoy!

Toni Tresca: Denver Pride is returning in June, but it will look a little different this year. Instead of its longtime home in Civic Center Park, Pride Fest will take place Sunday, June 28, along the newly renovated 16th Street. The celebration is also shifting from a weekend-long festival to a one-day event while The Center on Colfax expands Pride programming throughout the month. To talk about those changes and the importance of Pride in 2026, I’m joined by Kim Salvaggio, CEO of The Center on Colfax. Kim, thank you so much for being here.

Kim Salvaggio: Thank you for having me.

Tresca: Pride has historically been centered in Civic Center Park. Why the move to 16th Street this year?

Salvaggio: Have you seen Civic Center Park?

Tresca: Yeah, it’s kind of a disaster right now.

Salvaggio: It is. It’s under construction, so parts of the park are open, and so they’ve been able to have some celebrations there, but Denver Pride is about half a million people. There’s no place to have it at Civic Center Park.

Tresca: Yeah, some other festivals had already struggled with the compactness of Civic Center Park. You guys just decided not to do it this year and go to 16th Street.

Salvaggio: I mean, I think you have kind of two choices, right? You can either scale completely back and say, “Look, we’re gonna do a very, very small Pride celebration in whatever’s open and available to us at Civic Center Park.” Or we can say, “We’re going to double down and go even bigger.” We chose to double down and go even bigger, which is what led to 16th Street.

Tresca: And so what can people expect from the new layout and that one-day format? You say it’s going to be bigger.

Salvaggio: It is. It’s still the parade that leads us off, and that is coming from Cheesman Park. It will come down 17th Street because, of course, we can’t come down Colfax, where, historically, the Pride Parade has been, and it empties into 16th Street. 

What people will find is a lot of the things, the classics, that they’ve come to love. Center Stage Entertainment: This year we have two new hosts of Center Stage. DeMarcio (Slaughter) had been with us for 20 years and retired last year. So Miss Zarah and FUPA are our Center Stage hosts. Our main acts are Nini Coco, King Molasses and Pattie Gonia. We still have our Latin stage and our World Dance stage. 

It just feels different because it is different. The footprint is actually bigger than what Civic Center Park was, and there are a lot of things that people have come to know and love about Denver Pride that they will find there.

Tresca: Pride is spreading out rather than just being on one weekend. There are events all throughout the month. What does that make possible that a single weekend festival just can’t do?

Salvaggio: Yeah, we decided to go all month long, all citywide.

Tresca: You didn’t exactly make it easy on yourself.

Salvaggio: No, we didn’t. But, I mean, if you get down to the brass tacks of it, the two-day festival, as it’s been held for decades, was what drove a lot of the revenue for The Center on Colfax. Pride is a lot of things, but one of the things that it also is is a fundraiser for The Center on Colfax.

Most people don’t know that it is run by your local LGBTQ community center, which is The Center on Colfax. Denver Pride is in the top five in terms of size in the country, but we are the only one out of those top five that is run by the local community center. So for us to essentially lose the two-day tradition, we were going to lose the revenue that we need to keep the services at the center free.

I would’ve loved to say, “Let’s just move the two-day festival someplace else in Denver.” Guess what? There are not a lot of places in Denver that you can do that, just in sheer size.

Tresca: Yeah, half a million people is no joke. 

Salvaggio: It’s no joke. So we looked at everything from City Park — didn’t get the permit. A lot of people ask, “Why not just go to Cheesman?” Cheesman holds like 12,000 people. You can’t even get the machinery in there to build the stages.

Tresca: It would have been nice because Cheesman definitely has historic qualities within the LGBTQ+ community, but I understand, capacity-wise, it’s just a no-go.

Salvaggio: Yeah, and it’s really, I mean, you become the CEO of a place like The Center on Colfax, and you produce Denver Pride, and you have this opportunity to really not only learn the history but meet the people that made it history. 

They started in Cheesman Park 52 years ago. It was like a handful of folks and some balloons and a poster, and Christy Lane marched down Colfax Avenue, so to think that we’ve gone from that to half a million people coming to Denver to celebrate Pride is amazing. That we get to go back to Cheesman to celebrate some of our roots there, but also, we just cannot fit all of the people that we know want to come to Denver Pride into that one park.

Tresca: Totally, you mentioned the history of Denver Pride. Pride has always been both a celebration and a protest. In 2026, what do you see as the purpose of Pride?

Salvaggio: I still see it as a celebration and a protest. It is absolutely a celebration of come as you are, be the person that you are in full celebration and joy and visibility. It’s so important that we have that for ourselves, but that we also see it in other people, and then it’s still protest. 

We’re living in 2026. There are more than 500 active pieces of anti-LGTBQ+ legislation in our country. We have two pieces of legislation that are signature ballot measures that made it on in Colorado. I think we look back at what Pride has symbolized, what it has ushered in as far as freedoms and liberties; it’s about celebrating those wins and also acknowledging we’re still here fighting.

Tresca: How has the Trump administration changed the work that The Center on Colfax does?

Salvaggio: Well, it hasn’t. We still are here. We are still doing all of our programming, 100% free for our community. There is no barrier, and that is for all of our programming. We have a number of different ones for elders, for transgender people, for Rainbow Alley, which is our youth program, and anything for families needing support, including 12 free mental health care visits for anyone in our community in a calendar year, and all at no cost. 

So I think it affects us; you cannot escape the rhetoric. Just because we live in Colorado with more protections doesn’t mean that you don’t hear what’s happening, and we have folks that show up at The Center every single week that have come from some other state. “Hey, I got on a bus, came here from Idaho, and Googled LGTBQ Colorado. Guess what? You’re the first thing that shows up, and here I am on your doorstep.” We’ve seen a 10% increase in folks needing, and wanting, our support services and community and connection at the center. That’s how it’s affected us.

Tresca: Corporate sponsorship has become a complicated topic for many Pride events. How’s The Center approaching that this year?

Salvaggio: So we did a lot of community listening of how did our community feel about corporate sponsorship, essentially raising a nice amount of money for The Center and those free services. It is complicated. Money means different things to different people. We have said we agree with our community, that there needs to be transparency. You need to know who’s funding us so you can see all of our funders and sponsors on our website. 

We do have some cultural norms or standards of who we are actually not willing to take money from. This would be folks that are directly profiting off of making weapons. That’s just not in line with where I think our community is aligned. We also got a lot of feedback about ICE, and if you were an organization that was giving money or support in some way to ICE, they did not want us taking that money. And then the third one is climate justice.

Some of the asks we have not been able to do. Like, we’ve had asks to not have any single-use plastic at Pride. I think it’s a great goal. We’re not there yet. We’ve also had asks to get rid of corporate sponsors altogether. I would love to do that, but that means I have to find $2 million every year. So if somebody out there is listening and they’re like, “I’ll give you $2 million a year.” Make sure you publish my phone number and my email for them to get in contact with me.

Tresca: I’ll connect you.

Salvaggio: It hasn’t happened yet. But I do think that there is a responsible way to take capitalism and have it fuel our liberation.

Tresca: For people who may be wondering whether showing up to Pride matters this year, why is participation important?

Salvaggio: I think visibility, number one, is the most important thing. We’re not immune to hearing that rhetoric that’s coming all around us all the time. So to be in that space and in that crowd authentically as yourself and to see other people doing the same thing, and then you get to celebrate each other, is just an incredibly powerful moment. 

And I do think a lot about our youth, especially our LGBTQ youth, who have been under attack. It’s almost worse than when I was a kid, and I’m 50 years old. We just stayed in the closet, right? And we didn’t have any representation. We didn’t necessarily hear the person that is with the most power in our country and potentially in the world saying gender ideology or understanding your gender is the same as a domestic terrorist. So I think for especially our youth to see our community come together and push and fight back against that, that is incredibly important. 

I will also say when you show up at the free festival, you come to the parade, maybe you run in the 5k, maybe you come to one of the dozens of other events that we’re holding in the month of June. If you buy a ticket to one of those, if you buy a drink at the free festival, if you get something to eat when you’re there, that is your financial impact that keeps The Center open and 100% free. Your ticket, your presence, anything that you purchase, it directly comes back to keep programming open and free and accessible to our community yearlong.

Tresca: Well, thank you so much for coming by the studio today to talk about Pride and happy Pride, Kim.

Salvaggio: Happy Pride. Thank you so much for having me.