By Dulce Carrillo
Techno music, food and go-go dancers brought out a wonderful day outdoors for the Gay Pride Festival.
East Los Angeles College celebrated their first gay pride event at the Performing and Fine Arts Complex, last Thursday from 10 a.m. – 6 p.m. The crowd of people began to arrive around noon when the go-go dancers came out with their unique style of rainbow outfits.
The go-go dancers consisted of two females name Arielle Merlos and Tierra Oliver, and three males name Ronnie Cano, Charles Veasey and Frankie Barcenas, who is also known as Skittles.
Cano and Barcenas wore outfits that attracted the crowd. Cano wore puffy rainbow leggings that went from the ankle to the knee with grey boxers and danced with rainbow mini flags. Along with Cano, Barcenas wore tight grey leggings, shirtless with a rainbow Mohawk.
When Cano heard about the first gay pride event, he was excited and looking forward on that day to come. “They’ve come so far,” said Oliver.
Celebrating the gay pride united and created a positive change in ELAC. “This is the perfect way to end the semester,” said Ashley Diaz.
The Premier Social Network for Gay and Bi-men program assisted at the gay pride and were giving out cheesy colorful glasses, candy and condoms. They also had a raffle of guessing how many condoms were in a jar. Few of the contestants guessed the amount of condoms and won a T-shirt. At the Complex, there were also stands for STD testing, selling clothes and food.
In the afternoon, there were a couple performances. One was by go-go dancer Veasey, who danced to “Run the World (girls),” by Beyonce. He had the crowd pumped and clapping hands while he was doing his dance. The second performance was by Veasey and Barcenas who danced to another Beyonce song. The last performance was by Riri who danced to “Where have you been,” by Rihana.
There were couple of announcements in between and also a few certificates for recognition of acceptance in the community. Especially for not giving up of being gay and not letting the community put them down.
Before ending the celebration, the band The Zoo performed and gave a pleasant show to the crowd that stood around. Being the first gay pride at ELAC, many people stopped by to support the gay community and kept a positive environment.