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OUTGreenville
Greenville NC 27858
OUTGreenville.com
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Over a dozen individuals from the Greenville GLBT and Allies community gathered in 2012 with the idea of restarting a Greenville GLBT Pride Festival. While the
organization and hopes for a 2014 festival fizzled, a website had been established, and will be maintained as a resource to help network the community in hopes
that eventually we may be able to revive the effort.
During the mid 1990's a huge growth in activism in Greenville had led to the creation of the Down East Pride Festival, held from 1996 to 1998. A 1999 festival was planned, but cancelled due to the landfall and subsequent flooding of Hurricane Floyd. Organizers had already planned for that to be the final festival because the organizing group had dwindled in membership to a level that was becoming unsustainable.
A similar swell in organization had occurred surrounding the 2012 effort to defeat NC's anti-marriage Amendment 1. While much energy was expended in the efforts it continued on afterwards with several new organizations, including OutGreenville forming, but the interest declined more quickly, leading to groups going defunct.
Our hope is that this website resource will help spur more participation in remaining organizations and efforts, and that it may assist others to start new efforts. Please share this resource with others and contribute content to be shared with others.
More recently...
2015 saw a new surge in activity within the Greenville LGBTQ Community. That year saw the establishment of a Greenville-area chapter of PFLAG as well as another group which formed to revive the dream of bringing Pride back to Greenville in 2017, also under the name OUT Greenville. That group organized numerous events, but folded before a Pride Festival could be organized. Crave, the local LGBTQ Bar and Restaurant, which was a large part of the effort to restart a Greenville Pride Festival, closed its doors in October 2018.
From 2015-17, Greenville was host to it's own TeaDance Gay and Lesbian Film Festival held at Crave, including a screening of Dickinson Avenue, the [mostly] True Story of the Paddock Club, a documentary about the history of the Paddock Club Greenville's gay nightspot from the 1970s until it closed in 2003. The organizers of the festival intended to move it to Columbia SC in 2018.
Prior to the 2020 shut-down of most in-person gatherings due to the COVID-19 crisis, the UU Congregation of Greenville successfully held Community Pride Picnics in 2018 and 2019, and was also the host venue for monthly Drag Queen Story Hour events starting in December 2019.
Hopes of starting a Pitt County chapter of LGBTQ Democrats of NC are ongoing, and Pitt County is part of a regional organizing effort in Northeastern NC by Equality NC since 2020.