2026 PrideFest in Review

The 30th LGBTQ+ pride festival in Milwaukee brought an intensified spotlight to the city’s queer history, and offered high caliber entertainment across all three days.

Community News

The 30th LGBTQ+ PrideFest in Milwaukee promised to deliver after receiving mixed preview comments on social media and deliver it did. Across an impressive lineup of both local and nationally known drag artists, an immersive history exhibit, legacy guests and creative new performers, the 2026 PrideFest was a weekend of joy and release.

Attendance has grown in the years following the pandemic, heightening the stakes for festival organizers to bring in strong entertainment and offer an engaging experience. Festivalgoers of all stripes attended and enjoyed PrideFest: some who’d met at the festival years ago and came back yearly to celebrate, others who were there for the first time after recently coming out, and others still who were parents of LGBTQ+ youth there to support and have a good time. It didn’t hurt that many carnival rides were available for thrills in the ordinarily performance and dance-oriented festival.

As usual, vendors and local organizations filled the grounds with pop-up tents and tables. A rich smattering of advocacy, faith formation and civic services set up shop in the Health and Wellness area, meanwhile local makers sold fans, jewelry, clothing and artwork. 

President and CEO of Milwaukee Pride Wes Shaver spoke proudly of the collaborative and mutually respectful PrideFest team. “We have an organizational culture that’s thriving ... our event is amazing because people have an unconditional love and respect for one another here.” 

Shaver also expressed gratitude for the support of Milwaukee’s cultural festival organizers, many of whom were present at Pride to relish in their shared joys of festival-hosting on the Henry Maier grounds. He adds, “We’re a part of this iconic city of festivals, and the best thing about Milwaukee is that the social fabric here is stronger than anywhere. It really is.”

Performances Big and Small

One of the benefits to hosting on the Summerfest grounds is, of course, its bounty of stages. The Johnsonville Stage, known during Pridefest as The Intersection Stage, hosted many burgeoning artists from Milwaukee and beyond. Multi-piece funk and hip-hop band Mother Fortune performed a high energy set, interacting directly with many audience members and taking them on an emotional journey between originals and covers of songs like Mariah Carey’s “Fantasy.” Chicago-based hip hop artist Mami Zaddy followed Mother Fortune on Friday evening, inviting her posse of fans and producers up on stage for track after track speaking to uniquely queer and Latina experiences. 

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Lydia B. Collins, Suzie Toot and Kori King, a trio of queens known by “RuPaul’s Drag Race” followers as “Butt Toot King,” were set to perform Thursday night. Due to prior bookings, King had to drop out at the last minute — but the show went on with Collins, Toot and Olivia Lux, plus current “All Stars” contestant Aura Mayari.

Asked what performing at a local pride celebration meant to them after gaining such elevated exposure on “Drag Race,” the queens all shared a message of unity, spiteful joy and support for queer youth. Mayari and Collins specifically spoke on how their elevated platform from “Drag Race” afforded them to be extremely visible to queer youth who just want to know “they aren’t alone” (Mayari). Collins said she identified with LGTBQ+ youth who view drag as a beacon for their burgeoning queerness. “I was one of those kids who needed this to look up to.”

All four expressed the urgency of LGBTQ+ gatherings in the present sociopolitical moment. “It’s so important to get face to face interaction with your community and to see that...you’re not alone in a [far-right] land of horror,” said Toot. “Things are possible when you know that the community is there.”

Collins and Lux specifically emphasized the importance of performances in more acutely local settings like Milwaukee’s PrideFest versus the big stages they now grace on tours. “You said this is a local pride, for me this is the height, the big leagues,” said Collins. “We’re honored.” Lux spoke to the intersection of her identities as a Black queer performer: 

“As a POC drag queen and someone from the ballroom community, being in [smaller] spaces…I get to be representation that I saw as a young person. I’m also a [seamstress], so I think of this as the beginning stitches of a garment…the big stages are incredible, don’t get me wrong, we love it. We love a finished garment. But it’s all about the beginning stitches.”

The 10 p.m. show really reflected the Ru girls’ expressed values; each queen played to their strengths, but as opposed to some drag shows of Pridefests past, it was cohesive from start to finish without awkward gaps or shifts in aesthetic material. Lux began with an empowering number in a highlighter green leotard, robe and hat, evocative of her roots in the ballroom scene; Mayari followed with a kink-slanted Beyonce medley and later her newly released single “Dungeon”; onto Toot, who performed an ingenue-like rendition of Judy Garland’s “Over the Rainbow,” then Collins’ Lady Gaga set in a beautifully ugly fluorescent pink chevron cat suit.

It was a true drag revue, one queen handing off the stage seamlessly to another until the final few numbers: a “Hot Honey Rag” duet between Lydia B. Collins and Suzie Toot (or Butt Toot, if you will) and a big finish with all four queens. It was reminiscent of high art drag collaboratives such as Sasha Velour’s Nightgowns in which each queen has a chance to shine in their specialty while different groupings of the artists perform together, interestingly merging their niches.

30 years of PrideFest, decades more of LGBTQ+ Milwaukee History

This being an anniversary year for the festival brought a spotlight onto the event’s regular history programming, especially against the backdrop of anti-trans and anti-gay attacks by the Trump administration. Vince Tripi and Jackie Scott presented an interactive history activity, creating a community pride flag made up of fabric squares that festival-goers could adorn however they chose. The community art project honors the legacy of Gilbert Baker, creator of the original pride flag. “[He] was out dancing and saw all different shades of people...and he said, ‘it’s like a rainbow of humanity,’” explained Scott of the inspiration for the first pride flag.

The project was also thought up in response to the removal of the pride flag from the Stonewall National Monument earlier this year “When that flag came down, we said, ‘What can we do as a queer community? What do we want to raise up?’ ...[we wanted] to create an experience of joy when right now there’s a lot coming at us as a queer community that is not joyful,” Scott furthered.

Importantly, the history exhibit appeared better attended and more recognized by festivalgoers than in previous years. Attendees of all ages took part in the community pride flag creation and stopped to read about Milwaukee’s LGBTQ+ history.

Don Schwamb, founder of the Wisconsin LGBTQ History Project and former member of the PrideFest programming team, expressed great fondness and pride for how far Milwaukee’s embrace (or lack thereof) of the queer community has come since he first came out in the 1970s. “It’s great to see people celebrating out in the open, not at a bar...[we deserve] to not be as afraid to be gay these days.” 

Ann Hanlon, head of digital collections and initiatives for UW-Milwaukee Libraries, echoed the importance of preserving history for this very reason. “Oftentimes, LGBTQ+ [progress] is thought of as being coastal, when actually Wisconsin has a really deep history of being fairly progressive ... it’s a history that has been underrepresented, and it’s important for people to see it and take pride in it.”

The Shepherd Express is a proud supporter of PrideFest and Milwaukee’s Pride Parade.

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