The parade route ended at Penn's Landing, where a Pride Festival featured community groups and retailers offered information and rainbow-streaked merchandise while entertainers performed on a stage overlooking the Delaware. Headlining the show was Jennifer Coolidge, who nearly stole the show as the buxom nail salon technician in 2001's Legally Blonde.
Winners of the parade competition were announced at Penn's Landing, too, with the Attic Youth Center taking grand prize, the Fruit Bowl Award. (It was a steamy day, and a nice bowl of fresh fruit would have been refreshing, but this fruit bowl was just an empty pun.)
Increasingly, Gay Pride events draw allies - parents and friends of individuals in the LGBT community. But Landis Osbourne, a judge at Sunday's parade and a member of the group that sponsors the Black Gay Pride Festival every April, said such support was harder to come by in the African American community.
"Our community is not as accepting," Osbourne said, "because they are more grounded in what the Bible says. In a world that is often less than inviting, Pride events make us feel wanted and welcome by society."
Nicholas and Anne Scull of Willow Grove were on hand to see their son Craig perform with the Flaggots, a flag-twirling troop that has been a consistent crowd favorite at the Pride Parade.
Anne Scull said her stepson was one of the first to perform in what was once an all-girl troop at Upper Moreland High. A Temple University graduate, Craig Scull lives in Collingswood and teaches dance at two locations in South Jersey and introduced a "homorobics" class at the Camac Center in the Gayborhood, whose nexus is 13th and Locust Streets.
