20 years after the Pride parade left Broadway, here’s a look at this year’s celebrations on Capitol Hill: Trans Pride, Dyke March, PrideFest street festival, and more

Pride 1992 on Broadway (Image: comeoutseattle.org)

Twenty years ago, Seattle’s core celebration of its queer communities — the annual Pride parade — moved off Capitol Hill.

In 2026, the neighborhood will still swell with Pride as it celebrates around its rainbow crosswalks and everlasting core of gay bars and dance clubs.

Below, find a roster of 2026 Capitol Hill Pride events that highlight how much Seattle’s celebration has changed over the past two decades

Those 20 years have brought massive change to the city — and Capitol Hill, and an expansion of “the gayborhood” to areas across Seattle and the Puget Sound.

Before making Broadway its route in 1983, the Seattle Pride Parade actually originated downtown and in Pioneer Square. Seattle’s first Pride was actually a picnic.

By the mid-2000s, the Broadway parade and its festival at Volunteer Park had grown into victims of their own success. Broadway’s sidewalks were reportedly tightly packed, transit options up the Hill couldn’t yet handle the massive influx of people, and Volunteer Park was a crowded mess.

In 2006, the big parade moved downtown as it outgrew Broadway where it had been held since the early 1980s and expanded to be a bigger part of Seattle culture. The move didn’t come without dramas — some at the basic neighborhood level with bars, restaurants, and shops worried about their future, some more soul searching as the events around Pride took on a more mainstream hue and more and more corporate sponsors.

Pride parade on Broadway, 1993 (Image: City of Seattle)

The friction birthed Seattle’s modern Pride compromise. The official parade stayed downtown to accommodate hundreds of thousands of spectators, while Capitol Hill launched its own street festivals and marches in hopes of keeping the neighborhood’s history of radical, grassroots energy alive.

For a look back at when the Pride parade crossed Capitol Hill, visit the Come Out Seattle project at comeoutseattle.org, a community-driven digital archive and historical preservation initiative focused on documenting, mapping, and celebrating the rich LGBTQ+ history of Seattle.

The project was launched by gay bar veterans Nathan Benedict and Steve Nyman — the owners of Capitol Hill’s Union and founders of the iconic, long-running Thumpers — Realizing how much neighborhood history risk being lost over time, they created the archive to preserve first-hand memories, photos, and narratives for future generations.





For the 20th anniversary of the Pride parade’s move, Seattle Gay News talked with Benedict about When Pride marched on the Hill:

Benedict said that throughout all the years he’s been a part of Pride, there was always an argument about where to hold it and what to call it. In the 1980s it was called the “Gay and Lesbian Parade and Rally” until 1992, when the Freedom Day Committee voted to add “Bisexual” and “Transgender.” The change initially evoked a strong negative reaction among white Gay men and non-butch Lesbians, worried about respectability politics and the movement not being perceived as “normal” by the public.

Here is a look at this weekend’s Pride events on Capitol Hill:

CAPITOL HILL PRIDE 2026

Happy Pride.

 

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