This month, Langley and Coupeville may host the biggest pride celebrations in Whidbey history.

Coupeville’s second pride festival holds its opening ceremony this coming Saturday at 10:30 a.m. at the farmers market field behind the library, followed by a parade which ends in a community picnic and live music.

Langley will also revamp its pride festival the following weekend. The parade will start at noon on June 22, ending with food trucks, vendors, music and more.

“I feel just honored every single time I think about all that we’re doing,” said Em McLoughlin of South Whidbey Pride, “because there hasn’t been stuff like this before, and now there is, and it’s really beautiful.”

Outgrowing the South Whidbey Community Center courtyard last year, this year Langley’s post-parade celebration will be held on the adjacent track field. Many entertainers and community members will take the stage, including grand marshal Mayor Kennedy Horstman, poets, speakers, musicians and more. Later, there will be a DJ and a drag show.

The event will also feature five food trucks, 21 vendors, a sensory tent to provide a quiet place and a kids’ play area with yard games and toys.

The festival will be eco-friendly, McLoughlin said. Partnering with the local organization rePurpose, volunteers will sift recycling and compostable items before going to the landfill. There will even be a press for people to make their own pride shirts to not waste excess materials by creating merchandise in bulk.

South Whidbey Pride formed last year when Jill Edwards met with then-Mayor Scott Chaplin and worked together as a team to put on the entire festival in eight weeks, which became the most successful parade in recent history.

“Okay, well, we have an annual gig,” McLoughlin said. “Let’s incorporate. So, we became a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, and this year have five events for the month of June, which is really cool.”

For Coupeville’s first pride festival last year, sponsored by Andrew Ziehl and Cade Roach of the Meet Market, they didn’t expect a huge turnout, said Michael Ferri of the pride festival committee, but nearly a thousand people showed; he was shocked.

Ferri, who participated in the Gay Liberation Front in the ‘70s in California and New York, will present “A Thumbnail History of the Gay Liberation Movement” Sunday, June 23, at the Coupeville Library.

The gay liberation movement started long before the Stonewall Riots, Ferri said. It started when Karl Ulrichs, a lawyer, publicly defended homosexuals in the 1860s in Germany.

During the Coupeville festival, Carol Harrison of the United Methodist Church will speak on local efforts during the AIDS epidemic and the Coupeville Hands Off Washington committee.

Hands Off Washington was a 1993 effort in response to the Oregon Citizens Alliance, which gathered signatures for ballot initiatives that would restrict the civil rights of public employees based on their sexual orientation.

Coupeville and other communities across Washington formed committees to counteract the Oregon Citizens Alliance. They won.

“It wasn’t just gay people,” Ferri said. “It was a community-wide effort.”

The queer community has come a long way in terms of rights and responsibilities since the 1970s, Ferri said, but they have a long way to go as politicians continually seek to take those rights away. Today, the trans community is most vulnerable, he said.

In the weeks leading up to the festival, South Whidbey Pride has been hit with vandalism, with pride flags stolen across the city. McLoughlin calls upon businesses to “just rainbow the hell out of Langley.”

While pride organizations will replace their flags, if the entire South End is covered with rainbows and the community says they don’t stand for this, it “eases the burden of representation,” she said.

“The harm of a community not saying something afterward is so much more insidious,” she said. “We have to have our community step up and say, ‘Hey, this is not the status quo. This is not okay,’ and respond with a positive affirming message.”

Photo by David Welton Last year’s Pride Parade in Coupeville drew a diversity of marchers, young, old and in between. This year, parades and pride events in Coupeville and Langley are expected to be bigger than ever.