Ninth Edition of Split Pride Taking Place This Weekend!

June the 11th, 2019 - As the ninth Split Pride is taking place this weekend, on June the 15th, this article will take a look into some of the activities the LGBT centre Split is doing as part of the preparations for Split Pride.

The Split Pride participants will gather in Đardin, the event will begin at 18:00, and the route is: Ulica kralja Tomislava, Marmontova, Kino Karaman., Zadarska, Pjaca, Riva, Hrvojeva and back to Đardin.

The participants also include drummers from Klapa Klapa and vouge dancers who will entertain the participants and spectators. The After party will take place in Đardin with DJ's, stands, a bar and performances until 22.00 and then the party moves to Kocka.

TCN had a chat with Mirta and Nikolina from Split's LGBT centre, and they gave us some additional information on preparation for Split Pride. They have a lot of activities to handle before each Pride takes place, and this year they have multiple volunteers for several events. They need to work on collecting donations and have volunteers who are helping with preparations for 2019's Split Pride, as well as DJ's, designers, and videographers.

This year, they engaged a sociologist who created a survey for the event, while Kocka and Kino klub Split are always there to borrow sound system equipment from. The Rišpet Association offers space for all of Split Pride's activities while the Domine Association is there to help with additional equipment and advice. The LGBT centre has support from several cafes and bars who are willing to host their events or at least have a donation box at the bar.

Nikolina said that they usually start with preparations at the very beginning of the year, and then regularly meet to make sure everything comes together and works. They usually have a budget of zero, but are armed with several enthusiastic volunteers.

To include the local community as much as possible, they create several events before Split Pride, like pub quizzes, day trips, workshops, exhibitions, and similar things. Split Pride itself doesn’t have a lot of participants, but most of the donations did come from the local community. Nikolina emphasised that one of the most significant issues for Split Pride is facing a lack of participants on the day of the event – for one reason only, typically, Split locals don’t take part in protests and similar demonstrations, and on top of that, Split's local LGBTIQ community often avoids coming to events like this, even though they’re obviously supportive.

She has estimated there are approximately 3000 non-heterosexual people in Split, while just a few participate in Split Pride. Most of them don’t come because they’re afraid of what other people will say about them in Split, despite the fact Split Pride takes place to protest against such prejudice.

Specific events the LGBT centre has organised this year have been several pub quizzes, an exhibition in the LGBT centre, movie nights, different workshops, and a barbeque night. These events helped inform the public about LGBT centre's activities, and also saw donation collections take place.

From the donation money, Split Pride pays for its promotional material, organisation, and so forth. One of the interesting events before Split Pride took place at the of May was called Kvi(r)z, which is a themed quiz related to general knowledge, as well as a music quiz but related to the LGBT community.

The idea came to Daniel and Zlatko as they were a team participating last year in Chillton's pub quizzes. The quiz participants could, from time to time, create their themed quiz and that’s how they created Kvi(r)z, and it was held in June 2018. Kvi(r)z was first quiz in Split and probably the first one in Croatia to have general knowledge questions but related to people connected with queer culture. This quiz covers general knowledge questions related to science, history, politics, culture, art, film, music, sport, comics and the questions themselves are specifically related to individuals who are or were part of LGBT community, or who were/are related to it.

The idea behind is to motivate the public to make an event for amateur pub quiz goers. Daniel and Zlatko took months to create all of the quiz's questions, but now they have enough information to host a few more quizzes. They’re planning to possibly have another quiz this autumn as everyone who participated in this quiz had a great time and learned something new.

The LGBT centre also has permanent psychological counselling for local LGBT youth, and one of the plans is to launch a radio show for the LGBTIQ community and renovate the space where they're currently based. As they say: Pride is a celebration of differences and protest against prejudice. Split Pride is, as the people of Split say “dišpet”.

For all additional information on the activities of the LGBT centre in Split, check out their Facebook page. 

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