OC Pride is coming home to the streets of Downtown Santa Ana on October 10, moving from the fairgrounds setup of the past two years, including a ticketed 2025 event, to a street celebration that organizers say is shaping up to be the group's largest festival yet. The annual event includes both a parade and street festival.
LAist reports that OC Pride is moving back to Santa Ana after a 2024 decision sent it to the OC Fair & Events Center in Costa Mesa, where the 2025 event operated behind weapons detection scanners with Orange County Sheriff's Department security, according to Eventeny. Organizers cited rising costs and safety concerns when they made that call two years ago, LAist reported.
Bryan Terry, executive director at OC Pride, said the organization received overwhelming feedback recommending a return to Santa Ana, according to the same LAist report. “People wanted Pride in the streets, free and visible,” Terry said. OC Pride board president Brandon Chavez echoed that sentiment in comments to Culture OC in May, calling the return to Santa Ana a homecoming that honors what the community asked for, per Culture OC.
What's Happening on October 10
The festival runs from 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. and will include live entertainment and cultural zones, according to Culture OC. The parade will march down Third Street from Ross Street to Bush Street before the festival gets underway.
A Return to Santa Ana's Roots
The homecoming carries real historical weight. Orange County's first official Pride celebration, the Orange County Cultural Pride Festival, was held in the summer of 1989 at Centennial Regional Park in Santa Ana, where anti-LGBTQ protesters forced police to shut the park gates, according to OC Pride's own history. City officials subsequently banned festivals at Centennial Park altogether, pushing the celebration to UC Irvine before it went dark in 2001 and the original organizing committee dissolved in 2008.
Local activists revived the tradition in 2009 with a Picnic in the Park, organizing in the wake of November 2008's Proposition 8 vote, when a majority of Orange County residents supported banning same-sex marriage. The event returned to the streets of Downtown Santa Ana in August 2012 as an open-air street festival, and OC Pride formally incorporated as an independent 501(c)(3) nonprofit the following January, establishing what became a decade-long street-fair tradition before the 2024 shift to Costa Mesa.
A Timely Moment for Southern California Pride
OC Pride's return to open streets also lands just months after the neighboring Long Beach Pride Festival was abruptly canceled in May, when organizers failed to submit required safety permit documents to the city. Long Beach still held its parade, but the two-day festival was scrapped hours before it was set to open, according to the Los Angeles Times. That disruption comes as OC Pride returns to Santa Ana this fall; the parade is free to watch.
Santa Ana's downtown has long served as an anchor for that community beyond just the festival calendar. The city is home to LGBTQ Center OC, founded in 1971 as a helpline, according to the Orange County Community Foundation. The Historic Arts District downtown also hosts year-round LGBTQ-owned nightlife like Velvet Lounge on 4th Street, a restaurant, bar and drag performance venue noted by Matador Network.
