 This is our second annual Pride Portland 2015 launch party. Launch party is something to get the whole community excited about this year's Pride celebration. We're here to celebrate some of the entertainment that we're going to see over the course of Pride Week and also introduce our marshals for the parade. The full 10-day schedule event gets released tonight, so tonight's a little teaser just to kind of get people excited for the 10 days of Pride coming up in June. Today we're going to have a lot of our performers are going to be people that are like-minded, some are within our community. We're going to have people that are singers, people that are dancers, people that have fashion, and it just you know it's a big celebration of of our pride. We have two different burlesque troops we're performing tonight, one of them being strip-rect. We also have a fashion show with Jack Tar, which is a body-positive, gender-positive fashion blog and political commentary. And let's see, we have Lady Zen and Aquarius Funk are both performing tonight. Just a lot of really great local talents. We're going to tell people who our parade marshals are. This year it's Gia Drew, who happens to be the program coordinator at Equality Main. She's also the co-chair or she's the chair actually of the Main Transgender Network. And our other parade marshal is Doug Kimmel. And Doug is one of the founders, national founders of SAGE, which is Support and Advocacy for Gay Elders. And he brought that organization to Maine and has been a powerhouse in our community. And so it's really a nice honor, both of them, to honor them with being marshals in this year's parade. Last year we had, we had close to, I think we had at one time over 600 people in this room at one time. And then towards the end, it got to a point that they, if two people left, they had to have two people come in. There was a line out the door. And that's what we're expecting tonight. And last year was a Thursday night, which was different than tonight. And, you know, because everybody mostly sleeps in on the weekend and they don't have to go to work on Friday. But so we're hoping that it's going to be an unbelievable crowded amount of people here tonight. I think that one of the reasons that a party put on by the queer community is so much fun and has such a great draw is that it costs us something to do this. It costs us something to say, hey, we're a bunch of gay people getting together in one place. Come celebrate with us. Come be a part of this community with us. It's not just another Friday night drinking at the bar. We all like work and volunteer together. It's very easy and very flowing. Is that difficult? That dealing with difficult people or high maintenance people is very easy to work with these volunteers. This would not happen without an amazing group of people who all volunteer their time. Our performers tonight, the entire Pride committee. We have five work teams and a steering committee of 15 people that work all year long to make sure that Pride happens. Our community sponsors, we couldn't do this without their financial and in-kind support. Port City Music Hall and the State Theater have been just amazing to work with. So we're so lucky to have the venues that they offer to us. So it's really a community effort. It's not about one person or another person. We couldn't do this without the whole entire community. It's worth it the moment that you volunteer. It's important for me to be a part of my community and celebrate. For us it's really the sense of community that's so important and the fact that we are especially in the Portland area. The LGBT community is so significant and this is a chance for us to come together and celebrate what's unique about our entire community, share those experiences with each other and then really look forward to and keep an eye on what work is continuing that needs to be done. That's also so important and making sure that we celebrate our history but also look forward to say, hey we're all still here and to be as cliche as possible. We're still queer and we're really excited about what the future holds for us. Pride celebration to me is about bringing together a community that has historically been oppressed and has come to a place where we can celebrate out in the open thanks to our predecessors who went through riots and jails and beatings and all of these horrible things in order for us to be able to walk down the street proudly, you know waving our flags and saying, you know, we're here, we're queer, get used to it. We can do that now safely because of the people in the past. Website is super simple, www.prideportland.org. Our whole schedule will be up there this weekend and so we have some of most events. I think we've got 24 events this year and all but three or four of them are free. So we're really excited about that and then for the ones that are not free, people will need to get tickets for them. Those tickets will be available this weekend too. It's important to me and people who are here today, I know it's important to them too. It's a great party. Gays know how to do a party.