WeHo Pride Arts Festival: Taxpayer-Funded Ghost Town at the Wrong Address – Late May, Wrong City, and Zero Crowd

That’s right. While West Hollywood boasts a beautifully renovated Plummer Park that cost taxpayers millions as part of larger park bond projects (including a $9.25 million allocation from a 2011 bond that ballooned into far bigger plans), the city chose not to use its own sparkling public space for these taxpayer-funded “arts” events. Instead, the free programming gets shipped across the border to LA’s LGBT Center, while the big-ticket OUTLOUD Music Festival—the one people actually pay for— gets the prime real estate right in West Hollywood Park. This incestuous little “partnership” between WeHo Pride and the LA LGBT Center reeks of opportunism and potential financial misgivings. The City of West Hollywood budgeted a cool $7,224,300 from the general fund for WeHo Pride 2025 alone. On top of that, WeHo funnels hundreds of thousands more directly to the LA LGBT Center every year through specific service contracts—mental health services (~$149k–$170k), sexual health programs (~$223k), WeHo LIFE youth/homeless services (~$125k–$175k), and more. The City of Los Angeles kicks in its own slice too: hundreds of thousands in contracts receivable.

No one has uncovered hard proof of outright fraud or money being pocketed yet, but someone should get on it before the state of California outlaws investigative journalism with legislation AB 2624. When a city spends millions on Pride programming, routes free arts events to an out-of-town nonprofit it already pays handsomely, and watches the “festival” turn into a literal ghost town while the associated parties still get paid—well, the optics are terrible.

🌈 Celebrate Pride all month long in West Hollywood! From the WeHo Pride Arts Festival and WeHo Pride Street Fair to the Women’s Freedom Festival and the iconic WeHo Pride Parade, there’s something for everyone!

Check out the full lineup: https://t.co/W1BkO1gR4b 🎉 pic.twitter.com/VZfoczesV3

— City of West Hollywood (@WeHoCity) May 20, 2026

Local journalist and commentator Belissa Cohen captured the reality on a beautiful, perfectly sunny LA Saturday. Videos and photos show a practically empty courtyard and empty street at the LA LGBT Center, a handful of stragglers, and the superimposed mental sounds of crickets. Where was everyone? The same community that feigns deep interest in queer arts, poetry, cabaret, and workshops apparently couldn’t be bothered to show up. Lack of advertising? Or maybe—just maybe—the “arts” angle isn’t the draw it pretends to be when the real party is the ticketed OUTLOUD spectacle back in WeHo.

Even better: one of the few things actually drawing attention was a table dedicated to “Justice for Juniper.” Juniper Blessing, a 19-year-old trans woman, was brutally murdered in Seattle earlier this year—stabbed more than 40 times in a laundry room in what some are speculating was a hookup or date gone horribly wrong after the alleged killer discovered she was biologically male. Why exactly this out-of-town tragedy warranted a table at a WeHo Pride Arts Festival is anyone’s guess. The table featured a hand-scrawled sign that looked like an afterthought: “Capitalism can’t tolerate trans people so lets overthrow it.” Grammatically incorrect and dripping with irony.

Capitalism is precisely what allows WeHo Pride to exist in its current bloated form—corporate sponsorships for OUTLOUD, taxpayer subsidies for the free stuff, and a municipal machine that keeps the grift rolling whether crowds show up or not. Fewer attendees just means fewer people to hand out the free swag while the vendors, producers, and partner nonprofits still cash their checks.

This is peak progressive governance in action: spend millions of other people’s money on events in the wrong city at the wrong time, watch them flop, blame lack of advertising instead of lack of interest, and keep the cozy funding pipeline flowing between City Hall, the LA LGBT Center, and the Pride industrial complex.

West Hollywood’s beautifully renovated parks sit ready and waiting. The LGBT community claims to love the arts. Yet the courtyard was empty. The only thing thriving is the grift—and the increasingly obvious disconnect between the rhetoric and the reality on the ground. Taxpayers deserve better than this expensive, empty charade.