Kentuckiana Pride Festival Kicks Off Friday

by Stephanie CrosbyThe Kentuckiana Pride Festival starts tomorrow in Louisville. Director Mike Shouse says organizers added a kickoff event, a parade, three years ago when the festival started to pick up a lot of participants.Shouse says one of the goals of the festival is to be a celebration for Louisville’s gay, lesbian, bi-sexual and transgender community, and its relationship with the community at large.“The members of the gay and lesbian community are just that, we’re member of the greater community," says SHouse. "We all have jobs out here, we support organizations, and we’re no different than anybody else in the community in how we live our lives in those respects.”Shouse says the annual festival has grown a lot since it started ten years ago. He says original attendance was about 12-hundred, but last year they tallied about ten-thousand people.