Somewhere in the heady swirl of our weekend preparations, we find ourselves flashing back to the intensity of Pride 2021. That weekend was the centerpiece for our first set of events after being locked down for well over a year. We were socially distanced, only outside, legally restricted to half capacity, requiring vax cards, doing searches with face shields, but we were open. A Juneteenth kick off with Everyday People was followed by a Pride weekend with Horse Meat Disco on Friday, then Get Wrecked and Carry on Saturday and a Bushwig event produced by Simone and Matty on Sunday. For the Fourth of July weekend that followed, we invited Kerri Chandler on Saturday and closed it out with our first Octo Octa and Eris Drew b2b open to close on Sunday. It felt good to be back.

Two years before that, we couldn’t have seen it coming. In 2019, the city celebrated the 50 year anniversary of Stonewall riots and the birth of the modern gay rights movement. The streets, bars and clubs were flooded with people on a level beyond your average Pride (which is already epic). Despite being dead in the middle of Trump’s criminal presidency, there was an undeniable sense of excitement as summer hit. It’s hard not to feel the buzz in NY in June, and at Knockdown we were seeing years of hard work coming to a point of fruition that was undeniably rewarding.

A year later, the streets were filled once again, this time with fresh protests amidst the lockdown. The venue, shuttered by COVID, balanced in the same precarious state as all other spaces of public gathering. The movement for Black lives was exhilarating, but the long wait through 2020 was grueling. By the time the spring of 2021 came around and the vaccines emerged, it was hard not to feel a cognitive dissonance. We had been out of commission for just over a year - was it only a year, or a whole fucking year? Were we ready to go back? Would we ever be? Did we have a choice? 465 days after the pandemic was officially declared, music returned to Knockdown Center.

“I remember it all being very fluid,” recalls KDC Director Tyler Myers. “Pride is always extra joyful, people want to go out, the staff is excited, and it feels good to party with a purpose.” The bookending Juneteenth party and Fourth of July weekend were the icing on the cake. Still, it was hectic. Despite the best attempts to keep the staff unified during lockdown, some people had drifted off, or took new opportunities that emerged during the rapid reopening. “It was a scramble,” says Myers, “but the people who came out of the woodwork really wanted to be there.”

The energy at those first weekends was electric, a cathartic rush mixed with grief, nervousness and absolute exuberance. The giddiness was accentuated by Trump’s exquisite run of humiliations a few months prior (shout out to all our Four Seasons Total Landscaping Zoom background users) and a relieved sense of security following four years of ever-present ambient dread. Nonetheless, the Pride celebrations couldn't help but echo the hard-won victories of ACT UP and other AIDS activist groups in the ‘90s. At the start of the lockdown, a video of a 1991 speech by Larry Kramer had been making the rounds: “Plague!” he shouts, waving his hands in exasperation at the audience. “We are in the middle of a fucking plague!” In mid-March of 2020, it felt like he was speaking directly to the present moment. He implores the audience to course correct from embracing the “lunatic fringe” (how resonant that sentiment would soon become), concluding somberly, “and I say to you, in year 10, as we face a figure of 40 million infected people, the same thing I said to you in 1981 when there were 41 cases: until we get our acts together, all of us, and until we learn to plug in with each other, and fight, and make this president listen, we are as good as dead.”

Now in 2024, we’re proud that this sequence – Everyday People on Juneteenth followed by Horse Meat Disco, Get Wrecked & Carry and Octo Octa b2b Eris Drew – has become our annual tradition for the fourth year and counting. And our bodies remember, again, that first weekend getting to dance with you all after having been in our railroad apartments for a year, out of work, washing our groceries, seeing the refrigerated semi trailers at Wyckoff Hospital go from 1 to 2 to 3, and suddenly it is Pride, Pride, Pride, and we get to Open, Open, Open.

That weekend in 2021, the necessity of Pride was front and center. It still is. Amidst legacies of violence, repression, subjugation and shameful state neglect, we were, and are, proud to stand with these artists and organizers in celebration of Black and Queer liberation. Silence equals death, so let’s make some noise. Happy Pride.