Europride 2008 - two reflections

OK, so now Europride 2008 Stockholm has started.
It started already last Friday with an opening "concert" at the open air museum Skansen. (It's the same place where the closing concert was at Europride 1998.)

The place is really bautiful with a splendid view out over Stockholm. It's a well established concert scene since many many decades. "All" famous Swedish singers have been there.
It would have been interesting to see that place really turned gay for one evening, but that didn't happen. Just some flags and balloons in rainbow colours - nothing more.
The concert was nice with some good swedish singers on stage. But it all turned out very provinsial and uninspired. It was the kind od opening concert that you would expect in any small town running there first "gay pride".
The opening speakers didn't manage to draw any real attention. I'm not blaming them, they did as well as one can expect. But nothing was done to focus on them or give them "extra spotlight".

During the weekend there was the gay film festival. We didn't see anything of that.

On Monday they opened the "Pride House" in the middle of Stockholm. We went there since we expected that they had learned from previous years "failures". But - even though they this year had access to Kulturhuset with a lot of space they didn't manage to create an including atmosphere. It was the same thing as previous years - closed doors, minimal information, excluding atmosphere. We got a feeling that they had chosen to hide the whole thing from people, unless you were very "inside".

We also tried to get a feeling of in what way Europride had put its colours on Stockholm. All buses has rainbow flags, there were rainbow flags along some of the bridges and in front of the royal palace. But we didn't get the feeling that "Stockholm goes gay".
Maybe we had expected too much? It's only a few years ago when "Stockholm Pride" was a very small activity for just a few people.

Pride Park is opening tomorrow and we hope that it will add some points to Europride 2008.