On a Friday night in early June, the dance floor at Play Dance Bar has been transformed into a green room as city leaders, from Metro Councilmembers to the Nashville Pride board, get ready to perform for the organization’s marquee fundraiser: a community drag show.
Board member Brandon Norfleet’s will be doing drag for the first time, debuting on the same stage where many queens from RuPaul’s Drag Race got their start. Norfleet’s makeup artist is working with paint-like concealer and a nuclear-pink blush to transform him into his drag persona — “Baby Aspartame.”
“Because I’m obsessed with Diet Coke. I’m one of those really annoying Diet Coke people,” Norfleet said.
Marianna Bacallao WPLN NewsDrag performer Ki’Ari helps transform Nashville Pride board member Brandon Norfleet into Baby Aspartame for a drag fundraiser on June 12, 2026.
Norfleet may be new to drag, but he’s not new to Nashville Pride; he’s been going for more than a decade.
“When I first moved here, I don’t think we had a parade yet,” Norfleet said. “Last year was the biggest turnout for a Pride parade ever.”
But while Pride remains popular with the community, it’s become less popular with corporate sponsors. In an age of drag bans and DEI reversals, many long-time donors have pulled funding.
MORE: TN’s ‘drag ban’ is here to stay. Here’s why LGBTQ advocates don’t mind.
It’s a problem for Pride festivals across the country. Nashville Pride’s Brady Ruffin has commiserated with other organizers from Atlanta to San Francisco.
“Scaling back of corporate sponsors is … something that I think a lot of us share and a lot of us have conversations about,” Ruffin said. “Costs are rising all around … Entertainment costs, production costs, security costs.”
Going into this Pride, Nashville wrestled with a quarter-million-dollar hole in its budget. The group turned to the community to fundraise, but the campaign fell around $100,000 short. That’s meant having to scale back this year’s Pride from a weekend to a one-day event.
“Bringing that parade and festival together into one day allows us to create that more unified, high-energy experience,” Ruffin said.
Protest and joy
Marianna Bacallao WPLN NewsNashville’s first openly transgender Metro Councilmember, Olivia Hill, performs on the stage of Play Dance Bar.
Nashville Pride’s fundraising campaign sparked a lot of conversation within the community about what Pride should look like — if it should be more a celebration or more of a protest, since the first Pride was an actual riot.
Ruffin said it can and should be both.
“Especially in Tennessee, where LGBTQ+ folks are consistently facing political attacks and harmful rhetoric, I think that joy is not separate from protest,” Ruffin said. “For many people, joy is how we resist.”
Nashville’s first public Pride in 1977 was both an act of protest and an act of joy.
“They kind of walked around hand-in-hand, same-sex couples, around the Parthenon, kind of just being visibly gay in public at a time when it was criminalized,” said archivist Sarah Calise. “So, it seems like a small kind of protest, but it actually was a very courageous thing that they did.”
Calise said corporate sponsors weren’t that involved in Pride until the early 2000s.
“The more being gay became accepted, or tolerated at least in mainstream society, the more corporations saw profit, the ability to gain profits from that community and still not alienating other people maybe who don’t agree with being LGBTQ,” Calise said.
MORE: LGBTQ Tennesseans are fleeing the state. Hear from those who chose to stay
As that money continues to shift, Calise said the community will have to step up.
“It is built by us for us. That’s what it’s supposed to be. And if we want it to continue, we also do have to fund it,” Calise said. “And maybe less money does mean shifting. You’re not going to get your big-name musical acts like maybe we’re used to. But I am hoping for maybe a Pride that does feel more local, feels more intimate, and feels more community-based.”
Back at Play Dance Bar, Norfleet can feel that community from the stage. As “Baby Aspartame,” Norfleet performs with a group of backup dancers, raking in tips for Nashville Pride.
Marianna Bacallao WPLN NewsBrandon Norfleet as Baby Aspartame stuffs her tips into a fake, oversized Chanel bag while lip syncing to the song BEAT UP CHANEL$ by Slayyter
Norfleet said it’s one of the most energetic fundraisers they’ve had in a while.
“I think the community is really feeling like the pushback for, you know, legislative reasons, federal reasons, et cetera, et cetera,” Norfleet said. “There’s so much love here.”
That love is not just exclusive to Nashville, he said.
“There’s a lot of people who can’t find representation in their own cities,” Norfleet said. “So, they come from all over the place to celebrate with us.”
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