When the Chicago Pride Parade steps off the morning of June 30, the celebratory march will be led by three LGBTQ+ couples, including two from Chicago who have been key players in advocating for equality.
Comedian Fortune Feimster and her wife, Jax Smith, will serve as the parade’s celebrity grand marshals. The two met at Chicago Pride in 2015, just days after the Supreme Court’s historic ruling for nationwide marriage equality.
But Feimster and Smith will be joined by two pairs of hometown heroes known for their years of advocacy within Chicago’s LGBTQ+ community: Art Johnston and Jose Pepe Peña, owners of Sidetrack, and Myles and Precious Brady-Davis, a pioneering Black, transgender couple taking politics by storm.
For Johnston and Peña, who have been to nearly every Chicago Pride Parade since meeting in 1973, being able to lead this year’s procession is a “remarkable honor,” especially looking back on how much the tradition has grown since its humble beginnings in 1970, Johnston said.
“Back then, it wasn’t very long and always ended with a get-together in the park,” Johnston said. “I remember in one of the early years, Mayor Harold Washington came to that event afterwards. It wasn’t the parade itself, but he showed up there, which was a giant deal.”
Now it’s standard for the mayor of Chicago to participate in the annual march, Johnston said.
For the Brady-Davis couple, their inclusion as community grand marshals represents generations of LGBTQ+ people who came before them in the fight for progress.
Precious Brady-Davis made history in 2023 when she was appointed commissioner for the Cook County Metropolitan Water Reclamation District (MWRD), becoming the first Black transgender woman appointed to public office in the county. She also recently started a position as chief strategy officer at the Center on Halsted. Myles Brady-Davis also works in politics, serving as communications director for Equality Illinois.
“I think about what so many Black and Brown trans people had to go through when it comes to our survival and then Myles and I’s experience in general, and this feels like a moment to celebrate,” Precious Brady-Davis said.
Participating in the parade could also inspire the next generation of LGBTQ+ trailblazers, Myles Brady-Davis said.
“Growing up as a native Chicagoan, I never saw too many people that looked like me,” Myles Brady-Davis said. “So for me and Precious to be featured on this platform with like a million eyes on us is a dream.”
Art Johnston and Jose Pepe Peña
Participating in his first Pride Parade in 2974 was “a revelation,” said Peña, who’s from Cuba and moved to Chicago in 1968 by way of Miami.
“I had never seen that many of us at once in public,” Peña said. “And then I remember, years later, the first time I ever saw someone in a suit walking the parade. I assumed they were a lawyer or something, which was huge, because they could have lost their job for that.”
Johnston said the visibility the Chicago Pride Parade created for LGBTQ+ people helped him realize how big the community actually was, and there’s power in numbers.
“In those days, being gay was something that only happened after dark because bars were all we had,” Johnston said. “So the parade was one of the first times we saw gay people in the daytime.”
Peña was working as a bartender when he and Johnston met in 1973. Johnston was in Chicago for a short teaching program at Northwestern University and went to Peña’s bar after his friends in the theater department recommended it as “a place for people like us.”
Johnston struck up a conversation with the bartender, who happened to be Peña, and the rest is history, he said. The couple’s love story has been told in the documentary Art and Pep.
A few years later in 1982, the two opened Sidetrack, which is now one of the largest bars on North Halsted Street but started as a quaint hole-in-the-wall with no front-facing windows. Peña recalled renting VHS tapes of old films and using them as visuals for the bar’s music.
The couple has also been on the frontlines of advocating for LGBTQ+ equality and throughout the HIV/AIDS crisis. The two were instrumental in ushering a 1988 Chicago ordinance banning discrimination based on sexual orientation and the 1993 passage of Cook County’s human rights ordinance. Johnston also co-founded the Illinois Federation for Human Rights, which is now known as Equality Illinois.
Now, the couple is trailblazing in the legal weed industry, having opened Sway—the city’s first Black-, Brown- and queer-owned dispensary—with business partners Edie Moore and Kevin Hauswirth.
“It’s kind of amazing how far our community has come,” Johnston said. “And that’s why the parade is such a joyous celebration. It’s because we made the change.”
Myles and Precious Brady-Davis
Precious Brady-Davis participated in her first Pride Parade around 2010 when she was a student at Columbia College Chicago and said the experience was “euphoric.”
A few years later, Precious and Myles Brady-Davis experienced their first Pride Parade together—and Myles Brady Davis’s first ever—joining in on the Queen! float with JoJo Baby, the Chicago nightlife icon who died in 2023.
The parade happened at a time in Myles Brady-Davis’s life when he was starting to appreciate his trans identity more after meeting Precious Brady-Davis and learning more about the trans community and its history.
“Not everybody has the privilege and the joy to be out, so it was beautiful to see people from even rural towns being able to live as their authentic selves,” Myles Brady-Davis said. “Pride is about freedom to be who you are, and shine on that day for the ones who don’t have that.”
This year’s Pride Parade is also an opportunity to celebrate trans love, Myles Brady-Davis said.
Myles and Precious Brady-Davis married in 2016 at Rockefeller Memorial Chapel at the University of Chicago. Three years later, Myles and Precious-Brady Davis had their first of two children, publicly sharing Myles Brady-Davis’s pregnancy journey on an episode of TLC’s “My Pregnant Husband.”
By participating in the parade, Myles and Precious Brady-Davis are showing the possibilities for transgender people to thrive, Myles Brady-Davis said.
“Young trans, Black and Brown people need to see that trans people are worthy of love and actually see what a non-toxic relationship looks like,” Myles Brady-Davis said. “Our love is healing and powerful, and the world needs to see it on every level.”
The couple has also broken barriers in politics with Precious Brady-Davis’s role as an MWRD commissioner and Myles Brady-Davis’s at Equality Illinois, advocating for pro-LGBTQ+ policies in Springfield.
Precious Brady-Davis’s first year as an MWRD commissioner saw her responding to a massive storm that challenged the area’s flood response systems. In her second year, she wants to continue this work while exploring how the MWRD can move toward carbon neutrality and hold corporate polluters accountable.
Precious Brady-Davis also recently started as chief strategy officer of Center on Halsted, returning to the LGBTQ+ organization after having worked there from 2011-2014 as youth outreach coordinator.
“It’s a new day at the Center, and to be part of shaping its future is absolutely inspirational,” Precious Brady-Davis said. “I’m thrilled about the opportunity.”
Sunday’s Chicago Pride Parade will be a celebration of this progress, from Johnston and Peña’s early days as activists to Myles and Precious Brady-Davis’s role in today’s politics and advocacy, Precious Brady-Davis said.
“I feel like Art and Pepe represent the past and Myles and I represent the future,” Precious Brady-Davis said. “And we stand on their shoulders when it comes to the work we’ve done in the community.”