A note from the Pride team: This story runs as a sequel to our Denver Pride is Protest story. If you haven't read that one yet, we hope you'll read it here.
Pride is, has always been, and will always be a protest. Our demands have taken different shape: from asking the government to acknowledge our siblings dying of AIDS, to our right to marry who we love, and now, to protect our trans community members from the waves of government-sanctioned hate. May we never forget that Pride is a radical fight against all who seek to oppress us.
But Pride is also our community's largest display of joy. Of defiance. Of radical queer celebration in the face of oppression.
Vanessa James is a personification of joy. Her warmth radiates through every room she steps into, and her story is one of both queer joy and queer defiance.
I hope you'll spend some time learning from Vanessa today.
In years past, if you walked far enough from the main stage at Denver Pride, away from the noise and the crowds, you would have found a small patch of grass tucked close to Civic Center Park where the air was full of bubbles. There was music there, and there was happiness, but there was no alcohol.
And that was the point.
Vanessa James ran the place. "It was a beautiful little oasis," she says. People drifted in and out all weekend, taking it, as she puts it, in small doses: a little quiet, a little safety, and then back into the celebration.
What she remembers is not what the space kept out but what it let in.
Everyone who came through the entrance knew that, inside, they did not have to brace themselves. If being around alcohol was too much for someone who otherwise desperately wanted to be around queer community, the sober space was there to provide a warm hug for them.
This will be Vanessa's third Pride. Her first came just three months after she came out as a trans woman and chose her name, Vanessa.
At her first Pride in 2024, Vanessa arrived already running a booth for Advocates for Recovery Colorado, the nonprofit where she works, and by the next year she was running the sober area itself.
She tells this the way she tells most things about herself—at a gallop, then catching herself. "Gosh," she says. "Long-winded answer to get you nothing."
It is not nothing. To understand why Vanessa cares so much about a bubble-filled corner of a music festival, you have to know where she started, which is rural Oklahoma, where, as she describes it, she was "this image of a country boy" who did not believe she was part of any community at all.
For years, she built a facade of herself designed to hide the person underneath it. She bartended on Colfax. She played in bands—bass first, because four strings seemed easier to learn than six, then stand-up bass in a bluegrass group, then drums, then keys, two weeks of frantic practice before a first show that turned, improbably, into five years and a record label. She rode motorcycles and worked construction and built a body in the gym. All of it, she now says, to keep the world from seeing Vanessa.
"People accepted me, they liked me when I was on stage," she says. "It was all seriously a way to fit in."
The hiding had a cost, and the cost compounded. Her active addiction moved with her. A violent case in the Steamboat area brought a year of county jail time, half of it served before she moved back to Denver. The following August, in 2017, a far more serious case brought a ten-year prison sentence.
She marks her recovery from that day—August 21, 2017—and she is quick to puncture any romance about getting clean behind bars. "It is way easier to get drugs and alcohol inside prison than it is out here," she says. That she built a recovery in that environment is, by her own account, the hard part of the story.
She served just under four years, two of them on a wildland firefighting crew; she fought what she calls the state's largest wildfire, and the good time she earned got her an early parole she was not sure she wanted. She told the parole board she was afraid to come back out. She was afraid she would hurt someone again. When she was released, in July of 2021, she paroled to a sober living home in Aurora, which she had pictured as something grim and discovered was just "a bunch of people trying to figure it out in a safe environment."
What happened next is the part she clearly loves to tell. Someone asked whether she had ever thought about working in treatment. "I don't own khakis, I don't have initials behind my name, I work construction," she remembers answering. "What do I have to give?" She gave them her number anyway. The next day she had a call, and soon a job as a tech at a treatment center, and her recovery shifted, she says, "from focusing on myself to just holding space for others." She was not a therapist; she could not give advice. She could sit with people and listen and offer love. She became a director—two director roles—and three years ago moved to Advocates for Recovery Colorado, where her work is to knit the recovery community together and to insist, loudly, that it is allowed to have fun. "Recovery isn't boring," she says. "We get to live an exciting, fun life."
That insistence is the whole argument of the sober dance parties and mocktail nights she dreams up, and it is the engine of her quarrel with a single word. Vanessa has spent time at the Capitol testifying on bills, and she has learned how much the word 'recovery' can do in a room.
She watches ears perk up, eyes turn toward her, shoulders relax as she reminds people that if recovery was an option for her, it's also an option for them.
She wants the word stretched to its real size. Recovery, she points out, does not mention substances in its definition. She has met people whose recovery is from trauma, from mental health crises, from a loved one's addiction that forced them to rebuild their own lives. "I firmly believe every single person is on a recovery journey," she says. "They're all fighting a battle that we can't see."
Her own battle had a second front, and it is the one that brings her to the Center on Colfax. She used to bartend at the Irish Snug, around the corner, and she walked past the Center constantly, knowing what it was, thinking many times about stepping in to ask for resources and being too afraid to do it. What finally moved her was watching her own mental health slip in the familiar pattern that had once preceded her drinking. She had a partner and knew she could not give her everything, because everything she had was Vanessa. Working with her therapist, she set herself a nine-month deadline to become her authentic self, and she met it. She worried that an organization could not have someone transitioning as one of its public faces. She was wrong about that, too.
When she first came to the Center's trans-femme support group, it met in one little room downstairs, maybe ten people. Now it fills several rooms—on the day we spoke,someone leaned in to tell her the latest count was sixty-two—and afterward the group decamps to Hamburger Mary's. Vanessa has watched people arrive at that first meeting too frightened to begin, and then connect, and then keep coming. "That is what recovery is all about," she says. "Letting them choose the way, but giving them the support and the direction that they need."
This year, the festival itself is in flux. Construction at Civic Center Park has moved us out of Civic Center Park and into 16th Street. So Vanessa is improvising with a day of sober activations planned throughout the festival. The location may have changed, but the principle will not. The recovery community, she says, does not want to be corralled off to the side, an afterthought behind a rope. Part of the journey is learning to live in the world as it is.
"It's not like we were in a cage or put off to the side," she says of the old sober space. "We were right there for anybody to step in."
That is, in the end, Vanessa's definition of the thing this festival is named for. Pride, for her, is not the absence of struggle; it is what you build on the far side of it, and then refuse to celebrate alone. She spent years convinced she could not make music, could not be loved, could not be herself, without something in her system to make it bearable. She was wrong about all of it. The joy was always there. It just needed to be let in.