Individual | Inducted 2024
Timothy K. Frye is the longtime cocoordinator of Chicago’s LGBT Pride Parade with his husband, LGBT Hall of Fame inductee Richard Pfeiffer. Following Pfeiffer’s death in 2019 and a two-year pandemic related hiatus, Frye restarted the Pride Parade tradition in 2022 as lead coordinator of PrideChicago.
Frye grew up in a small town in central Indiana, attended Purdue University in the mid-1960s, and served two years in the U.S. Army before beginning a career as a copywriter for a Chicago TV station. He attended his first Chicago Pride Parade in June of 1971 and met Pfeiffer the following November, beginning what would become a 48-year relationship, with Pfeiffer and Frye sharing the responsibilities associated with organizing the Chicago Pride Parade year after year.
Scheduled annually for the last Sunday in June to celebrate the anniversary of the Stonewall Rebellion of June 28, 1969, the parade inspired auxiliary events that also came under PrideChicago’s purview as part of Pride Week and finally Pride Month every June. If Pfeiffer was the driving force behind the longterm success of the annual Pride celebrations in Chicago, Frye was the buffer behind that force, helping to make sure things worked as planned.