Northport’s biggest annual pride celebration, the Tea Dance, is coming back for a fourth year this fall. The event, scheduled for 2-6pm on September 29, will take place at Faro and will feature performances from Monique Madison and the Kunty Kittens and music by DJ Jay Harnish.

Hosted by the Chetcuti Evans Foundation, the annual Tea Dance is billed as “an important event for the region” that “creates awareness and visibility for the LGBTQ members of our community.” Michael Chetcuti and Kyle Evans, the foundation's founders and namesakes, launched the event in 2021 as a way of bringing some of the energy around Traverse City’s Up North Pride Week to Northport. The Chetcuti Evans Foundation works to provide “financial assistance and networking power to individuals and organizations in the LGBT community,” and Chetcuti told the Leelanau Ticker in 2022 that the Tea Dance fit into that mission because it could spotlight the LGBTQ+ population that exists in Northport and in Leelanau County.

“One of the reasons we do this is visibility for the younger folks. We are getting the community together and showing that we’re here, and we are not going anywhere,” Chetcuti said at the time.

In 1950s and 1960s New York, the gay community hosted tea dances – social events that took place on Sunday afternoons and served tea rather than alcohol – as a way for LGBTQ+ people to meet. At the time, it was illegal for bars in New York City to serve alcohol to gay people. As such, gatherings of the homosexual community moved outside of the city and made a point of foregoing alcohol as a means of avoiding police raids. Northport’s Tea Dance is a tip of the hat to that element of LGBTQ+ history.

This year’s headline performer at the Tea Dance is Monique Madison, an “author, actor, comedian, and drag queen extraordinaire” who hails from Kalamazoo and has been “practicing the art of female impersonation for 27 years.” Madison leads the Kunty Kittens, a well-known troupe of Michigan drag performers.

DJ Jay Harnish, meanwhile, is a Grand Rapids-based audio visual engineer and theatrical producer whose background runs the gamut from Broadway tours to comedy shows.

Tickets to the 2024 Tea Dance are $30 each and can be purchased online at MyNorthTickets.com.