When Emmanuel “Dapper Dan Midas” Williams received a call this year asking him to curate a day of music and entertainment at the Harborplace Amphitheater, it was uncharted territory for him.

“You’re essentially booking a mini one-day festival, which is something that I’ve never done,” he said, kicking back on a park bench on a recent sunny afternoon in Riverside Park near his home in Federal Hill. “I looked at the festivals that I’ve gone to. I’ve looked at what works. You have to first create a vibe.”

He decided he was ready to take on the challenge of curating — and playing — the first weekend of this year’s “Baltimore by Baltimore” festival series. The event Saturday, put on by the Waterfront Partnership of Baltimore, will also kick off the city’s Pride Month festivities.

Williams, 40, a veteran of Baltimore’s hip-hop scene, was barely out of high school when he won local battle rap tournaments like Style Warz. He was already well known for his sharp wit and outré fashion sense when he came out in 2010 and became the city’s most high-profile gay rapper. But his journey wasn’t always easy.

“They had whole radio show discussions about it,” he said, laughing. “Fast-forward to now, it’s like ‘Oh, you’re cool’ when I see these guys. And I think part of that is my level of confidence. Even with all that rapping and yelling and ferocious bars, I didn’t really believe in myself, or believe myself, to the extent that I do now.”

At previous Baltimore Pride events, Williams — who also performs under the names Midas, DDm and Uncle Lulu — has sometimes played the songs of an earlier trailblazer: ’90s Baltimore Club music icon Anthony “Miss Tony” Boston, who died in 2003. This weekend’s festival, aptly titled “Pride at the Waterfront,” is a chance for him to bring together a whole lineup of talent from the city’s LGBTQIA+ community, including a drag show and a DJ set by rapper Kotic Couture.

“I don’t think they [people outside Baltimore] understand how queer-centered the underground music scene is here. And it’s always kind of a shock to them that all of us that are gay or trans kind of thrive here,” Couture said. “Having someone like Miss Tony, I feel like, definitely opened doors … for us to be in hip-hop spaces.”

Williams, who grew up in West Baltimore and graduated from Mergenthaler Vocational-Technical High School, has become something of a renaissance man over the years, expanding into acting, writing and podcasting. The semi-autobiographical 2022 short film “F^¢K ‘€M R!GHT B@¢K,” which he co-wrote and stars in, was screened at major film festivals and is streaming on Paramount+ and Vimeo.

“DDm was recommended to us by previous producers more than two years ago,” Leanna Wetmore, director of events and programs at the Waterfront Partnership, said in an email. “We’ve been following him on Instagram and have fallen in love with his humor, wit, and pop culture commentary.”

Coming up as a queer hip-hop act before there was an established mainstream market for it, Williams got used to doing things himself, without the help of a label. “I’ve had major label meetings. I remember one just before Lil Nas X and Saucy Santana started making waves,” he said. “They were intrigued, but they didn’t get it.”

In his early 20s, Williams worked with a couple of Baltimore independent labels, making his first great songs with Mania Music Group, a company founded by producers Dwayne “Headphones” Lawson and Brandon Lackey. “Goldust,” the new Dapper Dan Midas EP released in April, was recorded at Lackey’s studio, the Lineup Room.

“Goldust” is Williams’ wildly entertaining tribute to professional wrestling. He parallels his own career to his favorite wrestlers’ on boastful tracks such as “Top of the Card” but also empathizes with the plight of female wrestlers on the thought-provoking “The Ballad of Luna & Sherri” and “Dark Divas.”

The EP is named after an androgynous character, WWE wrestler Dustin Rhodes, in the ’90s. “Dustin Rhodes doesn’t even realize how much LGBTQ wrestling fans identify with that character, and that character is iconic in queer spaces,” Williams said.

In a fit of inspiration this year, Williams recorded the nine songs on “Goldust” in the span of just 45 days — a culmination of his longtime love of wrestling. Even though Williams performs over a dozen shows a year nationwide, the EP is his first Dapper Dan Midas project in nearly half a decade. Now there’s more music on the way, including an “alternative pop” album called “Love at the End of the World” this year and perhaps a continuation of “Goldust.”

For now, he’s ready to take his new songs to the stage at the Inner Harbor this weekend. And who knows — maybe someday he’ll get to live out his childhood fantasies on a bigger stage like big-name artists and wrestling fans Travis Scott and Bad Bunny, who’ve appeared in WWE matches.

But, the lyrical Williams clarified with a chuckle, he’d keep to smack talk over a physical fight. “I will take a slap, maybe.”