4 days ago
You Might Think Trump Has Destroyed Gay Pride in Conservative America, It's Quite the Opposite.
Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily.
For years, Andy Hansen has wanted Waverly, Iowa, to have its own Pride celebration. The queer and trans people living among the town's 11,000 residents can feel isolated from one another, and Hansen thought a Pride event would give them a chance to gel as a community.
As chair of Waverly's Human Equity and Diversity Commission, Hansen wanted to help organize something that would suit the homespun, outdoorsy character of the municipality. 'We struggled with, if we are going to do something, how are we going to do it in small-town style that's uniquely Waverly?' they said. Nothing quite clicked, so the notion sat on the back burner.
Then, last fall, a Waverly resident came to the commission with a proposal. What if, instead of a parade, they hosted a boat float during Pride month, with participants paddling in kayaks and canoes down the Cedar River that runs through town?
Hansen thought it was a brilliant idea. And hosting Waverly's first Pride celebration began to seem even more urgent in February, when the Iowa governor signed a bill removing gender identity from the state's civil rights law, making Iowa the first state to rescind nondiscrimination protections from a previously protected class—in this case, trans people. That day, Hansen and their colleagues heard from several locals suddenly searching for a way to support LGBTQ+ Iowans. The timing was serendipitous: According to Hansen, the anti-trans turn from the legislature 'created a lot of momentum for the event.'
But before the commission could even begin marketing the June boat float, a roadblock emerged. Fifteen pastors from across the county presented a letter to the Waverly City Council urging members to stop the Pride plans. The event stood to 'endorse morals and values that contradict … God-given truths regarding marriage and sexuality,' the letter read. Citing conservative media reports about other Pride events, it expressed concern that the boat float could result in 'indecent' or 'pornographic' behavior in a public place.
Hansen was shocked by the pushback. 'My spirits were shaken a little bit,' they said. 'It was a bit of a reality check, because I personally haven't run into a lot of people expressing their disagreement for a long time.' But dozens of other residents spoke out in support of the boat float at a public meeting and in an online forum. The city council stood firm and refused to cancel the event. Then came another blow: A state bill targeting public diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives passed in May, threatening to prohibit Waverly's funding of the float. Hansen and their colleagues scrambled to come up with an alternate plan; local business owners said they'd gladly sponsor it instead.
The DEI ban won't go into effect until July, so Waverly's city-funded Pride is safe for this year. But the ambitions of Hansen and their colleagues have grown beyond a single event. Now, they're determined to make Pride an annual happening, with enough private backing to insulate it from external politics.
Across the country, a growing right-wing movement is placing LGBTQ+ people under attack. State legislatures have banned trans people from using bathrooms, playing sports, and accessing health care. Right-wing extremists have shown up at drag events with guns to intimidate attendees; one homophobe killed a California woman who hung a Pride flag outside of her business. The current Trump administration is ousting trans people from the military, inscribing their passports with incorrect gender markers, and attempting to make it illegal to help trans children.
There is a sense in most queer communities that this is just the beginning, that the national tide is turning against us. Public support for anti-trans legislation has risen among Americans across the political spectrum, and major companies are trying to curry favor with Trump by ending policies that supported LGBTQ+ people.
But even in this hostile climate, stories like Waverly's are everywhere. In some small towns and cities, queer and trans Americans are stepping up to organize their communities' very first Pride celebrations, eager to give their neighbors an afternoon of joyous release in a stressful time. In other places, far from the major metro areas with massive queer populations, Pride organizers are taking bold steps to combat local opposition and shore up safety measures amid mounting threats of violence. At first glance, this seems counterintuitive—why would new Prides spring up in small, conservative areas, when even Prides in big, liberal cities have lost corporate sponsors and considered advising trans travelers to reconsider their plans to visit? But you don't need the backing of business leaders to host a Pride event. Nor do you need the majority of your neighbors to endorse it. All you need is a few committed residents with a knack for party promotion and the chutzpah to overcome—or ignore—whatever opposition rears up in response.
In Nampa, Idaho, it started out as a plan for a picnic. As volunteers at a local nonprofit for LGBTQ youth, Van Knapp and Tom Wheeler were looking for a way to make the community feel more welcoming for the young people they worked with. Last spring, they settled on the idea of hosting the town's first-ever Pride celebration: maybe 50 to 100 people in a park, some music, low-key vibes.
In the three weeks they had to pull the event together, it swiftly snowballed into something bigger. There was a massive show of interest from residents wanting to attend, organizations wanting to set up tables, and vendors wanting to sell goods. Knapp, a queer parent of two queer kids, and Wheeler, a 28-year-old Boise real estate agent, were astounded by how ready Nampa seemed to make something major happen for Pride.
They were less surprised by the backlash. With 114,000 residents, Nampa is the third-largest city in Idaho and less than half an hour from Boise by car, but it can feel a world away from the more liberal state capital. Recently, the Boise mayor and City Council voted in near unanimity to make the Pride flag an official city flag to circumvent a state law that would have made it illegal to fly the rainbow banner on city property. Meanwhile, in Canyon County, where Nampa sits, about 72 percent of voters supported Donald Trump in the 2024 election.
'We knew we were taking baseball bat to a beehive, because it's Canyon County,' Wheeler said. Pride events 'didn't happen because no one felt like it would be safe to do so.'
Once residents got wind of the 2024 Pride plans, they took to social media and local news outlets to accuse the organizers of promoting immorality. Wheeler got threatening phone calls, and the mayor released a statement declaring that the event 'does not reflect the personal beliefs and convictions of myself, the Nampa City Council, and many living in Nampa.'
But Knapp and Wheeler pushed ahead. They signed up performers and recruited local drag queens who'd never had the chance to perform in their hometown before. Their only disagreement was about whether to allow police to provide security for the event. Wheeler thought it was necessary, but Knapp was opposed: It felt ridiculous for such a small gathering and antithetical to the purpose of Pride, which commemorates a 1969 riot against police harassment at Manhattan's Stonewall Inn.
Knapp and Wheeler spent hours talking to Nampa police and local FBI agents about how to ensure the safety of their guests. Eventually, it became clear that they had no choice but to involve law enforcement, because the threat of violence was immense. One year earlier, dozens of protesters showed up at a Pride event in Rexburg, Idaho, to falsely accuse drag performers of child sexual abuse. At least one had a loaded gun. The year before that, in 2022, 31 members of the white supremacist Patriot Front were arrested on their way to disrupt a Pride festival in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, armed with a smoke grenade, long metal poles, and a multipage plan to provoke a 'confrontational dynamic.' Knapp and Wheeler agreed to let police monitor the festival, and they didn't announce the drag show—possibly the most incendiary element for contemporary right-wing agitators—until the night before.
On the day of the event last June, armed protesters did show up to make a scene, but they weren't allowed inside the fencing where about 4,000 festivalgoers enjoyed the first-ever Canyon County Pride. 'I was hoping to show my kids that we live in a safe space,' Knapp said. 'And the reality was, in the end, we did that.'
The day was joyous, colorful, and gay—just what Knapp and Wheeler had hoped for. Many attendees approached Knapp with gratitude, saying they'd only known a handful of other LGBTQ+ people in Nampa before that day. One seventysomething lesbian couple said they'd moved from Nampa to a blue state 30 years ago, seeking a more affirming community. They returned just for the Pride event and were overcome with emotion by what they saw. 'I cried like 50 percent of the day,' Knapp said.
This year, Canyon County Pride is going bigger. Instead of a three-hour event, it'll be a full eight-hour day, with three times as many vendors and even more drag queens. But Knapp and Wheeler are also beefing up security. They expect antagonists to show up in greater numbers because they'll have more time to plan, since organizers aren't slapping together the festival in three short weeks this time around. Out of the $30,000 they've fundraised, half is going to a top-tier private security team—more than twice as much as they spent on safety measures last year. And this time, Knapp and Wheeler are no longer hiding their plans for a drag show until the last minute. They're confident enough to advertise it from the outset.
But Knapp and Wheeler sometimes struggle with the balance of confidence and caution required to plan a Pride in 2025. They followed a recent defamation case in Coeur d'Alene, in which a right-wing blogger posted a doctored video of a drag performer at a 2022 Pride event, claiming he'd exposed his genitals to minors. (He didn't, and a jury awarded him more than $1.1 million in damages.) So in Nampa, the fencing that surrounds the Pride festival in the park—three times bigger than last year's—will be covered in black privacy cloth, partially defeating the purpose of Pride as a public show of visibility and power. Privacy and safety have to come first.
Knapp and Wheeler are also weighing the desire for a Pride that feels free and uninhibited with the knowledge that they're being scrutinized by people who wish them harm. It was seeing a person partying topless at last year's Canyon County Pride festival that gave a local politician the idea for a new bill strengthening public indecency laws, which could be used to target trans people. Organizers don't want to censor attendees, but they recognize that it's an alcohol-free, family-friendly event in a conservative county. So this year, they've established a simple set of rules: 'Wear a shirt and don't bring a gun,' Wheeler said.
Still, when right-wing lawmakers show up for the next legislative session, 'there will probably be five more bills based off what they see or hear from Canyon County Pride.'
All over the country, just like in Nampa, Pride organizers are doubling down on celebration in the face of right-wing threats. In Franklin, Tennessee, two years after conservative residents tried to shut down a Pride festival held at a local farm, organizers are expecting 10,000 attendees at this June's event. Queers in Morehead, Kentucky, recently held their second annual Pride celebration in spite of a disparaging cancellation campaign from a local church. And in Coeur d'Alene, the site of the most famous right-wing assault on Pride, the annual event has rapidly expanded since the 2022 Patriot Front plot, with paid staff, year-round programming, and more vendors, sponsors, volunteers, and attendees each year.
In Prattville, Alabama, organizers staged the first-ever Pride—a small, unpermitted picnic by a creek—in 2023, only to have it ambushed by a white nationalist group. 'So we kind of said, 'Hold our beer,' ' said Caryl Lawson, vice president of Prattville Pride. 'Y'all thought you were gonna scare us and intimidate us into never doing this again in Prattville, and you really just lit a fire under us to want to do it bigger and better.'
The next year, they rented space in a public park and held a 2,500-person festival. A solitary protester showed up and began shouting homophobic slogans just as the sound guy was setting up the speakers. He asked Lawson how loud she wanted the music for the day. 'And I said, 'Just loud enough to drown that guy out!' ' Lawson recalled.
Each obstacle has only made Lawson and her fellow organizers more dogged in their promotion of Prattville Pride. When the city tried to keep a Prattville Pride float out of the local Christmas parade this winter, they got a federal judge to issue an injunction ensuring their place in the festivities. When officials couldn't promise them they'd be able to tape off an area of the park to keep protesters out of this year's Pride event, they found a different park. The whole experience has 'turned me from an outspoken advocate into a full-blown activist,' Lawson said.
For another look at how Prides are adapting to the current political moment, head to Fayetteville, North Carolina. The president of Fayetteville Pride, Krystal Maddox, has lived there for nearly all of her 64 years and began coming out as trans when she was 21. She has weathered all the highs and lows of queer life in a Southern military town. Maddox recalls watching Army gays celebrate the adoption of 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell,' back when requiring queer people to serve in secret was seen as an improvement on a total ban—then reeling with shock when a Fort Bragg soldier shot 10 people in a Fayetteville restaurant, killing four, because he was enraged by the idea of gays in the armed forces.
When Fayetteville hosted its first Pride in 2018, spurred in part by Trump's first election, Maddox was elated to attend. Seeing hundreds LGBTQ+ people in her hometown laughing and dancing together felt so deeply healing, it gave her chills. In her trove of treasured memories, she places that day alongside seeing the White House lit up with rainbow colors to celebrate the Supreme Court decision that made gay marriage legal nationwide. Both were 'things I never thought I would see in my lifetime,' she said.
For the most part, Maddox said, it got easier to be queer in Fayetteville over the decades, because 'nobody was paying attention to you if you minded your own business.' But today, it seems like the arc of LGBTQ+ progress has folded back in on itself. 'I've seen us have drag shows and clubs and bars that were open seven days a week, to the current situation where we don't have one at all,' she said. 'I've seen lots of support, and I see now where people are scared and don't want to attend events out of fear.'
After her joyful experience at the first Fayetteville Pride, Maddox joined the board. This year, she is making some major changes to protect Pridegoers from the likes of the Proud Boys, who have strutted through past years' events with their faces covered, taking photos and videos of drag performers. To maintain operational security, Pride planning meetings are now RSVP-only, and attendees must be personally admitted at the meeting location. And for the first time, in a major departure from other Prides around the country, the festival will be held at an indoor venue.
The change-up has a few benefits besides security. (For one thing, no one's mad about air conditioning in the heat of summer.) But, Maddox said, 'safety is the number one reason we're doing it, because it's what we're hearing the most about from festivalgoers—that they didn't feel as safe as they did in years past.' Thousands of guests will traverse metal detectors and carry clear bags to make it past security checkpoints, all in the hopes of keeping out interlopers seeking a fight or photo ops for right-wing propaganda.
The advent of extreme security measures at Pride events is a shameful sign of our increasingly repressive times, which have required organizers to make compromises on their ideals and alienate some potential attendees by involving law enforcement. But in a certain light, the adaptation of Prides to the dangers of 2025 looks heartening: The endurance of these annual events that prioritize pure-hearted merriment and connection as highly as political activism is proof of the limitations of anti-LGBTQ+ politics.
Legislation and intimidation can make queer and trans lives harder in countless ways. Lawmakers can wrest control of our bodies. Christian nationalist militias can make us fear for our lives. Judges can dissolve our legal bonds to our partners and children. But there are essential parts of the queer experience that those who despise us can't touch. They can't stop LGBTQ+ communities from supporting and sustaining one another with art, whimsy, and a good dance floor. And they can't roll back the cultural progress that has resulted in newly out young people finding more supportive family members, teachers, and care providers than ever before.
Trans and queer people are hungry for places to come together, and we don't disperse at the first sign of danger. We find alternative funding sources; we move our gatherings indoors. 'All of the fear, and the anxiety, and the reality of living in constant uncertainty and unsafety—we're going to put all that on hold, just for a day,' Knapp said. We adjust, carry on, and turn the music louder.
