Central Arkansas’ 16th pride festival of the year is this weekend. Conway Pride Community is hosting the annual celebration on Saturday, November 8, over 21 years after the City of Colleges saw its first pride parade in 2004.
Conway Pride Community Vice President Karen Collins says everyone is welcome to the free event whether they’ve attended many pride events or plan to go to one for the first time.
“There are lots of friends you’ll see in the park that you haven’t seen in a while. It’s kind of like a family reunion of sorts.”
The Return To Pride celebration will be at Laurel Park at 2310 Robinson Avenue from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. on Saturday, November 8. The festival will include drag performances from Miss Athena Sinclair and her Olympians, food trucks, vendors, and more family-friendly activities throughout the day. More information can be found at facebook.com/conwaypridecommunity.
Collins, who uses the pronouns bitch/slut, said the organization is also expanding the ways they support the LGBTQ community this year.
“This will be the first time we’ve put together a scholarship,” Collins said. “We’re putting together a scholarship for a resident of Faulkner County to help them whether it’s trade school or college – whatever their future endeavors may be.”
Collins says Conway held the state’s first pride parade in 2004, organized by the late LGBTQ+ advocates Robert Loyd and John Schenck.
“They actually were content to be homebodies until they decided they needed to be activists,” Collins said. In 2004 the couple planned the first Conway Pride Parade. Loyd and Schenck gathered a crowd of around 100 to march in support of LGBTQ+ rights, while more than 1,000 protestors gathered to denounce the parade. One protester dumped several tons of manure along the parade route.
Collins, who was a new mother at the time, said the waste was spread from driveway to driveway. It didn’t stop the parade.
“The neighbors got together and shoveled it and moved it,” Collins said, “because this parade had to happen.”
This year, the celebration won’t include a parade because of security concerns. Securing a block of a park is easier than securing one-and-a-quarter miles of a street, Collins explained.
“There have been protestors at every pride event I’ve ever been to. Some are more respectful than others, and I have yet to see it get violent… and I hope it never does. That doesn’t mean I don’t want to be prepared.”
Most pride celebrations in Arkansas are either in June, commemorating the Stonewall Uprising of June 1969, or in the slightly cooler month of October, coinciding with LGBTQ+ history month. Collins says the November date is not only to avoid over-scheduling LGBTQ-plus performers and organizations involved in multiple events and extreme temperatures, but also to show queer communities don’t need to wait for dates on a calendar to come together.
“I feel like pride is something I walk in every day,” Collins said. “There’s a parade somewhere and I’m going to stand up for my friend. If that is to take my Black trans friend to a job and then when she has an issue at it pick her up before something happens; if that is going to a craft store with someone who doesn’t feel comfortable walking into snobby lobby, I will walk with them into snobby lobby to get their stained glass. So I honor that June was the first pride but I do believe we can celebrate pride year round, and we should have the right to do that.”
Collins says last year’s parade in Conway was cancelled for organizers to help communities in Greenbrier, Morrilton, and Mena host their own celebrations.
Collins hopes attendees see the community as one that is vibrant, strong, and full of love.
“These are not people with an agenda for your children. Their only agenda is love and authenticity.”
“My favorite part of being in the queer community is the authenticity I feel with those who have come to terms with who they are and how they want to live, and how they choose to express themselves is not mine to judge, it is only mine to support,” Collins said.
“So yes, my pronouns are bitch/slut because I have learned ‘Am I gonna be late?’ ‘Yes, that bitch is always late.’ And you don’t need a gender to be a slut. I was against slut-shaming before slut-shaming was a word.”
Collins added it’s important to show young people they will be loved and accepted, even if people in their life reject them for being queer.
“Matthew Shepard's mom said she is surprised that we still have to educate people in order to receive acceptance. And she’s right, it is about education.”
