A town of many colors: Oxford Pride

April 28, 2022 By Brittany Kohne via the Daily Mississippian

All the colors of the rainbow will collide on April 24-30. Oxford Pride, organized by the Sarah Isom Center for Women and Gender Studies, is hosting a whole week of LGBTQIA+ events.

From a Pride Interfaith service on April 24 to a parade and drag show on April 30, Oxford Pride will host many inclusive activities to provide a sense of community throughout Oxford.

In 2016, Matt Kessler, then a graduate student at the University of Mississippi, proposed implementing more queer community activies in Oxford.

“I loved Oxford, but the thing that really struck me was there were (no) gay bars or spaces for queer people to hang out,” Kessler said.

The first event Kessler organized with the Isom Center was a screening of “Small Town Gay Bar,” a documentary centered around two small gay bars in Meridian and Shannon, Mississippi.

Kessler, along with other members of the Isom Center, decided to make the event even more entertaining and hosted a drag show at Lamar Lounge, which has since closed.

“You know, like there was a decent turnout for the documentary screening, nothing too crazy, but like an hour before the drag show started, Lamar Lounge started filling up fast,” Kessler said. “There was a line out the door, down the street on Lamar. It was really, really packed. It was a really wonderful evening with just a lot of positivity, positive vibes.”

From that moment on, the Isom Center and Kessler worked to create even more events to include everyone.

“Matt had been instrumental in creating other queer events in Oxford, including Code Pink. Once he secured a parade permit, we started working with him and others to plan a weekend full of events. Oxford Pride has grown to where it extends to an entire week,” Kevin Cozart, Isom Center operations coordinator, said.

Once Kessler graduated, Jonathan Kent Adams and Blake Summers took over, and have been hosting similar events for the past four years or so.

The purpose of these events is to create a sense of queer visability. Before these events were hosted, many members of the LGBTQIA+ community had no place to openly be themselves and amongst others in the community.

“You know, I do want to say we did create the events, but there was a growing demand,” Kessler said. “I think that’s because of a lot of cultural forces. I feel like the community was coming, the community needed these events.”

For Jamie Harker, the director of the Isom Center, these events became increasingly important  when House Bill 1523 was passed into law. The House Bill reads, “The sincerely held religious beliefs or moral convictions protected by this act are the belief or conviction that:

(a)  Marriage is or should be recognized as the union of one man and one woman;

(b)  Sexual relations are properly reserved to such a marriage; and

(c)  Male (man) or female (woman) refer to an individual’s immutable biological sex as objectively determined by anatomy and genetics at time of birth.”

This bill also allowed business owners to refuse sales to same sex couples.

“The creation of inclusive spaces is central to our mission,” Harker said. “We wanted the LGBTQ+ community in Mississippi, especially queer youth, to know they are valued and loved.  This continues to be important as a new wave of anti-trans legislation is sweeping the nation.”

With all the debate and weariness around the bill, the Isom Center continued to educate students on the diversity and resilience of the LGBTQIA+ community.

Oxford Pride hosted its first parade in 2016, the same year House Bill 1523 was passed.

“The state was kind of in the national news, and then we had this big parade, which was the first parade that drew a lot of attention,” Kessler said. “It was really fun, but it was not proposed as a response to the bill. It just happened to fall (around that time).”

In addition to the parade, which will be held on April 29 this year, Oxford Pride will hold a professional drag show featuring Trinity the Tuck, season four winner of the TV show “RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars”, and hosted by local queen Fendi LaFemme.

“For the uninitiated, drag performance may come off as shocking, over-the-top, dripping with innuendo and sometimes downright crass. That is by design. Drag performance has a long history in the LGBTQ community, first being performed by trans women and gay men in small bars and at extravagant balls across the country since at least the early 20th century,” Harker said.

Drag shows are very important to the LGBTQIA+ community and create an atmosphere that is welcoming to all, no matter how one identifies.

“Drag is purposefully transgressive, pushing the envelope in order to satirize what is acceptable to normative society. Drag kings and queens seek to expose the ridiculousness of gender roles and sexual repression through their performances,” Harker said.

Harker also noted that it’s important to let the audience know what they are going to experience before each drag show because the performance may not be for everyone.

“But consider letting drag take you out of your comfort zone for an evening. We don’t always have to push the envelope, but sometimes it’s a little fun,” Harker said.

For the most part, these events have been welcomed in Oxford. The only recorded backlash was in 2016, when a group of six to eight protestors showed up to an event.

“People from outside the region generally assume that living here is uniformly wretched for the queer community. There are certainly challenges — specifically, the tendency of politicians to pass anti-LGBTQ+ legislation,” Harker said. “But as a result, the LGBTQ+ community is inventive, and resourceful, and inclusive and it tends to embrace the entire community in a network of care. To be queer in Mississippi is to be part of a vast and glorious tribe, one I am proud to claim.”