As pride organizations across the country plan events this month to celebrate their identity, Prattville Pride’s pride fest takes on a particularly special meaning.
This year’s pride fest is set for Sunday, June 1, to kick off pride month, but the event won’t be inside Prattville city limits. The festivities will go from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. at Evans Park and Pavilion off U.S. Highway 31 not far from Maxwell Air Force Base.
Organizers Caryl Lawson and Adam Hunt said they would have loved to have the event in Prattville, but struggled with getting approval to host the event for a second year at Cooter’s Pond Park, the only park that can be reserved for events expecting more than 50 people.
At last year’s event, Lawson and Hunt asked city officials what perimeter could be set up to ensure any protestors who arrived were kept from interfering with the event, and they say the city told them the rental agreement technically only covers the site’s two pavilions, not the green space.
For more than a year, the group has discussed the city creating a green space rental agreement for the site, with Prattville pride organizers understanding that the city would need to have that agreement in place for the group to book the park. Other events at the site have made use of the green space as well as the pavilions.
“When we booked the park (for May 31) we were told it would have to be forwarded to (Parks and Recreation director Kellie Carter) because it was a larger event that would have to be approved,” Lawson said. “We never got a response and the implication was we were not approved.”
The organizers messaged Carter on February 18 about a timeline for renting the green space around the pavilions, noting the need to have that information settled before getting a special events license and talking to vendors. A month later, the organizers reached out again and Carter informed them that it would still be another week at least before any agreement was ready.
With time dwindling to organize vendors and set up the event, the group decided to book Evans Park instead.
“If we could do it in Prattville, I would love to do it in Prattville,” Hunt said.
The group also got an anonymous tip that there had been a coordinated effort to reserve the park on every June weekend. The group checked and confirmed with Parks and Recreation that the pavilions were indeed already booked out for the entire month in February. Lawson said there were plenty of June dates available last year when the group booked the park in April.
APR requested the rental agreement forms for the pavilions for each June weekend, and while the names on the forms were redacted, the events showed a mix of church events, library events and birthdays or reunions.
The pride fest will feature more than 40 vendors, outreach programs, food trucks, drag performances and the crowning of the 2025 Miss Fountain City Pride.
The group has taken issue with the city before, when just days before the 2024 Christmas parade, Mayor Bill Gillespie banned it from participating after they reported safety concerns. The group filed suit and a federal judge quickly issued an injunction, stating that the prohibition on the float was a classic case of the “heckler’s veto” and that the city could not interfere with the group’s First Amendment right to be in the parade.
The group has faced other significant challenges in its two years. Before Prattville Pride have even officially formed, a small picnic held for the pride community at Autauga Creek faced harassment from the white supremacist hate group Patriot Front. About a dozen masked men came with a banner denouncing the event while leader Wesley Van Horn shouted into a megaphone about how the group was an abomination. Local protesters with their own signs looked down on the creekside from an embankment.
That event led Prattville Pride to formally organize, and in June 2024 the group held its first true pride fest at Cooter’s Pond. Patriot Front showed up then, too, sometime before to post propaganda stickers, but organizers removed them before the estimated 2,000 or more attendees arrived. The group Clean Up Alabama, formed to challenge LGBTQ+ materials in the Autauga-Prattville Public Library, would later challenge city leaders that the event was not child-friendly because of a drag queen they say danced “sexually.”
