The LGBTQ+ community in Southwest, Missouri is rallying around organizers of a pride event in rural Mansfield. Organizers say public pressure, the city's Board of Aldermen and a suspicious booking dispute caused a Pride festival on the square to be cancelled.
They now plan a protest on the square this Saturday, in place of the previous event.
"I get really passionate about this," Mansfield organizer Theresa Nicolosi explained. "It's kind of a slap in the face to a whole group of citizens, you know, that are underrepresented and don't have support here."
Mansfield is a town of just over 1,000. Nicolosi said, last June locals hosted the small city's first ever Pride event. Nicolosi said about 45 people showed up, for what she described as a lowkey picnic like atmosphere.
"Some of the LGBTQ people here never really get to have that sense of community or hang out with people, you know, that feel the same as them and have had the same struggles," she explained. "It was it was a very good, very positive event and made a lot of new friends."
She says that visibility is important, to build community and to dispel misconceptions. They did face counter protesters last year, but Nicolosi describes their interactions as civil.
This year she helped plan something bigger, hoping to connect with more people from the constellation of small cities in the region between Springfield and West Plains. She booked vendors and advertised to communities outside of Mansfield, in places like Mountain Grove and Ava. She said her group confirmed their booking with the city just days before the Board of Aldermen meeting where the plans were upended. She said that meeting May 14, caught her off guard.
"I had a friend that was in our LGBTQ group send me a message. And she said, hey, there's a big group that is putting out a mass call for people to show up at city council and protest your event," she said.
According to meeting minutes several members of the public spoke against the pride event, Nicolosi also had a chance to speak, later during new business a Mansfield resident presented a claim that "he had tried to reserve the Mansfield City Square for the month of June and it had failed to be placed on the reservation calendar at City Hall." According to meeting minutes, he "asked the Council to honor his reservation for the month of June." Mansfield's Mayor Derrick Neal then made an "attorney-based recommendation that all use of the City Square should be denied."
The City of Mansfield has not yet returned a phone call and email from KSMU.
Nicolosi isn't sure when, how or if she would have been notified if she hadn't been at the meeting where the decision was made. She said the Aldermen seemed prepared with an answer before the question was raised. She said ahead of the meeting and in posts online since she has seen derisive, misinformed and at times hateful rhetoric against her event and the LGBTQ+ community, often employing religion. She said she has also seen positive support, and as she plans for this weekend, she says that support, particularly across the region from individuals and groups like the Springfield based GLO Center and PFLAG, is essential for her sparsely populated rural community.
"Our pride event is like a bridge," she explained "it's not an option for some people to travel to an event in these other places. So, by bringing just a little event here, something that they can look forward to each year, it combats that isolation and that loneliness."
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