Small Town
Courtney Anderson performs .
A colorful pride festival attendee.
SPENCER, Ind.,- Pride festivals in San Francisco, Chicago and New York City boast hundreds of thousands of spectators every June with their go-go boys, drag queens and dykes on bikes. Courage drew activists together some forty years ago to create something out of nothing in those urban centers. Now they’re pretty much corporate organizations with big budgets.
But here in this town rural Indiana town of 2,500 souls, a band of drag queens performing on the Owen County Courthouse steps in the rain proved to have even more courage. And Courtney Anderson’s cartwheel in high heel boots, was the show stopper. That’s Miss Gay Indiana 2009.
Drawing a strong contingent from nearby Bloomington, a handful of courageous souls braved the weather for this town’s fourth annual pride festival. Last year organizers were proud to claim 250 people – “more than double the prior year’s turn out.” It’ll easily be up to 300 this year.
When the drag performers came out to do their routines, a few law enforcement officers on duty elbowed each other and winked. Yeah, it’s easy to mock drag queens but how much courage does it take to show up in Spencer dressed in full regalia without a gun?
By 3 p.m. the festival organizers were packing up and shutting down. A mob of LGBT folks wearing a rainbow of outfits took over Skid Row Bar & Grill directly across from the court house. When John Mellencamp sang “I’ve seen it all in a small town” in the 1980s, Spencer is the kind of a rural Indiana town he had in mind.
Posted under Rural Landscape