News coverage of Columbus and Cleveland Pride celebrations has highlighted one thing first and foremost: attendance.
On News 5 Cleveland, “thousands gathered in Downtown Cleveland” on June 7. NBC 4 anchor Colleen Marshall in Columbus said, after highlighting her plans to participate, that “hundreds of thousands of people” would be at Columbus Pride. The Buckeye Flame has certainly done this, too.
But smaller, usually rural Pride celebrations don’t have such eye-catching numbers. For these events, the driving force is something more intangible.
Jalyn Thacker, the 24-year-old founder of Adams County Pride, saw the rural Ohio county he grew up in a different light after Pride.
“It was quite amazing because it’s my home county,” he said. “I’ve never seen anything like this before.”
Adams County Pride
A Pride cookout’s success in October inspired Thacker to put together the first Pride in Adams County, which is located southeast of Cincinnati on the Kentucky border.
Thacker hoped his June Pride festival would bring out familiar faces in the LGBTQ+ community, alongside strangers who felt comfortable to celebrate openly. But on the inside, he was “freaking out and nervous, [thinking] nobody’s going to come, maybe we did this too soon, maybe we should have advertised longer,” Thacker said.
But while recording some performers at the event for social media, he turned around and was shocked by what he saw.
“The field that we were in was filled with people sitting and standing and watching, and people walking through the booths,” he said. “I was like, ‘Whoa, I feel like I missed this. How did this many people get here?’”
Though he was glad the festival was packed, he would have been happy “even if just one person showed up.”
“That still would have been a success to me because we opened up a safe space for at least one person to attend,” Thacker said. “ Honestly, after putting on this event, I think Adams County is a little bit more of a safe space than we believe.”
Grace Methodist Church Pride (Vermilion)
Jim Chapple, 75, organized his church’s first Pride celebration this year – the very same church that ousted him for being gay two decades ago.
Pride was “awesome,” he said. Over 400 people, with 32 vendors under a huge, long tent to protect them from the rain. When Chapple asked the vendors if they would come back, all 32 said, “Absolutely.”
Being a retired college professor of statistics, Chapple wanted data to evaluate the festival. People who took the survey provided “overwhelmingly extremely positive” responses, he said. Any suggested changes to Pride were tweaks rather than sweeping overhauls.
And that’s alongside people thanking Chapple and the church in person for putting on Pride in the lakeside town 35 miles west of Cleveland.
“All of those kinds of statements really made us feel that the hard work that we put into it and the effort we put into it was well worth it,” Chapple said. “People said they couldn’t believe it was the first year we had done [Pride].”
Haven 740
Nearly two years ago, Reece Johnson founded his Pride organization, Haven 740, in the village of Waverly in southern Ohio. At 19, he planned his village’s first LGBTQ+ celebration, a Pride walk, but he said he wasn’t sure how many people would show up or how the community would react.
Johnson felt his excitement increase as his organization’s business cards, stickers, and event flyers started to arrive, he said.
“Oh my god, it’s really happening,” he recalled.
Around 15 people showed up for their first Pride walk, Johnson said. As he walked through his hometown, the walk felt “great” and “very affirming,” even as people took photos and videos of the small group.
“Whether it was for bad reasons, good reasons, I really don’t care,” he said. “We were out there showing our Pride, being happy, connecting together, being a community.”
If no one showed up for the Pride walk, Johnson said he would have still walked through the village.
“The importance of it is to show what a community should look like,” he said. “Even if one person didn’t show up, me being there, I feel like is successful.” 🔥
IGNITE ACTION
- To find the last few Pride celebrations in Ohio this year, visit our 2026 Pride Guide.
- To learn more about Adams County Pride, click here.
- To learn more about Haven 740, click here.
- To learn more about Grace United Methodist Pride, click here.
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