Laramie’s LGBTQ+ community looks to the future for PrideFest 2025
Pride Month is here. The Laramie community plans to celebrate, remember, protest and organize with events planned across the next two weeks.
Laramie’s annual Pride Month events kicked off early this year, as members of the local queer community gathered on First Street Plaza Saturday to usher in PrideFest 2025.
The crowd, which included several community leaders, heard the inaugural reading of this year’s Pride Month Proclamation — an official statement celebrating the LGBTQ+ community’s “contributions to Laramie’s unique, diverse tapestry.” Then they marched to the Albany County Courthouse, waving flags and bearing rainbow-colored parasols.
The night before, PrideFest organizers lit the Downtown Laramie display under the footbridge with blue, pink and white bulbs — the colors of the transgender pride flag.
As Pride Month proper dawns this morning with the first day of June, the LGBTQ+ community and its allies will embark on two full weeks of events. Those range from relaxed crafty gatherings to rowdy drag shows and everything in between.
Some events — like a movie night at the Regal Fox Theater Tuesday and an LGBT book club session at Night Heron two days later — provide opportunities for engaging with queer art.
Other events — like the social justice roundtable and a storytelling night, both planned for next week — provide opportunities to listen, learn and organize.
Every event — from the Vedauwoo pride hike next Sunday to the candlelight vigil that closes PrideFest one week later — is, in its own way, about building community.
PrideFest Chair Courtney Titus said that’s more important than ever.
“We are still here, and the community that we love and care about is still here,” she said. “This is our home just as much as it is anyone else’s, and we want to stay here. We want to go to college here and study what we want to study, and raise our families here and be able to exist and take up space and be happy and healthy.”
The theme this year is Queer Futurism, a genre of art, philosophy, and discourse that encourages the “radical, imaginative thinking of a just future,” Titus said.
“What is the Laramie and the community that we want moving forward?” she said. “And what do we want to create? And [it’s] thinking from that lens and not getting trapped in the despair and the doom-scrolling.”
Imagining a better world, and planning for it, isn’t just science fiction. It’s a necessary response to the current social and political climate Laramie’s queer community faces.
A wave of anti-trans legislation has radically transformed life for young trans Wyomingites, who will now be treated differently than their cisgender peers during team tryouts and counseling sessions, and in doctor’s offices, restrooms and dorms.
While those laws are driving some queer folks from the state, others will remain, defying the new legislative regime with their continued presence.
“Queer people belong in Wyoming, belong in Laramie, and we’re entitled and able to have everything that we could have ever dreamed of right here in Laramie,” Titus said. “We don’t need to be relegated to busy urban city centers that most of us don’t want to live in anyway. I am so determined in not being run out of my home state.”
But the local queer community, Titus said, seeks more than survival and resistance. It aims “to create a Pride that is not just a celebration of resilience but a declaration of possibility.”
In the works of Octavia Butler, in the lyrics of Janelle Monáe, in the blueprints of other leading voices in speculative and queer futurism, the local community hopes to find inspiration for their own work in building a better future.
Local LGBTQ+ community “vital to Laramie’s success”
Even as the state of Wyoming has become a dangerous place for transgender folks, the city of Laramie, by contrast, has aimed to foster ever greater inclusivity.
It was the first city in Wyoming to pass a full non-discrimination ordinance, and today enjoys a consistently high score from the Human Rights Campaign’s national equality index.
The city’s queer community, uniquely shaped by both its tragedies and its triumphs, has transformed Laramie into a Mecca for young queer Wyomingites — especially those who are “too yee-haw” to ever see themselves as residents of bigger cities out-of-state.
Demonstrating this city-wide commitment to inclusivity, Mayor Sharon Cumbie was at First Street Plaza Saturday, commemorating the launch of Laramie’s 9th annual PrideFest with a public reading of this year’s Pride Month proclamation.
“Wyoming’s LGBTQ+ community are living authentically today more than ever before and they deserve to know the City of Laramie and the State of Wyoming supports them,” the mayor read. “Laramie’s economy and culture are more prosperous when the civil rights of all people are equal and we recognize the LGBTQ+ community as being vital to Laramie’s success as an economically strong and culturally vibrant city.”
The proclamation will have its official reading before the Laramie City Council Tuesday.
All-ages events, drag shows, and Pride in the Park
PrideFest has expanded its scope this year, responding to community requests for more youth-friendly events. Two additions include an all-ages trivia night and an all-ages queer prom.
“For the all-ages events, they are truly all-ages. Everyone is welcome to attend,” Titus said. “Especially the queer prom. You know, that's something that even queer adults didn’t get to experience in high school. So it’s truly all-ages. It will just be family-friendly. So, you know: clean music, no alcohol, we’ll wrap it up by 8 p.m., and be in bed early … But later that night is the drag show at the Duck. So if folks want to keep the party going, they can.”
PrideFest 2025 will also feature two drag shows. The first, on Saturday, June 7 at the Gryphon Theatre, will serve as the official annual PrideFest drag show, a ticketed event with visiting performers that typically draws a significant crowd.
The second drag show will be a Cabaret Night, also featuring burlesque and comedy, planned for the more intimate setting of the Ruffed Up Duck Saloon. Titus said the event is part of a movement to revive drag in Laramie, where troupes have come and gone.
PrideFest ultimately builds to its signature event: Pride in the Park, an afternoon-long festival in Washington Park featuring live music and more than 50 vendors, artists and nonprofits.
“It’s not a big city corporate pride; we are entirely community funded,” Titus said. “We don’t have any big grants. We don’t have any big corporate sponsorships. We don’t even have any multi-year funding agreements. All of this is annual or biannual sponsorships and crowdfunding by the folks right here in Laramie [who] put their money where their mouth is.”
Sunday, June 1
Pride on the Patio
Time: 1-4 p.m.
Location: Cowgirl Yarn, 119 E. Ivinson Avenue
Kink Bingo
Time: 6-9 p.m.
Location: O’Dwyers Public House, 1622 Grand Ave.
Monday, June 2
Movie Night: To Wong Foo: Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar
Time: 6-8 p.m.
Location: Regal Fox Theater, 505 S. 20th Street
Price: $5
Tuesday, June 3
City Council Pride Proclamation
Time: 6:30-7:30 p.m.
Location: Laramie City Hall, 406 Ivinson Avenue
Thursday, June 5
LGBT Book Club: Geometries of Belonging by R.B. Lemberg
Time: 6-7 p.m.
Location: Night Heron Books & Coffeehouse, 107 E. Ivinson Ave.
Friday, June 6
Rainbow Road Bar Crawl
Time: 7-11 p.m.
Location: Downtown
Saturday, June 7
PrideFest Drag Show
Time: 7:30-10:30 p.m. (Doors at 7 p.m.)
Location: Gryphon Theatre, 710 E. Garfield Street
Price: $30 in advance / $35 at door
Sunday, June 8
Pride Hike
Time: 10 a.m.-noon
Location: Happy Jack Trail at Vedauwoo (meet at Wal-Mart parking lot)
Dungeons & Demis: Game Night
Time: 6-9 p.m.
Location: Canterbury House, 110 S 9th Street
Monday, June 9
Social Justice Roundtable
Time: 6-8 p.m.
Location: Canterbury House, 110 S. 9th Street
Tuesday, June 10
Pride Storytelling Night
Time: 6:30-8:30 p.m.
Location: Laramie Railroad Depot, 600 S 1st Street
Thursday, June 12
All Ages Trivia Night
Time: 6-8 p.m.
Location: Canterbury House, 110 S 9th Street
Pride Karaoke
Time: 8-10 p.m.
Location: The Great Untamed, 209 S 3rd Street
Friday, June 13
Queer Prom & Art Workshop
Time: 6-8 p.m.
Location: The Collective, 100 S. 2nd Street
Cabaret Night: Drag, Burlesque and Comedy
Time: 8-10 p.m.
Location: Ruffed Up Duck Saloon, 310 S. 5th Street
Saturday, June 14
Pride in the Park
Time: Noon-5 p.m.
Location: Washington Park
Sunday, June 15
Matthew Shepard Candlelight Vigil
Time: 6:30-7:30 p.m.
Location: Arts & Sciences Plaza on the University of Wyoming campus
Post-Vigil Processing Space
Time: 7:30-8:30 p.m.
Location: Canterbury House, 110 S. 9th Street
Er, Jeff: The caption under your first photo states "On the eve of Pride Month, the Downtown Laramie sign is lit with the colors of the transgender pride flag." However, the sign in the picture is lit up in red, blue, and yellow, while IIRC the "transgender" flag is pink, baby blue, and white. Admittedly, there are approximately one zillion different LBGTQIAWXYZ flags, and they're easy to confuse, but I'd expect that given your personal biases you'd get this one right....