This was not what Bailey McDaniel expected.
About a year ago, when McDaniel and her partner, Emily Turner, both Mississippi State students, began planning a parade to celebrate the LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) community’s presence in the city of Starkville, the idea was pretty simple.
“We thought we’d have maybe 100 people,” McDaniel said.
But when the Starkville Board of Aldermen rejected their application for a parade permit on Feb. 20, the little event made big news. After Starkville Pride, McDaniel’s organization hosting the parade, filed a lawsuit against the city, the aldermen relented, approving the permit on March 6. By then, the Starkville Pride Parade had gathered national attention.
People from as far away as New York have registered to participate, McDaniel said.
The Starkville Pride events kick off today with a donor’s only reception, followed by a kick-off party at The Mill at MSU conference center. On Saturday, there will be a Queer Arts Market at Fire Station Park, followed by the first Starkville Pride Parade, which begins at noon at Fire Station Park and will be following the same downtown route used by the city’s Christmas Parade. A drag show and party at Rick’s Cafe Saturday night will close the event.
Pets are all allowed in the parade.
In the past couple of weeks, McDaniel realized they were going to “need a bigger boat,” to borrow a movie line.
“We’re still having the same events, but we’ve had to change the venues for some of the events since there are going to be far more people than we originally planned for,” McDaniel said. “We’ve had 400 people register to participate in the parade. But there will probably be a lot more who just show up and join in. Really, it’s impossible to know how many people will be there. It will be a lot.”
McDaniel said the logistics of a large-scale event have been almost overwhelming.
“Emily and I are both college students,” she said. “I’m graduating in the spring, trying to get into law school. It’s a busy time for students, and now we’re dealing with this. We’ve just had to put school aside for a minute and concentrate on pulling this all together.”
Concerns about explicit behavior
McDaniel said the scale of the parade, along with the participation from people from outside the community, have raised some concerns about how explicit the event might become.
“A couple of people have brought that to our attention,” McDaniel said. “It’s not so much the local people. They understand that it’s a small town and there are some people who are worried about what they’ll see. But we want this parade to continue, so we want this to be positive, something people can bring their kids to.
“I know in a lot of cities, the parades can get pretty wild,” she added. “I’ve talked to some of people from bigger cities where the parades have been going on for years. I think they’ll tone it down a little. They understand. … I’m never going to tell anyone what they can and can’t do. If someone breaks the law, the police will handle that. I’m just going to enjoy everything and hope everyone else does, too.”
Brandon Lovelady, Starkville Police Department’s public information officer, said the department will use the same procedures it employs during the city’s annual Christmas Parade.
“It will be very similar to that,” Lovelady said. “We’ll have the majority of our sworn staff at the parade.”
Lovelady said the department will enforce all local, state and federal laws as they apply to both parade participants, spectators or protestors.
“If it’s a case of some form of nudity, our state laws on indecent exposure cover that,” Lovelady said. “It might be as simple as an officer informing someone, ‘Hey, you can’t do that, so please comply’ to an arrest if someone refuses to cooperate.”
Lovelady said that while the department is not aware of any plans to protest the parade, it’s something officers have prepared for.
“Any time there is an event that might be considered controversial, we had to take that into account and be prepared for it,” he said. “The bottom line is that we want to make sure that no one’s rights are violated. I think our approach will be to handle the situations on a case-by-case basis. That could be anything from a verbal warning to an arrest. Our main concern is the safety of everyone there. We are prepared to do whatever is necessary to do that.”
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
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