The Northeast Kingdom Rainbow Coalition is set to celebrate its third annual PrideFest on Sunday. While around 20 Pride events will be held around the state this year, the celebration in Newport is the only one of its kind in Vermont’s rural northeast corner.
Hannah Pearce, a queer farmer born and raised in Albany, attended the first PrideFest event in 2023.
“We know where the centerpoints of queer community are in Vermont; it’s not typically the Northeast Kingdom,” she said. “Just knowing that there was a PrideFest (in Newport) in which there were hundreds of people in the parade … just that alone, there’s value in that.”
Avi IC Ward, co-chair of the coalition, grew up in Montpelier and moved to Saint Johnsbury with their husband several years ago. Ward said they struggled to find community at first because the NEK is “so big and so spread out, it makes it particularly hard to find your people.”
Then Ward connected with the fledgling Rainbow Coalition and helped plan the first PrideFest. They said a lot of the people they have met through the LGBTQIA+ organization are now their closest friends.
“I feel really grateful to have found this group and be able to do this work,” they said.
NEK PrideFest features a one-mile parade through downtown Newport, set to begin at noon and concluding in Gardner Park. In the park, a festival is scheduled to run from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m., featuring live music, speakers, vendors and activities.
“Celebrating Pride is step one in the work we need to do to protect queer people and to make this world a safer, better place, but it’s important because it’s joyful and also just the visibility of it is really important,” Pearce said.
Ward said the nonprofit Rainbow Coalition was created from two distinct groups: one focused on planning a Pride event in Newport and another focused on creating queer community in the Northeast Kingdom.
The coalition adopted both missions and tries to host a community event at least once a month — either in Saint Johnsbury or Newport — to play games, make art or just “be in community,” Ward said. The coalition also holds a Halloween dance party and craft fair event, has a peer support program and partners with groups on other events.
“For the most part, we’ve gotten a lot of support,” Ward said. “A lot of people are just really happy that a (LGBTQIA+) group exists here. … It’s just so amazing to have that space where people can feel really comfortable.”
Last fall, Pearce held an amateur drag contest and dance party in the barn at Hillside Farm — her pastured poultry operation — to benefit the Rainbow Coalition. She said around 200 people attended the event.
“Any services of support the Rainbow Coalition can provide to make this place feel safer, to take care of their peers and other queer folks, is something I want to support,” Pearce said. “And I’m happy to have a fun party to do that.”
The farmer said she grew up in a pretty progressive family and had many connections to the queer community before she came out at age 31, relatively late in life.
“I never had to grapple with what a lot of young queer people have to, especially ones in rural communities: I wasn’t affected by fear of not being able to live my life how I wanted to,” she said. “That’s a pretty big privilege.”
Pearce points to the 2022 murder of transgender woman Fern Feather — who also grew up in Albany — as a reason why having an event celebrating LGBTQ+ pride in the area is important. While attending a vigil for Feather in Morrisville, Pearce remembers thinking to herself about the NEK, that “this place creates queer people too, and it’s not just a place for us to leave.”
“There are so many queer people doing awesome things in the Northeast Kingdom, and that love living here; that want to be a part of a rural community and love all the things that make rural communities special,” she said.
The farmer said she finds it meaningful to serve as a model of a rural queer person living their life authentically and openly — something she did not often see growing up in the Northeast Kingdom in the ‘90s and 2000s.
For her part, Pearce said Hillside Farm has employed a lot of people over the past decade, and many of her long-term and best crew members have been young queer people. It’s gratifying to know she’s had success making her farm a place where “people of any background would feel welcome and accepted and valued,” she said.
“The truth is that we all are here to take care of each other,” Pearce said. “That’s one of the values of any good rural community, and queer people are part of that community.”
