‘An easier way to live’: the people behind Los Alamos Pride
Photographs by Eliana Padilla
“The first time we decided to put this on, we had no idea what was going to happen. Were people going to be angry? Would they come and protest against us? Would anyone even show up?” says George Marsden, describing the anxiety he and his friends felt in the lead-up to Los Alamos’s very first Pride Festival in 2018. He’s wearing a T-shirt from last year’s festival, featuring, in true Los Alamos fashion, the “Queeriodic Table” of elements.
For a couple of years before the first festival, One Los Alamos, a group of moms who formed to raise awareness of diversity within the community, had been hosting a Rainbow Potluck every June for Pride Month at the Unitarian Church of Los Alamos. Also at the Unitarian Church, an advocacy group called Voices of Los Alamos was holding monthly meetings to educate the community and organize political action surrounding statewide social justice issues.
The first Pride Festival in town came about after the spring of 2018, when three people from this scene — Roberta Beal, Cristina Olds, and Tina DeYoe — began entertaining the idea of a Pride parade.
“We did have LGBTQ+ groups in town before the first festival,” DeYoe says, “but the community was more underground. There wasn’t much visibility outside those groups.” DeYoe is now the settled minister of the Unitarian Church, which she joined when she moved to Los Alamos twelve years ago. Even then, she was far from new to advocating for LGBTQ+ rights. At the 2010 General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA), she advocated for marriage equality in the Presbyterian denomination during the lead-up to the vote that would allow openly LGBTQ+ ministers to be ordained.
The parade she, Beal, and Olds had imagined never took shape due to financial and logistical concerns. But along with the many community members who had been meeting regularly to help plan it, they decided to organize a Pride festival instead.
That’s when Marsden became involved. His uncertainty over how the first official Pride event would be received is also part of the reason he felt it was important to make it happen in the first place. “People kind of keep to themselves here,” he says, “so it’s easy to feel like no one else is out there. I think that makes Pride especially valuable.”
After the success of that first festival, this anxiety quickly dissipated. Small businesses put Pride flags up in their windows. In 2018, the county council designated the second week of June as LGBTQ+ Pride Week in Los Alamos, beginning a yearly tradition of recognizing the LGBTQ+ community that the council has continued ever since.
Several more churches also came forward in support, a move that’s been particularly special for Marsden to see. As an involved member of Trinity on the Hill Episcopal Church, he’s known many queer Christians who felt there was no place for them in any church.
Pride in Los Alamos has grown over the years, but it’s still run the same way it was at the start — as a group of friends who give what they can to help put on events throughout June, whether it’s a space to host them, a garage to store flags in, or a couple of extra chairs. They’re now known as the Los Alamos Pride Collective.
Melissa Mackey, another organizer who’s been involved since 2019, lovingly refers to the group as a “chaotic collective.” “It’s really just run through a network of trust and support in the community,” she says. “You run into someone at the movie theater and invite them to come get involved. That human touch is vital for all of us.”
Support that lasts
Pride in Los Alamos is funded out of the pockets of the Collective, aside from occasional private donations from community members and support from a few local businesses and churches — like Boomerang, which has sponsored T-shirts some years for the festival, Pig & Fig, which hosts an annual Pride on the Patio gathering, and the Unitarian and Episcopal churches, which provided fiscal sponsorship for the first few years.
This community-based approach is part of what makes Los Alamos Pride unique. In many major cities across the country, Pride parades and festivals receive a significant portion of their funding in the form of sponsorships from large corporations. Without this support, they can be difficult to hold at all.
But the reality of these sponsorships is complicated: Some corporations support Pride only when it’s safe and profitable — for instance, many have begun to withhold sponsorships in recent years after the Trump administration’s targeting of diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives has led them to rethink their affiliations with LGBTQ+ causes. Even before that, corporations have been found to have donated millions of dollars to anti-LGBTQ+ politicians alongside their Pride sponsorships.
Against this backdrop, Siena Beattie, another organizer who became involved after moving to town two years ago, finds the grassroots organization of Los Alamos Pride gratifying. “I’d been to a couple of big-city Prides before moving here,” they say, “but those can be overwhelming, and corporate sponsorship always feels a little icky to me. Seeing all the community members and small businesses here who come to support and make it all happen is comforting.”
DeYoe shares this sentiment, laughing as she says, “I appreciate that here, there’s no capitalism involved.”
This grassroots organization also means that, while other once-prominent advocacy groups for the LGBTQ+ community in town have disappeared, the events put on by the Collective have continued despite the wider political climate. Prism, for instance — an employee resource group for the LGBTQ+ community at Los Alamos National Laboratory — was lost after the Laboratory suspended all diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in February of 2025 following a series of executive orders from the Trump administration, leaving their LGBTQ+ employees with no organized source of advocacy or visibility.
Generations to come
This year’s Pride Festival is a colorful pop-up of people and booths at Central Park Square, where families wander and groups of teens chat on the lawn. What’s striking is the amount of young people — an age group Marsden, Mackey, and Beattie all feel makes Pride particularly meaningful.
As someone who ran the Los Alamos Teen Center for ten years, Marsden often worked with queer teens who felt they couldn’t come out to their families or at school, making public expressions of care feel urgent and necessary to him. “It’s also important for young queer people to see queer adults in their community to be able to picture themselves getting older and making it through all these struggles,” he adds.
It’s hard to talk about Pride without mentioning the mental health challenges many young queer people, particularly transgender youth, are more likely to experience than their straight and/or cisgender peers. Mackey, who has also worked with teens as a public librarian, is all too aware of the alarming rates of suicide among LGBTQ+ youth. A report released by The Trevor Project last October found increasing rates of anxiety symptoms, depressive symptoms, and suicidal ideation among LGBTQ+ youth aged 13 to 24 in recent years, citing nationwide rises in anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric and legislation as a likely contributing factor.
But it’s also been shown that LGBTQ+-affirming spaces — which can include anything from community Pride-related events to a friend’s supportive household — are linked to lower rates of suicide attempts among LGBTQ+ youth.
This year at the Pride Festival, Mackey stands behind a table covered in bags of jewelry she collected herself. She’s selling them for a dollar each and accepting additional donations that she’ll hand over to the Techo Fund, a local fund providing housing support for LGBTQ+ youth who have become homeless. By the end of the day, she raised over three hundred dollars, and her stand has been visited by a young person who tells her the Techo Fund has helped them in the past.
As two kids dart by decked out in rainbow gear, Beattie is also thinking of Pride’s impact on younger generations. “They’re a huge part of why we all do this,” they say. “It makes me so happy to see all these kids here who get to grow up seeing this celebrated.”
Here every day
To get more young people involved in the festivities, members of the Pride Collective have organized activities like intergenerational game nights and T-shirt tie-dyes at the Teen Center. Last year, after noticing a gap in the age groups attending Pride events, they also decided to do something that would appeal specifically to young adults in their twenties: Pride After Dark, an afterparty hosted by the VFW with drinks, dancing, karaoke, and live music.
“When we first started talking about putting it on, everyone was like, ‘You can’t throw a party in Los Alamos!’” Beattie remembers. “But we did it anyway, and people were thrilled to come.” The Collective even threw another Pride After Dark that same year after Halloween, this time set up as a queer masquerade ball.
For Mackey, events like these that extend beyond Pride Month are important reminders that queer people are living their lives and contributing to the community all the time. “We want people to know that we’re here every day, making your lattes, drawing your blood,” she says. “We don’t just disappear once June ends.”
Other year-round events organized through the Collective, like the Queer Book Club periodically hosted by Samizdat, help make inclusive community environments available even once Pride Month is over.
Marsden adds that Pride has led to lifelong friendships and support networks that help people both inside and outside the LGBTQ+ community through many types of challenges. When the Covid-19 pandemic hit Los Alamos two years after the first festival, the friends he’d met through Pride were a huge part of what helped him through it.
“It’s just an easier way to live than being closed off and hateful,” says Mackey, reflecting on what being involved has meant for her over the years. “It’s very freeing.”