Adams County organizer plans first Pride celebration at state park

Jalyn Thacker is putting Adams County on the map for a different kind of milestone: the county’s first major Pride celebration. The Adams County Pride Festival will take over the Adams Lake State Park Shelter in West Union on Saturday, June 13, from 2 p.m. to 8 p.m., turning a rural park setting into a daylong gathering built around visibility, safety, and belonging.

For Thacker, the event grew out of years of travel. Growing up in Adams County, he once had to drive more than an hour to reach Pride events in Cincinnati, Yellow Springs, or Portsmouth. Now he is trying to create that same sense of welcome much closer to home, in a county of 27,477 residents spread across 583.9 square miles. Adams County’s median household income was $50,264 in the Census Bureau’s 2024 American Community Survey profile, 14.9% of adults held a bachelor’s degree or higher, and 8.9% of residents under 65 lacked health insurance.

The county’s demographics help explain why organizers see the festival as more than a one-day gathering. The Census Bureau profile shows that 96.3% of residents identified as White alone in the 2020 Census, underscoring how visibly different an in-county Pride event may feel for LGBTQ residents who have often had to look elsewhere for community. Thacker’s goal is to make Adams County feel like a place where people of all genders and sexual identities can be open without leaving home to find acceptance.

The festival is being planned as a free, family-friendly event with vendors, food, live entertainment, games, crafts, and interactive activities. Organizers also expect cornhole, volleyball, arts and crafts tables, food trucks, a lemonade stand, a talent show, comedians, and drag performances. Local calendars have described it as the county’s first major Pride event, and support has already begun to surface in unexpected places, including encouragement from an older man Thacker met while hanging flyers at a gas station.

That support matters in a county where a first Pride celebration will be watched closely, both for turnout and for the tone it sets. The Diocese of Southern Ohio promoted the gathering alongside All Saints in Portsmouth, signaling that some institutions are willing to stand publicly with the event. The larger backdrop remains sobering: GLAAD tracked 268 anti-LGBTQ incidents nationwide in June 2025, and Ohio nearly topped the state list that year. In Adams County, the festival is becoming a test of whether rural civic life can make room for young LGBTQ residents who want to build their lives there.