How Shepherdstown, West Virginia got its first Pride parade this year

On June 1, Shepherdstown, West Virginia will get its first-ever Pride parade. It is organized by performer and activist Joan Marie Moossy, who moved to the town permanently from New York City in 2022 after years of being a part-time resident. Moossy, now 70, experienced queer activism and community throughout her time in New York, where she counted as mentors and friends the great avant-garde performer Ethyl Eichelberger and Gilbert Baker, creator of the Pride flag. It was from people like them, she says, that she learned about the power of activism—that it really could create positive change and progress.

So, create she did. Shepherdstown, also home to Shepherd University, has a longstanding reputation for being queer friendly, one Moossy herself experienced for the first time over 30 years ago. This past October, Moossy’s idea for a Pride parade received a bounty of support from the Shepherdstown Town Council and local businesses, and it becomes a reality June 1 at 6 p.m. The town is a small one–about 1,537 people as of 2023– and the parade will travel the length of about two blocks, as the town’s other parades do. Moossy anticipates 25 groups–including everyone from the ACLU of West Virginia to Kevin Bacon’s SixDegrees charity to the Shepherdstown Presbyterian Church, among many others. In all, as many as 175 people will be marching in it. Local businesses have stepped up and created their own Pride programming for the weekend as well, all with the parade at its core.

The theme will be “Historic Firsts,” much like the parade itself, and will focus on the town’s LGBTQ+ history. Its Grand Marshal will be Rosemary Ketchum, the first openly trans person to be elected to public office in the state, and it will also feature salutes to Silas Starry (the town’s mayor and one of the country’s earliest openly gay elected officials) and Stephen Skinner, who became the state’s first out gay legislative member of the West Virginia House of Delegates when he was elected in 2013. Though the town previously had Pride festivities organized by John J. Mason and DJ Jearbear (who will also be honored during the parade), events like these hadn’t appeared in the city until 2014.

“I think it's important to stand up and celebrate,” Moossy says of the parade, but for her it also extends to life in general. “I think it's important to have fun…I tell all my young friends, the most revolutionary thing you can do right now is to be happy, and that having fun is an act of defiance.”

GOOD spoke to Moossy about the parade, queer Southern living, activism, and more.

This homemade banner will appear in Shepherdstown, West Virginia's first ever Pride parade on June 1. Joan Marie Moossy

What made you move to Shepherdstown from New York?
My parents moved here in 1991 from Pittsburgh, and so I've been coming down here ever since. In 2012, I inherited the house. For 10 years, I went back and forth between here and New York. In 2022, I decided to move out of my New York apartment and come down here permanently. And it's been great. I had done a few LGBTQ+ activities here before in 2018–I donated 100 rainbow flags for the businesses to put up during Pride, and that was really beautiful. I also worked with GLAAD and the local Pride organization to do a Trans Awareness Workshop, and that was an incredible experience. When I moved here permanently, I thought, I want to do something else. I thought of the idea of the Gay Pride Parade, just because they'd never had that. They had a picnic in Morgan’s Grove Park and a couple of years of street fairs, but they petered out. I proposed to have an annual Gay Pride Parade and I picked June 1 because I thought we could kick off Pride in the region and do some work promoting the other Pride organizations and towns around here.

What were your interactions with queer activism and queer life in New York?
I pretty much lived my whole adult life in the gay community. I was very lucky to work with Ethyl Eichelberger in the 80s, and he was a well-known avant-garde playwright by the time I started working with him, which helped kick-start my career as an actress. That was an extremely lucky thing for me. He wrote parts for me in his plays and was one of the great mentors of my life in general. In the 90s, I was lucky to meet and make friends with Gilbert Baker, who created the original rainbow flag in 1978 in San Francisco. He was another big influence on me in terms of designing protests, with the type of banners you make and how to make them. I was inspired that someone I knew personally was able to change the world, because he didn't just design the flag, but he worked his whole life to make it a ubiquitous symbol around the world for gay people, and it worked. That impressed me and made me believe that I could change the world, too. So that's what I'm always striving for. Even the smallest thing that can make an impact in someone else's life can go on to have a cultural impact in society. I was very lucky in New York to have a lot of high point experiences that very deeply influenced me with the idea that activism could work, that you could work hard at something and get a good, big win out of it, in terms of moving the culture forward. I know we're kind of in a regressive period right now. Of course, progress doesn't always go on a linear continuum. The LGBTQ+ community is under attack, especially our trans siblings. I wanted to step up and have an influence, especially on young activists, to show that if you keep working, you can win on certain issues and remind people that we've had a lot of big wins over the years to recognize LGBTQ+ people as major contributors in our society. These kinds of wins are important, inspiring the next generation of activists not to feel like we're just always losing. We've had big wins, and we're gonna win again.

The theme of Shepherdstown's first Pride parade is "Historic Firsts."Joan Marie Moossy

What was your experience of Shepherdstown's relationship to the LGBTQ community when you arrived?
When my parents moved here in 1991 I came and spent about three weeks here when they were in Europe. When they came back, I said, hey, you know you moved to a gay town, right? I just saw so many gay people here. My parents went on to be very close with a lot of gay couples that were their age. Shepherdstown has a long history of gay residents, and still does. There's still a lot of LGBTQ+ people. We've got a lot of young queer people here, which I saw very clearly demonstrated when I went this fall to the Appalachian Queer Film Festival. We currently have a gay mayor, James Gatz, and he's the third gay mayor here. We have Shepherd University, so we have a constant influx of young people. I think that creates a very big interest and brings in a lot of kids who feel safe and queer here.

Why do you think the parade is important now?
I think it's important to stand up and celebrate. I think it's important to have fun. I tell all my young friends, the most revolutionary thing you can do right now is to be happy and having fun is an act of defiance. I wanted to have just a quick, wild, crazy celebration where everybody had a really good time. Our parade route is only two blocks long. It's a small town, so even the Christmas parade that has 100 groups marching in it only takes an hour. We have 25 groups, and it will probably be about 20 minutes to half an hour. That's why I say fast and furious. But I think it's going to be very colorful and fun, and then there's so much else to do. It's going to be over by about 6:30pm, which is dinner time. This is a tourist town, so of course, there's a lot of beautiful restaurants and wonderful shops, and there's going to be a drag show afterward. There'll be lots for people to do–hang out, shop in town, enjoy the evening and get to know that this is a gay-friendly town. People are welcome here.

When I proposed the idea of a Gay Pride Parade in October, I got a unanimous yes right away. I expected to wait a few weeks to hear. Since then, the businesses have just stepped up right behind me to be incredibly supportive. We've got the all-day Countdown to Pride event on Saturday hosted by The Roving Peregrine Theater Company. Kinky Boots is going to show at the local movie theater on Saturday, too. And then on Sunday, before the parade, the Shepherdstown Presbyterian Church is going to have two Pride services in the morning. A yoga group called Mahalo Wellness is going to conduct a free yoga session, and then the local bookstore, Four Seasons Bookstore, is going to have a Banned Books Club meeting, and they're going to discuss Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe. The parade will be at 6 p.m. and after the parade, there'll be a drag show at Panagiota's Taste of Greece restaurant. That'll be hosted by Chasity Vain, and it's called the Royal Revue. The drag community is very big in this region, very supportive of one another, and has been incredibly supportive of the parade. So I think the town, the citizens, are really behind it, and I'm hoping for a big crowd in the audience.

What would you want people to know about queer life in the South that you don’t think they do?
I think the rural South is the vanguard of the gay liberation movement now. Not that cities don't have gay activism, but I think that there's a surge of activism in the rural south, and particularly in this mid-Atlantic area. I'd like people to know that this is nothing new here. We do have a queer history that goes quite far ways back, including our first gay mayor in 1972. People are always surprised by that. Like many groups, the history is buried. I think it's important to have this kind of history brought to people's attention. The queer community has existed in Shepherdstown and all over West Virginia and all over the South for many, many years. And it may be a history that's not been told yet, but is a fascinating history, and it's a history that should be told.