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‘Ashland always shows up’: Thousands celebrate return of SOPride parade and festival By Nick Morgan Updated: Oct 08, 2022 06:08 PM A A 7 View all photos Molly McBrayer, dressed as a Bigfoot, waves an LGBTQ pride flag and carries a sign of support as the Ashland City Band marches during the Southern Oregon Pride Parade on Saturday. [Andy Atkinson / Mail Tribune] A truck bed hosts queens making their way through downtown Ashland on Saturday during the Southern Oregon Pride Parade. [Andy Atkinson / Mail Tribune] Oregon Shakespeare Festival staff and performers march in downtown Ashland on Saturday during the Southern Oregon Pride parade. [Andy Atkinson / Mail Tribune] Ashland Mayor Julie Akins, grand marshal of the Southern Oregon Pride parade, waves to the crowd. [Andy Atkinson / Mail Tribune] An oversize LGBTQ+ pride flag kicked off the first Southern Oregon Pride parade since 2019 in downtown Ashland on Saturday. [Andy Atkinson / Mail Tribune] Demonstrators with the recently formed Rogue Valley Peppershakers surrounded the handful of anti-LGBTQ Rogue Valley Saltshakers. [Andy Atkinson / Mail Tribune] Ashland Aerial Arts performers make their way through downtown Ashland on Saturday during the Southern Oregon Pride festival and parade. The parade was the first since 2019. [Andy Atkinson / Mail Tribune] Spanning a wide spectrum from technicolor wigs and gender-bending ensembles to plainclothes parents with messages of acceptance, hundreds if not thousands of Southern Oregonians returned to downtown Ashland on Saturday to show off their true colors, celebrate themselves and those they love. Southern Oregon Pride's first parade and festival since 2019 was anything but muted, featuring Ashland’s city band marching to its rendition of ABBA’s “Dancing Queen” as Ashland City Councilor and SOPride founder Gina DuQuenne followed behind in a truck carrying a quintet of waving drag queens in the bed. DuQuenne, whose involvement in SOPride dates back to Ashland’s first pride parade in 2010, beamed at the energy she got from the crowd of wavers along East Main Street. “Ashland always shows up,” DuQenne said, getting overwhelmed by the turnout after two years of pandemic restrictions. “People are just ready to come out together and play.” A handful of anti-LGBTQ demonstrators with the group Rogue Valley Saltshakers appeared, but were crowded out and overshadowed by demonstrators with the recently formed Rogue Valley Peppershakers group currently in the process of becoming a nonprofit. The Peppershakers brought in rainbow flags on poles specifically designed to limit the visibility of the Saltshakers’ tall signs. As roughly a dozen younger demonstrators danced around the Saltshakers as they sang along to Katy Perry’s 2008 hit “I Kissed a Girl,” pro-LGBTQ demonstrator Dominique Toyer stood back, smiled and shouted to the crowd, “I did more than that!” “The kids are alright,” Toyer said. Toyer said she plans to be on the Peppershakers board once it becomes a nonprofit, and also has a podcast called The Caucacity Counselor that focuses on her experiences of being Black living in Oregon. Ashland mayor Julie Akins, the parade’s grand marshal, celebrated DuQuenne’s work building the SOPride’s parade and festival to what it’s become today. “We’re all here because she had a dream and she bought it and sold it to the rest of us,” Akins said. “We’re here for love of community, we’re here for the love of ourselves and we’re here for love of one another.” Akins brought on stage her first cousin Karen White, who shared a story of spending much of her life as a conservative white male professor at a Texas college. White shared with the crowd how she was “smacked by divine intervention” at a retirement age that she wasn’t a man. “I found a happy place in being a woman,” White said. Denise Krause, running as a Democrat in the race for Jackson County commissioner against Republican incumbent Rick Dyer, asked those at the pride festival to vote for her. “They don’t represent a lot of us in this county, and they don’t represent most of us who are here,” Krause said of the current board of commissioners. Others who marched included U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., Democrat state Sen. Jeff Golden and Democrat state Rep. Pam Marsh, who marched dressed as the Statue of Liberty. Another costumed reveler who was hardest to miss was Molly McBrayer of Ashland, who wore a Bigfoot costume and carried a rainbow sign reading, “Come out, come out wherever you are. I support you.” “I thought, Bigfoot doesn’t normally come out, but I’ll come out for this,” McBrayer said. “I just can’t imagine people not being able to support who they love.” Reach web editor Nick Morgan at 541-776-4471 or [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @MTwebeditor.