Help us fund Bartlesville Community Pride 2025: donate today!

BACC is hosting Bartlesville Community Pride on October 26^th, 2025 from 4pm to 9pm at Unity Square in Bartlesville, Oklahoma. You can help us fund this free all-ages community celebration by donating today!

If you’d like to follow us to stay up to date on our current and future work, you can find our social media accounts, email newsletter, and contact information through our linktree at: linktr.ee/bacc.oklahoma

An atmosphere of fear: Bartlesville’s three-year campaign to ban drag

For the last three years, a small but loud conservative movement in Bartlesville has been trying to eradicate drag from the town.

In 2022, a petition circulated asking the city government to make drag performances illegal in public spaces in town, calling drag “sexually charged entertainment”.

From this point on, the city government would give this dangerous rhetoric a platform, repeatedly revisiting the topic in city council agendas, special meetings, and briefings that explored the supposed dangers of drag and how the city could potentially ban drag performances in public spaces in town.

While the city government was unable to find a legal avenue to ban drag, the pressure from the local anti-drag movement, hate groups, and the city government itself created at atmosphere of fear that affected the entire community, including the local advocacy group Bartlesville Equality (then OKEQ Bartlesville) that had held Bartlesville’s annual Pride celebration since the town’s first Pride event in 2018, with some of their celebrations featuring family-friendly drag shows.

In 2023, Bartlesville Equality (BE) made an agreement with the city to not have drag at their annual Pride event in the Fall. In 2024, that agreement had expired and BE once again had drag performances at their Pride event. But in 2025, with continued anti-2SLGBTQIA+ tensions mounting in town and across the nation, BE voted at their July board meeting to ban drag from their own Pride event that Fall. This vote to ban drag from their own event split the BE board, with multiple board members subsequently resigning.

On July 31^st, 2025, BE announced that they were canceling their annual Pride celebration for the first time in eight years, citing their board resignations, financial concerns, and the claim that it was “unsafe to host Pride in 2025.”

After three years of anti-2SLGBTQIA+ rhetoric aimed at drag performances in town, Pride was dead in Bartlesville.

Pride’s legacy

Make no mistake: this three-year campaign to ban drag in Bartlesville resulted in the cancellation of Bartlesville Pride because there is no Pride without drag.

Pride was created by marginalized voices refusing to be silenced. BIPOC, trans, and drag-performing folks started this beautiful and resilient tradition of celebrating being joyously alive in the face of oppression. The freedoms of our right to expression; to celebrate our own lives and those of our friends, neighbors, and loved ones; and to simply be ourselves are inextricable from the freedom of our right to drag.

An attack on drag is an attack on Pride, and an attack on Pride is an attack on basic human liberties. If we don’t have the right to exist as ourselves, we don’t have the right to exist at all.

Right now, we’re seeing attacks on human rights echoed in Bartlesville and across the nation. Marginalized groups being profiled and targeted as supposedly dangerous is a tactic being repeatedly used to erode rights and endanger us all. While the target of this hateful rhetoric may change from talking point to talking point, the underlying assumption that some human beings have less right to exist than others creates an alarming through line that threatens the foundation of human rights across our towns, states, and nation.

These dehumanizing campaigns aimed at attacking our rights hinge on division and isolation. When community, resources, education, and avenues of expression are inaccessible to us, it’s natural for us to feel alone, unanchored, unsupported, and afraid.

When that fear is weaponized, when we’re told we should be afraid of our neighbor, we’re more likely to see attacks on our neighbor’s rights as protection for ourselves. But our neighbor’s rights are our rights. The division and erosion of our shared humanity is intentional and destructive to all of us. Our protection lies not in tearing one another down, but in building community with one another.

That’s what BACC was created to do: connect people across intersecting experiences, backgrounds, identities, cultures, abilities, and beliefs to empower, educate, and nurture our communities as a whole.

The mission of Bartlesville Accepting Community Coalition (BACC)

Founded in October of 2023 in response to the lack of vocally inclusive community spaces in Bartlesville, BACC is a grassroots intersectional community organization that promotes safe spaces, education, and connection through accessible events, programs, and resources with an especial focus on harm reduction, restorative justice, mutual aid, human rights advocacy, skill sharing, and the arts.

We host monthly peer support meetings, seasonal events, arts events and programs, online community spaces, and an annual Pride Family Picnic in June. We also collaborate with other organizations to connect community members with resources like Stop the Bleed training, crisis and deescalation education, literacy resources, and harm reduction supplies.

We believe that despite living in a city, state, and country where times feel darker than ever, we are truly better together and it’s more important than it ever has been to keep showing up. It’s important to know that we are not alone, and that we do in fact belong. We laugh, bleed, sweat, and cry together. We refuse to be othered and dehumanized. We refuse to be buried.

At the heart of all of BACC’s work is the desire to give people the space and tools they need to connect with themselves and one another to work together to create a world where we can all be unapologetically ourselves with PRIDE.

Pride is Dead, Long Live Pride

We don’t believe that Pride can ever be cancelled because it isn’t a single event: it’s the lives we live and the joy we experience amidst the hardship and the beauty, the grief and the love, the disquiet and the peace.

Neither do we believe that Pride can ever be killed because it lives in each and every one of us.

So this Fall, October 26^th, 2025, from 4pm to 9pm, BACC will be hosting Bartlesville Community Pride at Unity Square in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, to celebrate being joyously alive with our family, friends, neighbors, and community who refuse to be buried.

At this free, all-ages event we’ll have:

🌈 Live entertainment

🌈 Free activities

🌈 Local artists and vendors

🌈 Resources

🌈 Kid’s area

As a grassroots-funded organization, we source the majority of our funding from the communities we serve. That means we’re able to center those communities’ needs over corporate, state, or federal interests.

BACC is fiscally sponsored by 501(c)3 organization Oklahoma Pride Alliance, so donations to this campaign are tax exempt.

Donate today to help us fund Bartlesville Community Pride 2025 and free inclusive programs, events, resources, and services year-round!

Bartlesville Accepting Community Coalition Fiscal Sponsorship Fund