Hastings celebrated its fifth annual pride festival on Saturday, June 14 at Levee Park. The event was organized by the nonprofit Inclusion, Diversity & Equity Alliance (IDEA) and featured programming from line dancing and an open mic to community craft fair and a pet parade.
“Hastings Pridefest is designed to celebrate and bring awareness, not only to the hardships faced by the LGBTQIA+ community, but also the beauty they bring to this community,” said Mayor Mary Fasbender, kicking off the event.
Fasbender underscored the city council’s June proclamation of June as LGBTQIA+ Pride Month, which was announced at the June 2 City Council meeting: “The city continues to have discussions and conversations [on] how we do better for this community.”
Fasbender spoke alongside Marta Tierney, IDEA co-founder and executive director.
“Pride is a little different this year,” said Tierney, characterizing the event as a return to the pride movement’s roots as a “form of defiance and resilience in the community and well, right now, the queer community is under attack.”
This year’s event in Levee Park differed from the pride parade of previous years, a change Tierney attributed to ensuring the safety of the event, an issue that will be revisited next year.
Rather than a parade, the event featured a pet parade and competition at Levee Park. Harvey the Alpaca won handily over his canine competitors.
Hastings pride has always been “ever-evolving,” said Tierney with the first pride parade in 2020 created in an effort to show support for the community even during the ongoing COVID-19 Pandemic. The parade, which had “all of about five days to get it all set up” was a way to maintain safe distancing while still being out in public, said Tierney.
Despite the last-minute preparation of the 2020 pride parade, the event received such an “outpouring of support [that] it became really apparent this is really needed in town,” said Tierney.
Government and business partners from around the area set up tents for the event, including Dakota County Public Library which handed out free books and craft kits. Within the Dakota County Library booth hung the two previous pride quilts, made by community members each year, with the third to be unveiled on June 21 at Pleasant Hill Library.
Other booths included local businesses like Chuck and Dons which is set to open its Hastings location in September and Redefine Mental Health and Wellness, a local psychiatry practice.
Hastings Pride Festival preceded an event remembering William “Ike” Eickholt and celebrating Diversity and Vulnerability on Sunday, June 15. Mitch Carmody, a grief facilitator and friend of Eickholt spoke about the event saying, “we are just gonna hootenanny and see what we can do to help each other [...] We can’t have Ike’s life be erased.”