Organizer Tom Wheeler waves a Pride flag and yells, “Canyon County, the gays are here!” (Kyle Green for The Washington Post) NAMPA, Idaho - In the beginning, Tom Wheeler didn’t expect he would need a fence. He wanted to give Canyon County, Idaho, its first Pride celebration, and when he imagined that day, he pictured a park without barriers, an open space where everyone was welcome. But then the mayor said the event conflicted with her beliefs, and angry residents called for a protest.
Wheeler was a real estate agent from Boise, an out-of-towner, and worse, gay. Far-right extremists had already targeted another small-town Idaho Pride, and now, Wheeler’s event seemed to be at risk, too. His mother begged him to stay home.
An uncle urged him to wear a bulletproof vest. At the very least, local officers said, he might want a barricade. Now, the crews were here with 700 feet of six-foot-tall metal fencing, and Wheeler, a 27-year-old who’d chosen not a bulletproof vest but a cowboy hat and a pink T-shirt for the day’s attire, watched as they hoisted the frame, then wrapped the metal in a black shroud.
Wheeler frowned. He felt safer, but not exactly fabulous. “I think we have a thousand feet of gay stuff to put on the fencing,” he told Van Knapp, a curly-haired queer Nampa mom who’d helped him plan the event.
“We need to glam up the perimeter.” Until now, Wheeler’s existence had been mostly a privileged one. He was White, cisgender, handsome in a way people .
