Queer Joy Interview #6: Brenda McWilliams
I met Brenda (She/Her) and her wife Lou Anne on 7/2/24 at their home in Tyler to talk about the first Tyler Pride picnic and the start of the East Texas PFLAG chapter.
“Queer joy, it's just being me, not having to edit my life.
There's been pockets of LGBT groups for ages, yet now, we've got more of a sense of a larger community. And I think the community at large is more aware of the LGBT community in the area and so it feels a bit more welcoming, open.
I didn't come out either till 46-47… as far as I knew then, it was just, friends, one or two, and you'd get together and have dinner or play board games…no big social gatherings or anything like that. No pride festivals or anything like that… and then outside of our groups you pretty much edited your life, but things have changed and the LGBTQ community is more visible. Who would have thought 20 years ago, or even 8-9 years ago, when we had the first difficulty with the city, that this year in 2024 the city allowed a big Pride festival in their brand new W.T. Brookshire Conference Center.
Pride in Tyler actually started with a picnic…and it had to be after 2008, probably 2010 [with 25-30 people.] Tyler Area Gay’s sponsored it, a picnic at Southside Park, and people would bring side dishes, and TAG would provide the meat and do the grilling, and then there'd be some silent auctions, and volleyball games set up, horse shoes, and some booths set up. That's how pride grew. But it actually started with a picnic, just a picnic, and then it began to pick up some…we'd grow every year anywhere from 50 to 150 people…and that went on for several years. It was a lot of fun.
Then TAG bumped it up with a TAG Pride out at Lindsay park for several years. And you know, the drag show, a dog fashion show, that kind of stuff. So it moved from that to that and became much bigger vendor wise. And then this year, it was a big deal at the conference center. And we've been to every one of them, every pride, picnic, festival we've been to it.”
-Brenda McWilliams (She/Her)
This is the coolest interview I've read yet