Yardley Pride Celebration draws local community to hear about LGBTQ+ rights

Yardley may be a small town, but its community has immense LGBTQ+ pride.

During the annual Yardley Pride Celebration event, organized by Lisa Edward, the owner of Yardley Tattoo on Main Street, about seventy people wearing every color of the rainbow in their brightest saturations gathered around Yardley Borough Hall on June 3 to celebrate pride month locally.

In 2021, Yardley Borough held its first pride flag raising, which council members organized. Since last year, Edward has organized a pride celebration and ceremony to accompany the flag raising. Inspired by other pride events and being invited to Yardley’s first flag raising, she said it was a “no brainer” that she wanted to build a tradition.

“Holding this event in our community sends an important message to residents and neighbors: Yardley is welcoming, it is inclusive, and it is a safe place to be,” Edward said.

Beginning the ceremony, Edward spoke about the importance of building local community trust around big issues, like LGBTQ+ rights.

“In a time when hate and exclusion are loud, it is more important than ever for communities like ours to show up and be louder with love, support, and visibility, no matter how small we are,” Edward said. “That's the kind of community I want to live in, and hosting this celebration helps ensure that Yardley Borough is that community.”

LGBTQ+ rights were fought for, not given. There’s a rich history of this that Callum Kater, community health educator at the Planned Parenthood Keystone’s Rainbow Room of Bucks County, is reminded of every time pride month rolls around. He particularly thinks of monumental transgender activists Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson who partook in the Stonewall Uprising over fifty years ago. Yet for Kater, history is largely a contingent thing, rather than a steady rise of progress.

“We are taught as children that progress is linear, that each step forward is towards a better world, and each step that follows is even better,” Kater said. “We are not taught that progress is more akin to a pendulum, that when we swing forward, our oppressors do anything they can to pull us back. But it's in these backswings where real community is possible.”

Kasey Bautista, a youth attendee of the Lower Bucks Rainbow Room, spoke about pride meaning loving yourself and having courage. He believes courage is not just the courage to come out, but about “holding a sacred flame in your heart close to you and never letting it burn out.”

“Even if you can't let everyone see it, even when it's storming all around you, and you can't afford to let that flame escape the cover of your umbrella,” Bautista said. “Eventually you can find a home and turn that flame into a beautiful fireplace. You can build upon that home, make it safer, and eventually take another source of shelter. I believe that if we keep building our home and fueling our fire together, that one day the storm will stop, and we will finally be able to live in peace and harmony.”

Sharing a more personal story, Lauren Conrad, a local real estate agent with Kim Rock Group on the DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) committee at Bucks County Association of Realtors, spoke about growing up in a conservative area in Central PA and presenting as straight through high school. In college, she realized she was a lesbian, and her parents threatened to kick her out of the house and pull her out of college. However, they apologized quickly and accepted her.

“There were very low times where I considered not living this life, but realized I needed to be a voice for others,” Conrad said.

Ultimately, she started the first LGBTQ+ support group at her college and organized many events to provide a safe space for gay students. She also marched on Washington to advocate for the acknowledgement of the AIDS crisis, and is currently involved in Delaware Valley Legacy Fund to provide funding to LGBTQ+ organizations.

“We fought hard to be heard. We will not go back to hiding in the closet. We will continue to take up space,” Conrad said. “I stand here for that little girl who needed an advocate to tell her it's okay to be you. At the end of the day, this is all about love. We need to hold dear our humanity and love for one another.”

2025 is undoubtedly a contentious year for LGBTQ+ rights and protections. Alex Villasante, a local author who has lived in Yardley for 16 years, spoke about marginalized people actively being erased, such as the banning of books featuring LGBTQ+ stories. In fact, she is one of those authors with a banned book. 

“Without representation, without our words and our stories in the world, terrible things can happen,” Villasante said. “Kids and adults who are LGBTQ+ will not see themselves reflected and valued by society.”

Nick Emeigh, associate executive director of National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) of Bucks County, who partners with the Rainbow Room in a program called Pride Saves Lives, spoke about his own trauma about being gay as a child, in which his father “tried to beat it out of me on a daily basis” and disown him. Yet he emphasized that you don’t have to be fully healed to help people: Emeigh runs an organization that has, since the pandemic, helped over 75,000 people find help with their mental well being.

“Mr. Rogers said, ‘when I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, ‘look for the helpers. There's always people who are helping’,’” Emeigh said. “We are the helpers. NAMI, the Rainbow Room, Callum – we don't want to change or fix you or make you more palatable for society. There's nothing about you that needs to be fixed.”

Akin to Kater’s pendulum analogy, Emeigh said that because rights are not stagnant but quite precarious, voting matters.

“Please remember, just because we have these rights today does not mean we'll have these rights tomorrow,” Emeigh said.  Every local election matters.” 

Attendee Robin Frank, 61 from Yardley, who was there with her sister Debra Frank, said small town pride events matter.

“I think when you're in a small town, there's a perception that everybody's just quiet and that there’s no diversity. But there is diversity,” Frank said.

Attendees Holly Bussey and Jim Sanders, who both live in Lower Makefield, have been part of leadership at the Unitarian Universalist Church in Titusville for 35 years. At the church, they’ve both taught a program called Our Whole Lives (OWL), which offers sexuality education for children in youth. The church was also one of the first five Universalist Unitarian congregations in the U.S. to be designated as a Welcoming Congregation, which is a program helping Unitarian churches learn to undo homophobia and transphobia.

“Our organization is centered around love,” Bussey said. “They are our people–always have been.”

Sue Cocchimiglio, 37, has lived in Yardley for twelve years with her husband and seven-year old son, who she brought to the pride event. She said she thinks it’s important to expose her son to events like Yardley Pride that celebrate the fact that we can all be who we are.

“I also work with children, and a lot of them are still very innocent and don't understand that the rights that we have were fought for,” Cocchimiglio said. “So I think it's important to tell them the story behind that and show them some examples of people who might not be comfortable being themselves so that we can raise them to be good, open-minded individuals.”