The city council of Southlake, Texas — one of the wealthiest cities in the US — voted unanimously on Tuesday night to deny a permit to Pride So-Kel, a community Pride festival planned for October 3 on the 10-acre property of St. Martin-in-the-Field, an Episcopal church.
While one person at the council meeting reportedly opposed the festival, council members didn’t discuss the event or ask any questions of city staff or organizers before voting to deny the event permit, The Dallas Morning News reported. Neither Southlake Mayor Shawn McCaskill nor city council members responded to the publication’s request for an explanation; a city spokesperson said they didn’t know why the council denied the permit.
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The Pride event was held on the church’s property last year. It featured food trucks, vendors, performances by Dallas’ Oak Lawn Band, a B-52s cover band called “Bikini Whales,” and a drag queen singing songs about the difficulties of growing up trans in Texas’ rural city of Odessa.
Around the time of last year’s event, the then-mayor of the neighboring city of Keller, Armin Mizani, said his municipality didn’t condone the festival. The 2025 event itself was protested by a street preacher with a bullhorn asking “graphic questions about gay sex,” the aforementioned publication noted, as well as activists with the Texas Coalition for Kids, an anti-LGBTQ+ organization that purports to defend children from “the woke left.”
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Last year’s event, however, didn’t require a city permit because its attendance was estimated at fewer than 1,000 people. Public events in Southlake with more than 1,000 people legally require a permit.
April Dreyson, who founded the Pride event, said she began the event with her wife to show gay and transgender people living in suburban Tarrant County that they are not alone. “We wanted to create a space where everyone could feel safe and loved. LGBTQ people have become a point of political fodder. Our existence is not political,” she said.
Rev. Alan Bentrup, who leads the church, offered to host the event since Dreyson doubted whether she could get a local city to permit the event.
Dreyson said she’s still exploring other options in hopes of hosting the event. “It’s not going to be that easy to make us go away,” she said.
Southlake’s school board recently approved policies banning trans-inclusive policies regarding pronouns and restroom use in local schools.
The December after last year’s event, the city of Keller rescinded its invitation for Bentrup to lead an opening prayer before its city council meeting. The city’s mayor said leading the prayer “is a privilege, not a right” and added that his city wouldn’t “elevate an individual who offended a large majority of our residents.”
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