Bethel Pride Parade Storms Into Its Second Year

BETHEL, CT — This weekend, Bethel residents will again don their coats of many colors and paint the town red. The second annual Bethel Pride Parade, celebrating the LGBTQ+ community, is Sunday May 6.

The run-up to the event has been a whirlwind of website building, ordinance translating, social media grinding, finance wrangling, and float logistics.

The center of the rainbow-striped tornado is Hailey Gesler and her mom, Alexis Wilson. In a story everyone in town now knows, 12-year-old Hailey, and her friend Marcella Antunes, approached Wilson last year after turning in a language arts project she had elected to do on gay rights. Hailey felt she had more to say, more to do, on the topic.

“She wanted to have a march,” Wilson recalls. “So we talked about it, and decided we were going to get some kids together after school and march down the street and say our piece, and that was going to be the end of it.”

As if.

“Molten Java [the local coffee nexus] saw the event, shared the event, and the rest is history,” Wilson said. “I started getting emails, Facebook messages, people wanted to know how they could help, how they could donate, what they could donate.”

Alexis Wilson

It was clear that something about Hailey's extra credit project struck a chord that resonated throughout Bethel, which up to that point was best known as the birthplace of P.T. Barnum and corporate headquarters for Duracell. A year later, and on the eve of the parade’s sophomore edition, Wilson finds herself the warrior queen of a diverse court of marketers, designers, coders, writers and other volunteers who have only one thing in common, besides their zipcode:

“It’s a group of people who wanted to help us do this, and wanted us to do it big,” Wilson explained.

Wilson estimated there were about 300 marchers last year, and published accounts place the number anywhere from 200 to 400. She hopes to see upwards to 500 marchers this year, and keep better count. All marchers, both groups and singles, are being asked to register.

That’s an example of some of the organizational skills Wilson says she has had to learn, and quickly, to keep her annual parade from becoming a runaway train. For her daughter, who has become the literal poster child for the gay rights movement in southwestern Connecticut, some of the new life-skills may have been hard won.

Hailey Gesler

“She's learned some good lessons, and she's learned some things you wish your child never had to learn,” Wilson said. “One thing she learned is that there is a community here that supports her, that's amazing. And to be part of something like that can be life-changing.”

Marchers will gather Sunday at 12:00 p.m by the end of the Municipal Center lawn near Library Place and Durant Avenue. The parade will commence at 1:00 p.m., and proceed to P.T. Barnum Square and circle back.

Pets welcome...

These photos from the first Bethel LGBTQ+ Parade were contributed by Alexis Wilson.