Pink and green painted nails, a long brown wig and three-inch heels were among the final touches to prepare Blake Tierney for his walk in Little Rock’s SoMa Pride Parade this June.
As he strutted down South Main Street and waved to parade-goers dressed in rainbow garb, a team carrying campaign signs trailed nearby. Tierney, 32, is challenging Little Rock’s longest-serving elected official in November. If he wins, he would be the first known drag performer to hold a city council seat.
“People have asked me multiple times if I’m afraid of running as an openly queer person,” Tierney said. “Mostly in terms of ‘Is it going to impact my campaign? Do I feel like it’s a detriment to do that?’ And what I tell people is I’m going to be who I am and I’m going to campaign better if it’s true to who I am.”
Tierney is one of many Arkansans in the LBGTQ+ community, or an ally to it, who have chosen to become more civically engaged because of recent changes in state and local law specifically related to the queer community.
If elected, Tierney said he would be bold on action related to homelessness and housing, vacant properties, dangerous streets and the “nuts and bolts of the city.” He vowed to make data-informed decisions and listen to community members for ways to be effective and proactive.
The Pride Parade was the first public drag appearance of Tierney’s campaign. The second was a drag brunch at a local restaurant where attendees donated enough money to exceed Tierney’s monthly fundraising goal.
The event also proved to have a deeper impact.
“People also came up to me, other queer folks, tears in their eyes, because they knew that they were going to be represented,” Tierney said. “And not just by a queer person, but by somebody who is willing to — in the same city that Arkansas legislators tried to ban drag — is out here campaigning in drag.”
Arkansas lawmakers in 2023 proposed a bill to regulate drag performances in public, which was amended to refer to specific sexualized acts in adult-oriented performances. The final version, which became Act 131, didn’t mention drag.
Other legislation in 2023 required teachers to refer to students with pronouns that are consistent to their gender assigned at birth and restricted bathroom use at schools for transgender youth.
Several residents traveled to the Capitol for rallies or to speak against the legislation. While some bills were changed substantially, lawmakers passed legislation that sought to control behavior related to gender.
Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders last year also banned gender-neutral language from state government documents.
Arkansas in 2021 was the first state to enact a ban on gender-affirming care for transgender youth with the Save Adolescents From Experimentation (SAFE) Act. After input from the transgender community — such as Washington County Quorum Court member Evelyn Rios Stafford — then-Gov. Asa Hutchinson vetoed the bill. But the Legislature overrode it.
The SAFE Act was quickly challenged in court. U.S. District Judge James Moody granted a permanent injunction, but Attorney General Tim Griffin appealed to the U.S. 8th Circuit Court of Appeals, which heard arguments this April. A ruling is still pending.
Most recently, lawmakers approved a rule prohibiting a gender-neutral “X” marking on a driver’s license, a policy that had been in place since 2010. The rule is being challenged in federal court.
Running for representation
Anti-LGBTQ+ legislation has been a theme during legislative sessions across the country for years, including in Arkansas where it’s trickled down to the local level.
In Saline County, where the county administrator fired the library director after she refused to relocate books, including ones with LGBTQ+ themes, 24-year-old Bailey Morgan is vying for a seat on the quorum court. Morgan’s priorities include improved renter’s rights, green space, library support and government accountability.
“I decided to go ahead and run, not only on the library issue, but on more of what I think it represents, which is just a complete lack of representation in Saline County for anybody that’s not a white, straight Republican.”
Morgan, who leads the Saline County Library Alliance, said he is an ally to the queer community, adding that the push to ban books with LGBTQ+ characters was like an attempt to erase the existence of the queer population.
“Removing those books, in my mind, was equivalent to saying you want to remove them from the community entirely,” he said. “You want to erase them from the community’s mind.”
Similarly, Eli Clardy is running for justice of the peace in Crawford County where the local library system, under pressure, moved books with LGBTQ+ topics to a segregated “social section” only accessible to adults.
Clardy, 26, isn’t new to politics, but he is new to running for office as his authentic self.
At 18, Clardy was a candidate for the Mulberry city council. He knocked on hundreds of doors seeking committed voters and said he felt good about the work he put in to get elected.
But on election day, a photo of Clardy holding hands with his partner appeared on social media, outing him to the community.
“It was a horribly traumatic experience,” Clardy said. “…I had to hear from my grandmother afterwards, you know, she had an old friend and she was so excited to vote for me until she found out. People think we’ve come so far in this time period, but in these rural areas in the South, it’s still not as progressive as a lot of people think it is.”
Being a member of the LGBTQ+ community in rural Arkansas — let alone running for office — is intrinsically different from someone doing the same thing in a more progressive region of the state like Little Rock, Clardy said.
“The biggest word[s] that describe the gay experience in rural areas such as ours is an ‘overwhelming sense of loneliness and a lack of community,’” he said. “Without community, it’s very hard to put yourself out there to do something like run for office.”
If elected, Clardy said he would focus on the issue of accessing library books, but also improvements to neglected roads, expansions to EMS services for shorter ambulance response times and infrastructure to accommodate people with disabilities.
A lightly-traveled path
Arkansas has had two openly gay lawmakers, both Democratic women in Little Rock: Kathy Webb and Tippi McCullough.
Webb, who has devoted years of her life advocating for women, paved the path as the first openly LGBTQ+ lawmaker as a member of the House of Representatives from 2007 to 2012. She was also the first openly gay member of the Little Rock Board of Directors, a position she’s held since 2014.
This year, she was one of eight inductees into the Arkansas Women’s Hall of Fame.
Webb said some of her time at the Capitol was “very unpleasant,” like when voters passed a ballot measure barring same-sex couples from being foster parents, and when a colleague referred to her as “that lesbian.” However, she had positive sentiments about helping her constituents.
“I dealt with education, I dealt with healthcare issues, I dealt with economic development, I dealt with making a payroll, the environment,” Webb said. “That’s what my constituents were focused on, and it wasn’t the fact that I was a lesbian.”
Webb forged her friendship with McCullough years ago, when McCullough was fired from her job at Mount St. Mary Academy after she married her wife. The pair now lean on each other for legislative advice, and as the only other person who knows what it’s like to be in their situation.
“It is, at times, very difficult,” said McCullough, who is serving her third term in the House. “…When I come in, I’m of course representing my district, but I’m also a caucus of one, basically. I’m representing another group also, just by being there.”
McCullough said sometimes “people don’t seem to understand how horrifying” the laws affecting the LGBTQ+ community are. She said she is rarely surprised by the proposed bills anymore, and expects more of the same in 2025.
But McCullough’s “caucus of one” could gain a new member if David McAvoy — a Democrat challenging Republican incumbent Jack Ladyman to represent House District 32 — wins this November.
McAvoy, 38, said his identity isn’t his only reason for running for office, but recent legislation about the queer community has factored into his view of how things are moving in the “wrong direction.”
“We do need broader representation in the Legislature, not just with the LGBTQ people, but across the board of a whole swath of Arkansas whose voices and lives are not represented there,” he said. “At the end of the day, it’s really about trying to deliver for everyone. Right now, we have a state government that works for the people who are at the top.”
Civic engagement
Besides running for office, increased civic engagement can include drafting ballot initiatives, collecting signatures for those measures, testifying at the Capitol and educating others on the civic process.
Marie Mainard O’Connell, a pastor and mother of three, this year formed the Queer Collective, a group that provides advocacy training, supports the LGBTQ+ community and meets regularly for potluck dinners.
The Queer Collective offers a safe space for what O’Connell, 44, calls “queer families,” which she is a part of as the mother of a transgender, non-binary child.
At a Trans Day of Remembrance event two years ago, O’Connell said her youngest child “in that really, incredible loud child whisper that just carries forever,” asked if their oldest sibling would be murdered for being transgender.
“That was a real moment for me and my family, because for me, that was a public question,” O’Connell said. “Time stopped. I realized I had to give an answer right then, and the only honest answer was no. [They] will not be murdered, we’re just going to have to change the world.”
O’Connell left a steady job to work with the Queer Collective, which came with a financial sacrifice, she said. Still, she said she felt it was her “call at this time” to start the community.
“We want to empower families to know how to speak up for themselves,” O’Connell said. “Sometimes civic engagement is shrouded in mystery: Who do you call? How do you get there?”
O’Connell has attended rallies and protests herself. As the parent of a queer child, she said she often second guesses “when you need to be the gate to prevent people access to your child, who is growing into an adult that needs to be self-sufficient, versus when you need to be the aggressor, the advocate.”
Running for office could be in O’Connell’s future, but she said she hasn’t considered at what level of government.
JP Tribell, a Little Rock attorney and LGBTQ+ ally, was one of a dozen Arkansans who recently spoke during a public hearing on the rule to prohibit gender-neutral distinctions on state ID cards.
“That policy is absolutely wrong,” Tribell, 51, said. “It does not achieve what the state claims it will achieve. … There’s no way that the state of Arkansas can force somebody to choose genders that they want, and have them agree with federal policy as well.”
Tribell frequently works with residents on name changes and during the adoption or surrogacy process, many of whom have told him they’re fearful of the attacks on their community.
“What is different is the intensity of the attacks, which are fairly new, within the last five years, against trans and basically against the LGBTQ community,” Tribell said.
As a lawyer, Tribell said it was natural that he would end up on the path of increased civic engagement, but his efforts have also been a reaction to the current political climate in Arkansas.
Tribell helped draft the proposed Arkansas Educational Rights Amendment of 2024, which aimed to hold private schools that receive state funding to the same standards as public schools. The LEARNS Act, Tribell said, has created societal inequalities through “a massive wealth transfer to people that don’t need it.”
“Education is the bedrock of society,” he said. “Our system needs education to remain successful as a country. … Our systems are at risk.”
The measure came up short of its required signatures to qualify for the November ballot, but supporters are working to qualify for the 2026 ballot.
Tribell said he thinks the views of the majority of Arkansans, including on education and LGBTQ+ legislation, no longer align with the makeup of the Legislature.
“I think the more extreme candidates are winning on ideological bases,” he said. “I feel like the people of Arkansas are more practical than that.”
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