He didn’t plan to return to Wichita. Now he’s running what could be biggest Pride Month

Jim Hall was “the kid who left and determined never to come back.”

At least that’s what he told the Wichita City Council recently.

Hall identifies as a gay man. He was a self-described military brat growing up and graduated from high school in Derby. He remembers when Wichita’s non-discrimination ordinance — intended to prevent discrimination and ensure equal opportunity for housing, employment or other public accommodations regardless of sexuality — was introduced in September 1977.

He was also here when the ordinance was rejected by the city after its initial approval.

“I remember that summer when it was passed and hearing all the controversy and thinking to myself ‘I’m never coming back here. This will never be a safe place for me to be,’” Hall said.

But Hall did come back. Now, he serves as the president of Wichita Pride, where he and his board seek to help Wichita become a place where all members of the LGBTQ community can feel safe and welcome.

“44 years later, here I am, retired and getting to do the things I want to do,” he said at a recent City Council meeting.

This month, Wichita Pride is celebrating Pride Month with a number of activities and events focused around the LGBTQ community. For the past several years, the group has moved the majority of its activities to September due to the heat.

“My goal for Pride is that we become a year-round group,” Hall said. “It’s not just a one-shot deal, and we will still have activities in the fall. We haven’t figured out exactly what those activities are yet, but we will still have some activities in September and October.”

Hall lived in Houston for 36 years. He moved to Wichita in 2017.

“My husband, of almost 38 years, had been here many times when my parents were living,” he said in an email. “I was approaching retirement, from MD Anderson Cancer Center, and he was ready to leave Houston, so we made the decision to head to Wichita.”

A year later, Hall got involved in his first Wichita Pride before becoming vice president in 2019.

“Now that I’m retired, I have the time to do things like this that I didn’t have before,” Hall said. “I was asked by the one person that I had kept in contact with from high school to join the board and went to a meeting, not knowing I was going to be asked to be on the board at that meeting, but came home being on the board.”

This month, Wichita Pride has, by Hall’s estimation, more activities planned than it has before. He attributes a lot of this success to the strength of the board.

“We have, right now, the best board I think Wichita Pride has ever had,” Hall said. “...That’s why we’ve been able to expand activities that we’ve not been able to do before.”

Dawna Raehpour, this year’s communications director for Wichita Pride, agreed that 2023’s board has been one of the organization’s greatest strengths.

“Jim as a board president has been so willing to hear every voice on the board,” she said. “We have a lot of new people this year, and most of them are younger, and it is so great to see them stepping up and leading and offering ideas that we didn’t think about before. They really think outside the box, they really think about what their friends in the community might want to see and experience in terms of Pride, and they’re not afraid to just jump in and do the work.”

In addition to traditional celebrations like the Pride Parade, the Pride Festival and an interfaith service, Wichita Pride will host events at Minisa Pool, the Sedgwick County Zoo and the Wichita Ice Center.

Wichita Pride has also partnered with the city of Wichita and Proud of Wichita (the LGBT Chamber of Commerce) to host Pride in the Park, an event in Naftzger Park from 4 p.m. to 11 p.m. Friday, June 23, which Hall described as “a big dance party.” Gia Gunn, a former contestant on “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” will be the event’s headliner.

Wild and Proud Day at the Sedgwick County Zoo will be held on Saturday, June 24, from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. The annual Pride Parade will start at the Old Sedgwick County Courthouse on June 25 at 11 a.m. The Wichita Pride Festival will be held in the Century II Exhibition Hall immediately after from noon to 4 p.m.

For a more comprehensive list of events and how you can celebrate with Wichita Pride, check out this year’s Pride Pamphlet, or go to Wichita Pride’s website or Facebook page.

“Every year, I get asked, ‘Why do we do Pride?’ and it’s a really simple answer,” he said at the City Council meeting. “It’s because every year it’s someone’s first Pride. It’s someone’s first time to feel a part of a community, to feel validated, to feel the inclusion that all of us want, and I appreciate Wichita doing this for us.”

Wichita Pride has also partnered with Tallgrass Film Festival to host PrideGrass Film Festival, screening films such as “Hedwig and the Angry Inch” and Best Picture-winner “Moonlight” throughout the month at The Lux.

Raehpour said she hopes this year’s Pride Month not only allows Wichita to celebrate its LGBTQ community, but to simply get to know them as well.

“It’s hard to hate people up close,” she said. “I kind of feel like people who have a lot of hateful things to say about the LGBTQ community don’t really know anyone in that community, but they are your neighbors and your friends and your coworkers and your kids’ teachers. They are just regular people whose only agenda is to live a happy life and no more than that, so I feel like Pride is not only a celebration of all the things that this community has overcome, but all the things that will hopefully be in their future without discrimination.”

“We still have a long way to go for complete inclusion, but I think we’re getting there,” Hall said. “I think the community bands together when we are able to celebrate our diversity, because we are a very diverse community, and the more we do that, the more we make ourselves visible throughout the year, the more we get included.”