When Oregon City held its first Pride celebration in March 2023, the event became national news for the wrong reason: a street confrontation near the original downtown location that ended with two people arrested. Three years later, Oregon City Pride has become something different entirely — a registered nonprofit that fills a community college campus each August with vendors, live music, drag performers, and family activities, all funding youth services in Clackamas County.
The 2023 disturbance that drew cameras from across the country was, according to reporting from The Oregonian/OregonLive, a clash between protesting groups that fought one another near the original Pride location at 15th and Washington streets, resulting in two arrests during what has been described as a sidewalk skirmish. Coverage from VICE at the time offered more specific context, reporting the clash involved two competing far-right groups — the PDX Proud Boys and the Rose City Nationalists, a neo-Nazi active club that had splintered from other regional far-right factions — with Proud Boys forcibly removing masks from Rose City Nationalist members before police made arrests.
That confrontation wasn't an isolated flashpoint. Civil rights researchers at the Western States Center, as reported by OPB, found that the Rose City Nationalists belonged to a coalition called the Northwest Nationalist Network that systematically targeted small-town Pride celebrations across Oregon, Washington, Wyoming, and Montana. These active clubs focus on white nationalist recruitment and mixed martial arts training, according to the same OPB reporting, placing the Oregon City incident within a wider pattern of far-right interference in rural and small-town Pride events across the region.
How the Festival Found Its Footing
Wesley Hanson, who co-founded Oregon City Pride while working for the Downtown Oregon City Association in March 2023, first proposed bringing a Pride event to the city while attending a Main Street America conference in Boston, per the same OregonLive account. Hanson, a 1997 graduate of Oregon City High School who experienced bullying for being queer in high school, has said he wanted future generations to feel safe. He has described small-town Prides as being about community and expressing love.
Oregon City Pride organizers received threats following the 2023 event, and by that September the celebration had partnered with Clackamas Community College for a larger gathering — a relationship that has continued every year since. Between the original event and the move to the college, organizers also relocated a related celebration from 15th and Washington streets to Arch Bridge Taphouse, located about a half mile from the original site, where the event proceeded without incident. Lisa Holcom estimated that about 400 or more people attended that Arch Bridge Taphouse celebration.
Not everyone in the local business community stayed involved. The Downtown Oregon City Association board decided not to continue planning Pride, with the board chair attributing the decision to short staffing after the association's executive director left for another job in spring 2023. Pride organizers, however, have contended that community backlash also contributed to the decision, according to OregonLive's reporting.
A Fiscal Sponsor Faces Backlash of Its Own
Oregon City Children's Theatre, founded in 2005 by Michelle Leigh, became Oregon City Pride's fiscal sponsor as the event searched for institutional footing. Leigh has said the theater is a safe and welcoming place, but some families withdrew their children from her programs after she sponsored Oregon City Pride. The event went on to receive its own nonprofit status in January 2025, a milestone that came as the festival entered what organizers now call its fourth year as an annual tradition.
Security remained a serious concern even as the event grew. The Oregon City Police Department and the FBI met with organizers about security concerns, underscoring how seriously local and federal authorities treated the threats directed at the celebration. Clackamas Community College, which has hosted Oregon City Pride since September 2023 on its 165-acre main campus on Molalla Avenue, was founded in 1966 and serves more than 25,000 enrolled students annually across three county campuses, offering the kind of institutional infrastructure a growing festival needs.
Small-Town Prides Multiply Across Clackamas County
Oregon City's experience is part of a broader wave of new Pride celebrations launched across Clackamas County communities in recent years. Canby and Molalla each held first Pride events in 2021, Milwaukie followed in 2023, Lake Oswego in 2024, and Wilsonville in 2025. Not every event has survived the pressure: Molalla Pride was canceled in 2024 after organizers received online threats, though Molalla Pride organizers responded by holding a picnic in the park on the same day as the canceled official event.
To share resources and coordinated support among these scattered efforts, organizers formed the Pride Coalition of Clackamas County in 2026, bringing together organizers from several small-town Pride events across the region. That kind of mutual aid reflects a landscape where sexual orientation was the second most frequent bias motivation reported to Oregon's statewide Bias Response Hotline in 2024, accounting for 771 reports behind race-based targeting, according to the Oregon Department of Justice. The hotline itself was established under Senate Bill 577, a 2019 law that modernized the state's bias crime statutes and mandated annual public reporting by the Oregon Criminal Justice Commission.
The growth of these events also tracks with rapid demographic change across the county. Oregon City reached a population of roughly 38,387 in 2025 while Clackamas County as a whole grew to 432,473 residents, per estimates from the Portland State University Population Research Center published on QualityInfo. Nearby cities have shifted even more dramatically, with Happy Valley expanding by nearly 500% and Molalla growing by 82% between 2000 and 2022, changes that help explain why new communities keep launching their own Pride celebrations rather than relying on a single regional event.
What's Planned for This Year's Festival
Oregon City Pride returns to Clackamas Community College at 19600 Molalla Ave. from noon to 5 p.m. on Saturday, August 29. The festival will include dozens of vendors alongside live music, dance performances, author readings, a craft area, and family-friendly activities, with drag queen story times held between acts throughout the afternoon.
The performance schedule includes Atlas Marshall from 12:45 to 1:20 p.m., country line dancing from 1:30 to 2 p.m., the Bria Cam Project from 2 to 2:45 p.m., a Latin dance troupe from 3 to 3:45 p.m., and a cabaret show closing out the festival from 4 to 5 p.m. Proceeds and community support connect back to organizations like The Living Room, a Milwaukie-based nonprofit founded in 2009 that offers drop-in programs, peer support, and community resources for LGBTQ+ youth ages 14 to 20 across Clackamas County — one of the only dedicated organizations of its kind in the area.
The night will continue with an official afterparty at the Ice House in downtown Oregon City, owned by Cindy Spaniol and Paul Spaniol. The Ice House began hosting an official Pride afterparty and drag show in the event's second year, and this year's gathering opens its doors at 7 p.m. before the party officially begins at 8 p.m., featuring drag-aoke hosted by drag performers. The afterparty is limited to guests 21 and older.
The arc from a 2023 street clash to a multi-venue, nonprofit-backed festival illustrates, in organizers' view, the importance of Pride celebrations in smaller communities — a sentiment echoed at the state level by figures like Oregon State Treasurer Elizabeth Steiner, the state's first openly LGBTQ+ state treasurer, who called attention to economic disparities facing LGBTQ+ Oregonians in a June 2025 statement. Whether local police departments and municipal leaders continue to expand security coordination as similar Pride events multiply across suburban and rural Clackamas County remains an open question as the calendar of small-town celebrations keeps growing.
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