LAS CRUCES — Triple-digit June temperatures mean Pride in Southern New Mexico coincides with spooky season.
And because the events happen around Halloween, they can provide a unique opportunity for people still exploring their identities.
Many people are ‘“able to be themselves for the first time,” said Ryan Rox, who has hosted and performed at queer community events in Southern New Mexico for years.
“A lot of drag queens say their first time in drag is … Halloween and they just say, ‘Oh yeah, it’s a joke. I’m just doing this for fun once a year,’ ” Rox said in an interview. “But sometimes you put that wig on and you never take it off.”
Josh Bachman/For The New Mexican
Holding LGBTQ+ events in October rather than June “is yet another way that makes our town unique,” said Katalina Hadfield, president of Singing Out, a local LGBTQ+ choir. “It’s like, ‘This is our pride time, and we really have to assert ourselves.’ It’s not just the default.”
‘Something really special’
The October date is a recent change. Las Cruces Pride began in 1990 as a small picnic organized by older-generation LGBTQ+ people, said state Sen. Carrie Hamblen, D-Las Cruces, a vocal advocate for the community.
Like other celebrations nationwide, the Las Cruces observance was originally in June to commemorate the anniversary of the Stonewall riots.
The event grew after Hamblen took over in 2000, a year after then-President Bill Clinton declared June Pride Month. More recently, the Southern New Mexico Pride board moved the celebrations to October because of concerns about the heat — the outside event became an obstacle, particularly for older people, Hamblen said.
This year offered a panoply of Pride activities, from a play, drag shows, the annual Pride Parade on the plaza and the “grand finale,” the Pride Ball on Friday. The ball is “paying homage” to New York’s ballroom culture, a Black and Latino queer tradition recently popularized by shows like RuPaul’s Drag Race, Rox said.
“The youth of today … can learn their history as well as feel like they can find community,” Rox added.
Hamblen, who this year marked her second run as Pride Parade Grand Marshal, a role she called “very humbling,” said pride celebrations can even be life-saving.
“The whole point of pride is to make sure that queer people are visible and seen. And when this population has one of the largest suicide rates in the country — a queer person considers suicide every 45 seconds — having this visibility and this representation is, in some cases, life-saving for young people and older people who feel isolated,” Hamblen said in an interview.
Courtesy Tom Conelly
Hadfield, a Las Cruces local, attended her first Pride event in 2012. At the time, she was in high school, and it consisted of a small fair at Pioneer Park. Now, a drag performance on the Main Street plaza draws a crowd of up to 1,000.
“It’s just beautiful to see how that has evolved,” Hadfield said in an interview. “There’s just something really special and poetic about it being the place where I grew up, and about being a place where I know that I’m cared for.”
Despite living in Seattle in the past — a city with a large queer community and a whole day dedicated to transgender pride — the Las Cruces celebrations are more special to Hadfield because of the close-knit circle they offer.
“When we say Las Cruces, the name of the town, a lot of people … have this religious affiliation, which is potentially one way to look at it. But for me, I look at it like a crossroads,” Hadfield said. “We’re really lucky to have a place at such a crossroads of different communities and cultures, and people coming together to just coexist and be kind to one another.”
‘A critical time’
Hadfield’s feeling of being cared for is not just anecdotal — Las Cruces received a score of 94 on the 2025 Municipal Equality Index from the Human Rights Campaign Foundation, surpassing Santa Fe’s score of 60. City Councilor Becky Corran attributed the score to LGBTQ+ liaisons in the police department, inclusive activities and access to gender-affirming healthcare.
Corran’s personal experience made her especially attuned to the importance of affordable housing for the queer community.
“When I came out, my parents kicked me out,” Corran said. “We know that LGBTQ folks are particularly vulnerable to housing insecurity, and so I’m really proud of working on things like that within the City Council that are less clearly LGBTQ issues, but have a significant impact on our community.”
Corran said local events like Southern New Mexico Pride are increasingly important as the Trump administration is targeting the LGBTQ+ community, particularly transgender people.
“It’s a critical time. We need to be the opposite of all of that exclusion and cruelty that we’re seeing from the federal government and people running for office,” Corran said.
Rox said the resiliency of the community amid these threats is encouraging.
“It’s really cool to look back and realize that it’s been scary, and we’ve persevered,” Rox said. “And so, even if it feels very scary this year, it probably will next year. But we’ll definitely still be here, and we’ll still be celebrating.”
Julia Gentin is a reporter for The Las Cruces New Mexican, The Santa Fe New Mexican and Searchlight New Mexico through a partnership with Report for America, a national service program that places journalists into local newsrooms. She covers the Southern New Mexico region. Learn more about Report for America at reportforamerica.org.
