When the municipal government of Frisco, Texas, made its only Pride declaration in June of 2022, the event made headlines for a different reason than that historic first: it drew out the Proud Boys.
The extremist right-wing group has made opposition to LGBTQ+ expression – especially drag and Pride – a cornerstone of its violent movement. In Frisco, the Proud Boys harassed a key organizer and followed him and other supporters to a celebration at a restaurant after the proclamation.
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Justin Culpepper, 36, one-half of the married couple who founded the nonprofit Pride Frisco, said the extremist group threatened to assault him. “I went into the restaurant, and the people who worked at the restaurant protected me,” he recalled.
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His husband Jon, 45, described the event as “traumatic,” but Justin Culpepper has been hesitant to discuss the event with the media out of fear of giving the bigots undue attention. Instead, Justin Culpepper reserved the bulk of his criticism for the reaction—or inaction—of the police and city government, telling LGBTQ Nation: “When you raise these concerns to the city council and to the police chief, the response is to erase LGBT people or to minimize our existence so as to not provoke the Proud Boys, rather than to say, ‘Why the f**k do we have Proud Boys in our city and what are we doing about it?’”
He continued, “Why on earth has the mayor or the city council not denounced these people or this activity? And even if they don’t denounce it, why not elevate things that are good, like a Pride proclamation?”
Other communities have responded to the incursion of far-right street-fighting groups with condemnation and even displays of community unity. In Frisco, in the years since, not only has the city government refused to officially honor Pride again, they’ve all but erased what remains of their previous official diversity initiative. According to the Culpeppers, the city only supported them when it was politically expedient. Now, under pressure from the Texas Republicans and following a troubling pattern that’s playing out nationwide, Frisco’s elected officials seemingly would rather sweep the LGBTQ+ community under the rug.
When it comes to “LGBTQ people, Frisco politicians act like you have cooties,” Justin Culpepper said. “They don’t want to be seen with you in public. They don’t want to be on the record as sympathizing with any of your positions because they’re afraid that it will be used against them.”
Part of the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex, Frisco has over 200,000 residents and grew rapidly across the 2000s and 2010s, frequently ranking as one of the fastest-growing cities in the country. Frisco Pride, which threw its first annual Pride event in 2021, has about 5000 supporters from Frisco and the surrounding region, just one sign of the area’s growing diversity. The Culpeppers moved to the region in 2018 and founded Pride Frisco three years later. In addition to organizing within the local LBGTQ+ community, the couple operates a real estate brokerage and property management company. Justin Culpepper is a licensed real estate broker and co-owner of an IT software consulting firm.
courtesy photo Pride Frisco
The Culpeppers explained that Pride Frisco offers vital support to LGBTQ+ folks who can’t always easily travel into the Dallas urban core. Since its founding, they’ve sought to offer regular events that serve the community beyond just an annual celebration, such as gender marker and name change clinics for transgender residents. Eventually, they hope to convince Frisco to help them open up a physical LGBTQ+ resource center.
“We look at the unmet needs of the community.” Justin Culpepper said that he feels it’s especially important to support people new to LGBTQ+ life, often through education. “The fundamental thing that you need is information. Good information, because that empowers decision makers.”
While Pride Frisco has grown rapidly since its founding, when it comes to official recognition of LGBTQ+ folks from Frisco’s government, support has been decidedly fickle—perhaps even deceptive.
In 2020, Frisco’s mayor, Jeff Cheney, established the Mayor’s Inclusion Committee, eventually tapping Justin Culpepper for membership in the newly formed organization. After nationwide protests for civil rights and accountability, many communities like Frisco were eager to show their openness to improving when it comes to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), but that commitment was short-lived.
Though the city showed support on the surface, all was not as it seemed. The newly formed organization’s internal communications grew divisive with arguments over the scope and purpose of the group, such as when Justin Culpepper suggested, in a July 30, 2023, WhatsApp conversation, that the group intercede in support of DEI initiatives in Frisco’s public schools. When he noted to the group that a previous DEI coordinator for the Frisco Independent School District had been moved into a new position called “Director of Continuous Improvement,” he was warned by Sunitha Cheruvu, the committee’s co-chair, to “keep the chat focused on Frisco Inclusion work please.”
And the committee was never given any real power, resources, or influence over city politics, except to exist as a tool for when the city wanted a symbol of its support for diversity, Jon Culpepper said. For example, the Frisco Inclusion Committee was listed in the marketing materials used during the region’s 2022 bid to successfully draw FIFA Soccer to the metroplex. The region is now due to host nine games in the World Cup in 2026.
“They put this inclusion committee in the paperwork of their bids at FIFA to say we’ve got all these great things on diversity and don’t worry, we’re working on it,” Jon Culpepper said. “And now that that’s all over with, they’re going to quietly try to get rid of it.”
By 2023, the year after the Pride proclamation, the tide had already begun to turn against even token efforts at inclusion like the Frisco committee, with DEI beginning to come under fire from the Texas Republican Party. When Pride Frisco submitted the paperwork for a similar proclamation in 2023, Jon Culpepper said the city told them it had changed its rules, now no longer allowing proclamations to repeat themselves more than one year in a row. The city made similar procedural excuses when refusing to make a Pride proclamation in 2024. According to the current “Mayoral Proclamation Guidelines,” dated March 5, 2024, “Proclamations issued in person by the Mayor at a City Council meeting are limited to no more than one per lifetime or per event/recognition.”
Despite this, he said the city continues to honor other holidays and even lesser observances, like Bicycle Month or Garden Week, year after year.
When Pride Frisco looked deeper into the Inclusion Committee, they found something even stranger. Jon Culpepper submitted a public information request seeking minutes from any group meetings and other notes—which groups like this are typically required to keep under Texas’ Open Meetings Act. He received just a handful of WhatsApp conversations and other notes in return. The city would not even provide a complete list of members of the committee.
As first reported by the Dallas Observer, it appeared the Inclusion Committee was never formally approved by the Frisco City Council. According to the Culpeppers and others LGBTQ Nation spoke to for this story, it existed in a sort of limbo, stripped of any real power or even official existence, but available to be displayed when it would score points for the city government. And they say the support all but dried up after the Proud Boys marched through the city.
“We’ve seen it across the country, not just in Texas, where there is kind of a political movement against a concept: diversity, equity and inclusion,” said Callie Butcher, Dallas based attorney and former president of the Dallas LGBT Bar Association. She became involved with the Frisco situation through her volunteer work as an attorney on LGBTQ+ rights cases. “I think typically what we see targeted in these conversations is equity.”
Frisco is far from alone. Rowlett, for example, another member of the sprawling DFW Metroplex, has faced similar battles over its DEI commission and Pride events. The pattern is beyond statewide, too, coming amid a national attack on everything to do with DEI and led by the Republican party and other right-wing extremists.
In 2023, during the last session of the Texas legislature, the state government passed S.B. 17, a law that bans DEI offices at state-run universities. Dozens of workers at universities lost their jobs as a result. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) signed a similar bill into law last May. Other states with anti-DEI laws include North Carolina, North Dakota, Tennessee, and Utah. In June, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH)—Donald Trump’s pick for running mate in the 2024 election—was a cosponsor of a bill to ban federal DEI initiatives.
“As we’ve seen in the attempted erasure of inclusive efforts in higher education, LGBTQ rights are continuing to face challenges,” said Sarah Kate Ellis, CEO and President of GLAAD, which has been monitoring the nationwide attacks on DEI and Pride. “Instead of erasing our efforts, they should be uplifted.”
She continued, “Texas is a beautifully diverse state, and through its shared cultural values, Texans often embrace and celebrate our differences. The City of Frisco is not only erasing DEI initiatives but ignoring the contributions of local LGBTQ organizers and more.”
Although the Texas law, which went into effect January 1, has no direct legal effect on DEI committees or offices in city governments, Butcher said it has contributed to an atmosphere where certain city governments feel immense pressure to back away from anything resembling DEI initiatives.
“The law creates the sense that there’s something wrong with DEI, that was the messaging,” Butcher said. “What we see in places like Frisco or Rowlett, that traditionally lean more conservative, the city council is picking up on that… all of that reaches a point where it’s bleeding into spaces beyond what the law actually covers.”
In May, the Frisco City Council voted to replace the Inclusion Committee with a new Frisco Multicultural Committee, which launched in June under the city’s arts department. The mayor’s proclamation announcing the new committee made no mention of the LGBTQ+ community.
LGBTQ Nation repeatedly reached out to the city of Frisco for comment. Initially, Dana Baird-Hanks, director of communications for the City of Frisco, seemed open to allowing a conversation with the mayor.
“We’d be happy to chat with you,” she wrote in response to initial inquiries.
“I’d be happy to call you tomorrow,” Baird-Hanks wrote. “I’d likely be facilitating a call with you and our Mayor Jeff Cheney.”
However, after a May 24 initial phone conversation with Baird-Hanks, the city stopped responding directly to questions and would not agree to a phone interview. This included refusing to answer a yes or no question about whether the new Multicultural Committee was intended to represent the LGBTQ+ community.
“When we say diversity, equity, inclusion, I think it has come to be understood that that includes a really broad range of things, from race to gender, to sexual orientation to gender identity, ethnicity, disability status, you know, a variety of things,” Butcher said, “Whereas, multicultural is not a term that it’s usually used specifically to apply to this kind of work.”
Pride Frisco, meanwhile, plans to continue to petition the city for an LGBTQ+ community center, something the Culpeppers say the region sorely needs. And they’re planning the next Pride festival, scheduled to take place October 6 at Frisco’s Toyota Stadium.
