The Queer Ozarks: How Eureka Springs Became an Outlier

One of the more surprising facts about Eureka Springs is its identity, in one of the most conservative states in the country, as one of the most openly welcoming communities in the South. The transformation began in the nineteen seventies, when artists, craftspeople, and others seeking an affordable and unconventional place to live began arriving in the little Victorian town in the Ozarks. Many of those early settlers were gay and lesbian, drawn by the privacy of a remote hillside town and the relative openness of an arts community.

Over the following decades, a visible and established LGBTQ community took root. By the early twenty-first century, estimates suggested that more than a quarter of the year-round population identified as LGBTQ, a share that would be remarkable anywhere in the country and is extraordinary in rural Arkansas. The town hosts an annual Pride festival that draws visitors from across the region.

In twenty fifteen, the Eureka Springs City Council passed a nondiscrimination ordinance that included protections for sexual orientation and gender identity. The Arkansas state legislature responded the same year by passing a law barring cities and counties from enacting such local protections. Eureka Springs challenged that law in court.

The town has been fighting this particular battle in one form or another for decades, an outlier that keeps making its own choices in a state that keeps trying to override them. The queer Ozarks are not an accident. They are the result of deliberate community-building by people who saw something in a Victorian ghost town that most people had overlooked.