|File photo by Emma Delk| The Friendlier City Project's "Pride on the Plaza" returns Saturday to Wheeling's Heritage Port.

“Bigger and better” is the unofficial motto for the Friendlier City Project’s ever-growing annual Pride on the Plaza because, since its start in 2023, the event has drawn more and more Wheeling area residents to celebrate LGBTQ+ culture, history and community.

The event – to be held this year on Water Street downtown Wheeling on Saturday, June 14 from 3 p.m. to 9 p.m. – will feature several new additions. Perhaps most notably, “Pride After Dark” welcomes pride goers to a drag show featuring local queens performing.

This is the Friendlier City Project’s first year with an official board in place to oversee pride, which Chair Mikaya Green said has helped the nonprofit divide and conquer the planning process and all its moving pieces.

“I definitely think it’s going to be bigger and better, just like we always say, and I’m really excited,” Green said.

Local comics Isaac Crow, Kayleigh Dumas and Amy Essington will take the stage along Water Street during the day as well as musical acts J.E.L, Stone Campus, Company Caravan and Matt Vanfossen.

There will also be a gender-affirming closet in partnership with Ohio Valley Mutual Aid offering free clothing items, as well as gender-affirming haircuts by the Honeycomb Salon.

Local food vendors and artists will line Water Street throughout the afternoon, including a booth featuring two panels of the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt, the component of this year’s pride that Green said she is most highly anticipating.

“You’re able to come and really experience that because AIDS was a huge thing that happened to the queer community and it just shouldn’t have and so many lives were lost,” she said.

It is a little known fact that two panels reside in Wheeling under the care of HIV Task Force of the Upper Ohio Valley’s Jay Adams, Green said. This year, Adams is bringing the panels to Pride for the community to see and experience a piece of queer history.

The quilt originated in the mid-1980s to honor the lives lost to AIDS. It now has more than 50,000 memorial panels and continues to grow.

Next Saturday’s event provides an opportunity to acknowledge the history of LGBTQ+ oppression in the United States and come together as a community as legislation continues to threaten queer rights, Green said.

“Every single day there are people trying to strip away queer rights, specifically trans rights, and I think it’s just really special and really important to be able to have this safe space where people can come, they can be their true selves, they can learn about queer history, especially when things like that are trying to be censored,” Green said.

Each year the FCP leaders say it is more important than ever to celebrate pride, Green said, and that continues to be the case in 2025.

“We’ve had so many people say to us ‘this is the first time I’ve ever been able to come out and be myself and feel safe and be able to hold my partner’s hand or dance with my partner,'” Green said. “People don’t have a lot of experiences like that and get to enjoy things like that when you’re from such a small town.”