Rowan Hunter, 15, stepped up to the lectern at Princeton City Hall in July 2021. It was one of their first acts as part of the LGBTQ+ advocacy group Princeton Texas Diverse (PTX Diverse). Pride—shorthand for the international celebration of queer rights typically observed in June—“was a place where you see all these people welcome, why would you want to take that away?” they asked city council members.
Hunter, who uses gender-neutral pronouns, was among residents of this outer-rim Dallas-Fort Worth suburb who gathered that day to oppose special permit ordinances that would require nonprofits like PTX Diverse to seek permission to reserve public parks even for events under 250 people. This seemingly technical tweak was introduced following backlash to Hunter’s organization’s inaugural Pride event at Veterans Memorial Park, Princeton’s central green space, which included a drag performance. After that June 2021 event, an online citizens’ petition had demanded the permitting change.
Hunter had come out as trans earlier that year, then joined PTX Diverse after dating the son of the group’s co-founder Charlise Lee. Despite the new permit restrictions, which passed, the nonprofit still managed to organize three successful Pride events in Princeton in the following years. But, over those same years, Hunter and their then-boyfriend, along with Lee and other PTX Diverse activists, would find themselves bullied, harassed, and eventually shut out for expressing their identities and gathering with LGBTQ+ advocates in their hometown—a conservative bedroom community of about 28,000 on the periphery of larger Collin County suburbs.
This civil rights showdown is playing out in a boomtown. Princeton, which originally sprung up on the outskirts of nearby Farmersville, has become one of the nation’s fastest-growing cities. Since 2005, when it claimed around 4,000 residents, its population has septupled. Just from 2020 to 2023, the number of Princetonites increased by 65 percent as younger, more diverse families bought up some of the DFW area’s last remaining affordable homes. New developments of blocky, five-bedroom houses bake in the sun on the suburb’s south and east sides, while older homes sit under the shade of fully grown live oaks on dirt roads to the west.
Princeton High School has grown in tandem with the city, now enrolling 1,163 students. Its sports teams now compete with the state’s largest 5A high schools. But its growing student body is increasingly competing in other, more toxic ways too.
Hunter’s activism took root after they were bullied at Princeton High. They told the Texas Observer that the abuse started in school bathrooms and online over their gender expression after they came out in early 2021, during which time the school offered both on-campus and virtual instruction. While the school principal granted Hunter access to a gender-neutral staff restroom, they said the change wasn’t widely communicated to teachers, who questioned their use of the facility or sent them to the office. After an Instagram user began mockingly posting pictures of Hunter with their boyfriend, Hunter started missing school. After a TikTok user called on the principal to “get your dog,” displaying a photo of Hunter wearing a goth-style spiked-collar necklace, Hunter’s mom pulled them out of school in December 2021.
Hunter says students bullied them both because of their gender identity and because they are on the autism spectrum. “A lot of the kids dropping out are queer students and disabled students, is what I’ve noticed. Like, if you’re disabled or you’re queer or even different races have a very hard time there,” Hunter told the Observer, referring to Princeton High. “If you’re different in any way, you’re fucked.”
In an interview, Superintendent Donald McIntyre said the district conducts thorough investigations for all bullying claims. Princeton schools “do have single-use restrooms that are available for any student that does not feel comfortable in using a group restroom, no matter what the situation is, and that’s something that’s been clearly communicated out to all of our administrators,” he said, without addressing whether that information actually reached all teachers. “Princeton High School values all students and wants them all to feel safe.”
Around the same time Hunter left the school to pursue their GED, Lee, the founder of PTX Diverse, also pulled out her son, Hunter’s then-boyfriend. Two of her other children, she told the Observer, have also dropped out of area schools over bullying or related conflicts to likewise pursue their GEDs. Lee, who identifies as pansexual, founded PTX Diverse in 2020 to promote inclusive education, including hosting Passover, Ostara, and Juneteenth observances, as well as LGBTQ+-focused events. Now, she’s planning on moving her family out of state next year.
The Rev. Yadi Martínez-Reyna, an ordained minister with the United Church of Christ, identifies as nonbinary and uses gender-neutral pronouns. In 2021, they founded another pro-LGBTQ+ group in Princeton, Color Splash Out, to “establish safe and brave spaces that foster resilience, a sense of belonging, and self-esteem for young people aged 11 to 23.” Color Splash Out quickly began supporting and participating in various PTX Diverse events in addition to organizing a queer youth summer camp.
But, over the last three years, Martínez-Reyna, Lee, and Hunter all say they have faced not just increasing social harassment but expanding administrative roadblocks, placed by local elected officials, in the way of organizing events and meetings in their small town’s public parks and schools.
This summer, these conflicts came to a head. In recent years, the Princeton ISD school board has lurched right as conservative activists, including Collin County GOP precinct chairs, took seats in campaigns partly financed by Dallas hotelier Monty Bennett. (He also has been involved, as reported by Texas Monthly, in a push for a school voucher-type program in the district.) On June 12, this school board voted to uphold prior decisions to cancel a 2024 Princeton Pride event at Lovelady High School and to ban both PTX Diverse and Color Splash Out from renting school property in the future. Ostensibly, these decisions were based on technical violations of district event policies, though the groups contend that these were pretexts for discrimination.
The school board’s votes represent one of the first Pride events ever canceled by a government entity in the state, according to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Texas, transforming Princeton’s LGBTQ+ advocates into a symbol of progressive Texans’ struggle to survive in pockets of the state that have been targeted for right-wing school board takeovers.
In response to the school board’s decisions, the ACLU of Texas posted on X that it was “urging the district to end its discrimination against LGBTQIA+ groups.” In formal grievances filed with the Princeton ISD superintendent, the civil liberties organization has argued the school district’s moves to cancel Pride and ban the organizations from using public property are part of a longer-running pattern. “We do want the district to receive some kind of ramification for their actions, because we don’t want the precedent that this is OK for other districts to do,” Charelle Lett, an ACLU of Texas attorney, told the Observer. As of late October, the ACLU had not sued the district.
The superintendent, McIntyre, disagrees that the district is singling out certain advocacy groups. “Any person that has [been] found to violate any rule has received a phone call from me to discuss how they broke a rule,” he told the Observer, “and then they’ve had a choice to come into compliance with it, or not. Everyone that has come into compliance on the rule has been able to continue to rent.”
But advocates say the district has been targeting, and applying a double standard to, pro-LGBTQ+ groups and events since 2021, when the city—under pressure from School Board President Cyndi Darland among others—introduced those special permit restrictions for local parks. Each Pride event since then, the groups say, has been unfairly targeted by either school or city officials.
After the city council voted to tighten its permit rules for public parks in 2021, PTX Diverse paid $657.50 to successfully reserve J.M. Caldwell Sr. Community Park for its second Princeton Pride in June 2022. This time, advocates say, backers of the 2021 online petition that had called on the city to change its permitting rules—including Darland, who is also a Collin County Republican Party precinct chair, and John Campbell, another party precinct chair who won a school board seat in November 2022—organized a protest. Campbell, advocates recall, told LGBTQ+ and other youths in attendance that they could be bound for hell.
But it was 2022’s oppressive heat, more than the counterprotesters, that started PTX Diverse looking for a new venue for Pride 2023, said PTX Diverse co-founder John Kusterbeck. The group began eyeing the spot where the town’s most culturally impactful events take place: Princeton High.
Following Pride 2022, Kusterbeck, using the organization’s modest pool of donations, started renting Southern Middle School for meetups for queer youth in Princeton. Supported by both PTX Diverse and Color Splash Out, the meetings allowed attendees to express themselves through arts and crafts and other activities. By December 2022, the superintendent’s office had approved Kusterbeck’s application for a permit to rent Princeton High for Pride 2023.
Then, Campbell and another ultraconservative activist, Julia Schmoker, were both elected to the school board, creating a bloc along with Darland that could dominate the body come January 2023.
This more right-wing board began evaluating potential changes to the facility use policy that had allowed PTX Diverse and other community organizations to rent school property for local events. Just after the board’s first meeting on the subject that month, Kelly Neidert, who became a conservative student leader during her days at the University of North Texas in Denton and once described herself on X, formerly Twitter, as a “Christian fascist,” showed up with other far-right influencers to protest a PTX Diverse-sponsored drag bingo event at the city’s small Steve and Judy Deffibaugh Community Center, falsely accusing drag performers of “grooming” kids.
“It’s just ridiculous that you’re going to tell me who I can associate with and not.”
That day, masked members of a left-wing community defense group surrounded the community center, armed with walkie-talkies, cameras, and handguns. Neidert’s group, bearing signs reading “Hands off our kids,” mostly occupied a corner of the sidewalk, except when Neidert would occasionally circle the center with armed allies as she livestreamed. One local resident walked over from her house across the street to confront members of Neidert’s group, telling one that his rifle was making her kids feel unsafe.
Neidert, whose group rebranded itself as “Texas Coalition for Kids” in 2023, has protested alongside various ultra-right, neofascist, militia, and Christian nationalist groups targeting drag shows across the state. In March 2023, Neidert and others testified in support of the now judicially blocked statewide drag ban, Senate Bill 12, at the Capitol. That same month, Princeton school board members revised the district’s facility use policy to include a $25-per-hour surcharge on top of its $75 rental fee, while adding additional charges for the cost of security. That move raised the cost enough to price out the queer youth meetings, which resumed this September at the town’s new firehouse.
Five days prior to the planned June 2023 Princeton Pride event, trustees again tweaked their policy to bring it in line with the unconstitutional SB 12, with Darland claiming in the right-wing Texas Scorecard that the district’s rule changes were to “protect children as best we could.”
McIntyre met with Kusterbeck to discuss the new rules prior to the Pride celebration.
Only a few protesters showed up to PTX Diverse’s June 2023 Pride event, which mostly went off without a hitch. Afterward, Kusterbeck wrote a Facebook post on the organization’s account thanking everyone—including Darland—for attending.
Then, three months later, PTX Diverse received a letter from McIntyre notifying organizers that they were now banned from ever again renting school district property for violating the district’s facility use policy. The violation in question, supposedly, had been mentioning Darland by her official title in the Facebook post. This, McIntyre said, created the appearance that the district had endorsed the event, violating the policy’s mandate that event-related materials disclose that the district isn’t a sponsor. At their meeting prior to the Pride event, McIntyre says he warned Kusterback about some Pride 2023 materials lacking such a disclaimer, but after that meeting all promotions included the required clarification, PTX Diverse activists say.
McIntyre told the Observer that he investigated the post-Pride Facebook post after receiving informal complaints over the phone. According to the school district’s response to an open records request filed by PTX Diverse and provided to the Observer, no written complaints were ever made.
Despite now being banned from renting any school facilities, PTX Diverse found a way to remain present in the community. In April, the group participated in the local Lions Club-hosted Onion Festival at Princeton High. During that event, the group offered free gift baskets of donated books that had been targeted for bans by far-right groups. The school board then used the baskets of banned books as an excuse to further restrict the group from even vending anything on school property, despite the fact that the district hadn’t officially banned any of the books that were distributed, a PTX Diverse records request provided to the Observer confirms.
After PTX Diverse was barred, Color Splash Out took over organizing the 2024 Princeton Pride event at Lovelady High School. The district approved the application in late April, and the event was set to take place on June 29.
Then, on May 20, McIntyre notified Color Splash Out that the event would be canceled, citing a reference to PTX Diverse on Color Splash Out’s vending application form—an error that organizers say resulted from a failure to swap in the correct name after the organization used PTX Diverse’s prior forms for reference. The school board proceeded to permanently ban Color Splash Out from renting district property.
That’s when the ACLU stepped in, filing grievances on behalf of both PTX Diverse and Color Splash Out in May and June. During the June 12 school board meeting, trustees upheld their decision against PTX Diverse and considered the possibility of softening Color Splash Out’s permanent ban to a one-year suspension. “It’s no secret that members on this board are anti-LGBTQIA+ rights,” Lett, the ACLU lawyer, told the Observer. “So we do believe that those biases have come into play for this issue.”
Advocates say the district is applying a double standard in enforcing its facility use rules, pointing out that local church groups have repeatedly failed to include the required disclaimer about the ISD’s non-sponsorship for religious events on school property and faced no sanctions. McIntyre told the Observer that at least one of these churches has begun using the disclaimer.
The school board, in the proposal considered at the June meeting, stipulated that Color Splash Out would be eligible to rent district property after a year on the condition that “they not be affiliated with the Princeton TX Diverse,” according to board meeting minutes and Rev. Martínez-Reyna, something the ACLU says would clearly violate the First Amendment. On a 2-4 vote, the board voted down this motion, letting the permanent ban stand.
School Board Trustee Campbell did not respond to an Observer request for comment for this story, and Board President Darland did not follow up after an initial response.
“I was surprised when the board came back and said, ‘Well, we will grant you a year suspension, but you will have nothing to do with Princeton Texas Diverse,’” Martínez-Reyna told the Observer. “But before I could even say ‘no’— because it’s just ridiculous that you’re going to tell me who I can associate with and not—they voted against it and upheld the ban.”
In July, the city approved PTX Diverse for a special permit to rent J.M Caldwell Park for a belated Pride event on October 27. The celebration went smoothly, organizers reported, without protest.
Meanwhile, Hunter, now 19, recently moved back to Princeton from McKinney and is focusing on their own mental health as they continue to work toward their GED. Their hopes for their hometown remain low. Princeton, they said, is full of “a bunch of old people who don’t want to admit that the times are changing.”
