A man checks his phone and sees the forecast: rain. "Oh, it won't ruin the fun," he said to a woman next to him.
Then it started raining - a lot.
The 20th-annual WV Pride Parade quickened as dark clouds rolled into Charleston Saturday. But even the eventual downpour, and the handful of protesters across the street, couldn't dampen the spirits of folks at the celebration. This was the pinnacle of a week-long series of events celebrating the LGBT community and its allies.
The sun had been shining. People wiped beads of sweat from their foreheads as even more sweat crept down the backs of their shirts. They sat lining Kanawha Boulevard, waiting for the parade to begin.
Just before thunder started to clap, Betsy Walker grabbed her water bottle and started hustling back to her car.
She wore the gold and blue flag of the Human Rights Campaign draped around her shoulders and a rainbow scarf around her neck. "I don't normally dress like this," she said. Walker is a retired Episcopal priest and a lesbian. She's a proud and an often outspoken advocate for the LGBT community.
She was smiling all day.
"Fifteen years ago, you couldn't do this in West Virginia. In a lot of places, you probably still can't do this," Walker said. "In towns like Lewisburg, you know, we marched in the [New Year's Day] parade for the ordinance. It's a pretty progressive small town."
The ordinance she's talking about is a non-discrimination ordinance the Lewisburg City Council approved in January. Among other things, it expanded protections for the LGBT community by prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity.
Before that, it would have been perfectly legal to fire someone or deny a person housing because he or she might be gay or transgender.
At the five-hour city council meeting in January where the council voted on the ordinance, 300 to 400 people turned out, and 92 people stood up to speak. Walker said the crowd was pretty evenly split between those for and those against the ordinance.
Walker's town, the county seat of Greenbrier County, joined a growing list of communities across the state to adopt similar ordinances.
"This is not an issue to younger generations. When you think where the country has gone very quickly, what you're hearing since marriage equality passed is a lot of these [Religious Freedom Restoration Act]-type laws," Walker said. "It's the last gasp of a dying generation. Just because we passed the Civil Rights Act, doesn't mean we did away with racism. But it's a hell of a lot better than it was."
She remembers growing up in a world where some leaders across the state and country didn't want black men to be able to use the bathroom with white men.
And it wasn't long ago that Walker had to slip her partner, Patricia Kerns, out of the house without anyone seeing her. Walker was the director of a small church and Kerns was a teacher in that small town. Walker said the knowledge of a relationship between the two wouldn't have boded well there.
The two eventually got married in 2010 in Washington, D.C. Same-sex marriage still wasn't legal in West Virginia. When the state dropped its ban on same-sex marriage in October 2014, Patricia Kerns had her name changed to Patricia Kerns Walker to celebrate.
Kerns Walker died a few months after taking Walker's last name, and Walker didn't march in last year's parade.
This year, she did. She was struck by how the younger people at the event, especially the people under 30, can talk about and understand LGBT issues so easily.
"The younger generation will come up with their own new issues," Walker said. "I think if we get passed the transgender issue, I don't know who the hell else we can find to discriminate against. But who knows, we might go back through the list."
Reach Jake Jarvis at
jake.jarvis@wvgazettemail.com,
304-348-7939 or follow
@NewsroomJake on Twitter.