It is an early summer Sunday, the kind Sullivan County does so well. Brunch with a few friends runs into another table of them, and somewhere between the coffee and the rosé we fold the two groups together and carry the afternoon to the Cochecton Pump House. Familiar faces keep arriving. The day stretches, the way the good ones do.

When my husband and I settled in this rural corner of Sullivan County, I expected, mostly because of how close we are to New York City, to meet a few other queer couples. I never imagined a community large enough that a Sunday brunch could snowball into an entire day of socializing.

Maybe this is just what queer life in Sullivan County looks like now, in 2026. But to understand why a day like that still catches me off guard, you have to go back a couple of decades, to a version of me who believed the opposite.

I grew up in New Jersey, close enough to Manhattan to visit whenever I wanted and far enough away that it felt like another planet. My hometown was not so different from Sullivan, just denser: a small town of vanishing farmland and people quietly hoping to preserve a way of life. Around the time we ushered in the new millennium, my obsession with being in “the city” hit its peak. I was in my late teens, realizing I was gay, and the city became a refuge. 

That is the script so many of us inherited: if you are queer and you want a real life, you leave the small town for the big city, and you do not look back.

That script is being rewritten, though, and Sullivan County is one of the unassuming places rewriting it. Queer people are moving here on purpose. Others who grew up here are staying, refusing the old premise that belonging is something you commute or relocate to find. I have found in these hills the same thing I once rode a train into Manhattan to find.

But community at this scale does not happen by accident, not in a county where your nearest neighbor might be a mile down the road. In a city, Pride can be a parade you attend. Out here, Pride has to be infrastructure. It is the safe spaces where we understand we’re welcome. 

This sentiment is in no small part the work of Catskills Pride. Year-round, not just in June, the organization builds the connective tissue that turns scattered people into a community: the events, the advocacy, the celebration of neighbors building businesses, art, and small worlds of their own. We got to honor some of those people, a mix of folks who identify as LGBTQ+ and allies who simply showed up, on June 6th at the Catskills Pride Awards.

For many of us, that work is the reason a Sunday brunch can linger into a Sunday afternoon surrounded by chosen family.

Don’t get me wrong—I will always love the city that once took me in. But this June, I am not celebrating the place I escaped to. I am celebrating the place I never expected to fit, the place I chose on purpose: Sullivan County.