"My husband and I are both queer entrepreneurs. We are also fathers of children we adopted. In both parenthood and business ownership, we have experienced specific roadblocks and struggled unique to being queer in Ohio. Through our success we decided to start our own 501c3 non profit event specially geared towards celebrating queer owned businesses and queer families in Ohio! I am a psychotherapist and I operate a private practice called Wild Ohio Therapy farm LLC on our six acre farm. Also on our farm is my husband's business, Shady Pines Alpacas, yes we are Golden girls fans!  We raise our own alpaca and make/sell our own yarn. Every year, alpaca farms across the entire country, open their doors to the public for a weekend event called Alpaca Days. It's a fun farm day for the community to come learn about and experience our alpaca and have the opportunities to purchase alpaca products.

It's typically a pretty simple event. Not ours! We have decided to make our alpaca days, a chance for not only traditional alpaca days activities, but also a non profit festival where queer owned artists, authors and crafters can come together to support one another, to bring awareness to our visibility in our communities and lastly to thank our community for its support now and in the future. Because we are "Shady Pines", we simply couldn't resist the temptation to coin the phrase "Thank you for being a friend" in our slogan! ..and we mean it. Our event will have vendors, musicians, drag performances, live bands and more! We sincerely appreciate the support we have gotten. I'm also a navy vet and I think it's important, especially in these small rural towns that supporting veterans and veteran owned businesses can also look like celebrating queer ones! Id like to add, in closing, that in the political climate in which we find ourselves as queer Ohioans, it's essential now more than ever to be visible. We often talk about the importance of being "out" year round and not just at pride celebrations. Well, this is exactly what we have all been talking about for years, right? This is it! As queer business owners, we all provide valuable resources to our communities. Let's come out and show who we are! Please help us bring awareness to this vitally important event/message happening on our farm in Zanesville September 28th and 29th 9am-5pm both days - Daniel Kelty