Andee Lyons had been skating for sixteen years before she decided to do something nobody at the University of Utah had ever tried: organize a pride event on ice.
On June 13, 2026, she pulled it off. “Pride on Ice” brought together the university’s figure skating club, local drag performers, and a crowd of spectators at the Salt Lake City Sports Complex. It was the team’s first performance dedicated to celebrating gay pride, and by most accounts, it worked.
This is a story about what happens when a student decides the culture around them needs to change and actually does something about it. It’s also a story about Utah, a state not exactly known for LGBTQ+ visibility, and what it looks like to build community there anyway.
The problem Lyons noticed
Lyons is the president of the University of Utah figure skating team. She founded the club in 2024 and has been skating since she was a kid. She is also a queer woman. Those three facts are relevant because together they explain why this event happened at all.
“As a queer woman myself, I was noticing a lack of pride within the figure skating community in Utah,” Lyons told the Daily Utah Chronicle, “especially because figure skating is a very prideful sport.”
That sentence captures a frustration a lot of LGBTQ+ students know well: you can belong to a community that is, in some abstract way, full of queer people, while simultaneously feeling like nobody is willing to say it out loud. Figure skating has a long history of LGBTQ+ athletes. But history doesn’t automatically translate into visibility on a Tuesday evening at a local rink.
So Lyons decided to create that visibility herself.
What Pride on Ice actually looked like
The event featured a series of performances set to music well known within the LGBTQ+ community. Drag performers from the Salt Lake City area joined the skaters on the ice. The program included both solo and group numbers, and the cast gathered for a group photo at the end of the show.
There’s something about ice as a performance surface that changes the dynamic of a pride event. On a stage, performers face an audience seated in rows. On ice, the performers are surrounded. The audience wraps around the rink. Skaters move through the space in ways that draw people in from every angle. For an event built around visibility, the medium itself reinforces the message.
It sounds straightforward. Organizing any public event as a student is harder than it sounds. You need a venue, you need performers willing to show up, you need to convince people to buy tickets or at least walk through the door, and you need to navigate whatever institutional approval process your campus has in place. In Utah, there is an additional layer of social context that organizers in other states might not face: Pride Month 2026 has not been a simple celebration nationwide.
Lyons founded the skating club in 2024, which means she spent roughly two years building the team before staging this event. That timeline tells you something about how student organizing actually works. The visible moment — the show on June 13 — was preceded by months of practices, recruitment, and relationship building. The pride event was not an impulse. It was the product of sustained effort.
The context Pride on Ice landed in
This year’s Pride Month has been complicated. The San Francisco Giants held their annual Pride Night on June 13, the same day as Pride on Ice, and four of their players protested the team’s rainbow caps by writing messages on them. Major League Baseball issued a warning to those players the following day. The story got national attention and sparked debates that are still playing out in sports media.
Meanwhile, Sacramento held its annual Pride Festival and Parade, and author and activist Raquel Willis appeared on ABC News to discuss her memoir and the importance of visibility in the LGBTQ+ community. Willis has spent years advocating for Black trans experiences, and her presence in mainstream Pride Month coverage is part of a broader shift toward more inclusive narratives.
Against this backdrop, a college figure skating club in Salt Lake City put on a show that centered queer joy. It might sound small. It isn’t.
Why student-led events like this matter
Lavender Graduation ceremonies, campus pride parades, queer student organization meetings, student-run publications — these things share a common thread. They are created by students, for students, in spaces that do not always naturally make room for them.
The Lavender Graduation tradition started in 1995 at the University of Michigan when Ronni Sanlo noticed that LGBTQ+ students were walking across graduation stages with no acknowledgment of what it had taken them to get there. That observation — simple, direct, and hard to argue with — spawned a tradition now practiced at over 200 campuses.
Pride on Ice is the same kind of idea applied to a different context. Lyons noticed that queer skaters in Utah were performing without a space that explicitly celebrated who they were. She built that space.
There is a pattern here that any LGBTQ+ student can recognize: someone looks around, realizes something is missing, and creates it. The scale varies. The impact does not.
What students at other campuses can take from this
If you are an LGBTQ+ student at a college or university and you are reading this thinking about your own campus, here are a few practical observations from how Pride on Ice came together.
First, Lyons founded the skating club two years before hosting the pride event. That timeline matters. She didn’t walk into an existing infrastructure and ask it to accommodate a new idea. She built the infrastructure first, then used it as a platform. Starting a club or organization takes time, but it gives you control over the framing.
Second, the event was collaborative. It included local drag performers, not just student skaters. Partnering with community organizations outside campus expands your reach and brings in people who know how to produce events. Salt Lake City has a visible queer arts scene. Finding and connecting with that scene was probably one of the more important steps in making Pride on Ice work.
Third, the event happened during Pride Month, which gave it a natural promotional window. Timing an event to coincide with a broader cultural moment means you spend less energy explaining why it exists. People already know.
There’s a fourth observation that matters too: Lyons didn’t wait for permission to feel like she had enough support. The University of Utah’s skating club was new. It probably had a small budget and a handful of members. She worked with what she had. That’s a pattern that shows up across successful campus organizing. The teams with the biggest budgets don’t always produce the most meaningful events. The ones that resonate are usually the ones where the people putting them on have a personal stake in the outcome.
Think about the Lavender Graduation movement again. Ronni Sanlo didn’t have institutional backing when she organized the first ceremony in 1995. She had an observation and a conviction that the observation mattered. The first Lavender Graduation was probably not much bigger than Pride on Ice. Today it’s practiced at over two hundred campuses. The scale was not the point. The point was that the event needed to exist.
The Utah factor
It would be dishonest to write about this event without acknowledging where it took place. Utah has a complicated relationship with LGBTQ+ visibility. The state has passed some protective legislation, but it has also been the site of ongoing debates about transgender rights, religious exemptions, and curriculum restrictions. Salt Lake City itself is more progressive than much of the state, but the broader cultural context still shapes how public queer events are received.
For students attending Utah colleges, this context is not theoretical. It shows up in classroom discussions that go quiet when certain topics arise. It shows up in the calculation some students do before deciding whether to out themselves to a roommate. It shows up in the way campus LGBTQ+ organizations sometimes have to justify their existence to administrators who would rather they didn’t.
That is precisely why Pride on Ice is worth paying attention to. If a student figure skating club can organize a pride event in Utah and pull it off, the same kind of thing is possible almost anywhere. The obstacles will look different on different campuses. The recipe is the same: find people who care, find a format that works, and do it.
Salt Lake City’s queer community has been building infrastructure for years. The city hosts an annual Pride Festival that draws tens of thousands of people. There are queer bars, community centers, and arts organizations. What Pride on Ice did was connect that existing community infrastructure to the student population in a way that felt natural rather than forced. The skating club didn’t import a pride event from somewhere else. It created one that made sense for the specific people in the room.
Where this goes next
Lyons and the figure skating team have not announced whether Pride on Ice will become an annual event. That is how most campus traditions start anyway: someone tries something once, it resonates, and the next year the planning begins in August instead of June.
What we know for now is that on a Saturday in June 2026, a group of queer students and performers stood on ice in Salt Lake City and performed for an audience that had come to see them. That is a community being built, in real time, by the people who need it most.
If you are on a campus that doesn’t have something like this yet, that is a gap you can fill. It takes time. It takes finding other people who feel the same way you do. It takes dealing with whatever institutional friction your campus throws at you. But the people who built Lavender Graduations, campus pride alliances, and now Pride on Ice all started from the same place: they noticed something was missing and decided to create it.
The rest is logistics.
For students who saw themselves reflected in that ice rink on June 13, the takeaway is simpler. You don’t need permission to build the community you need. You just need to start.
