Queer for the Planet (and the People): All Up In Your Business with Kath Pierce
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When we think of Pride, the default image is often a sea of corporate floats and city crowds. But for the residents of the Cairngorms National Park, the reality looks a little different—think less glitter-cannon, more bee hotels.
Enter Kath Pierce. Kath is the driving force behind Cairngorms Pride, a pioneering ‘eco-Pride’ proving that you don’t have to escape to the city to find your people. She’s building a movement rooted deeply in the landscape, fighting rural isolation not with massive footfall data, but with deep, meaningful connection (and the occasional queer ceilidh).
In this edition of All Up In Your Business, we chat with Kath about why impact shouldn’t just be a numbers game, the unique power of rural allyship, and how—from magazines to mountains—good design helps queer joy blossom in unexpected places.
Kath with Eoin, winner of Cairngorms Pride Arts Prize and Cairngorms Pride Co-Director Dan Cottam.
SL: Tell us a bit about yourself and your journey with Cairngorms Pride.
I moved to the Cairngorms from Edinburgh in 2022 and was keen to find fellow rural queers in my new place. I could see there were already a couple of trailblazer groups and spaces doing their bit for queer visibility, so with another hat on (as co-founder/editor of Somewhere: For Us magazine), we created a special LGBTQ+ History Month event in February 2023 at Grantown Museum. It turned out to be the first LGBTQ+ heritage event to have taken place in the area. It also attracted a lot of local people, including staff and students from local schools, so it became clear there was an appetite for more visibly LGBTQ+ events and activities to be held.
The idea for our new kind of eco-Pride—and tagline ‘Here for the planet. Queer for the planet’—spawned from this moment and the positive outcomes of a subsequent community consultation in 2024, which involved 400 people from the Park and surrounding areas. We secured funding as Cairngorms Pride CIC in Spring 2025 and launched in the summer with the first-ever LGBTQ+ ceilidh in the Cairngorms National Park!
“It’s not a numbers game in a rural setting—it’s about the quality of engagement and impact.”
Rural queer visibility often gets overlooked in favour of urban narratives. How does your work with Cairngorms Pride challenge this?
It’s not a numbers game in a rural setting—it’s about the quality of engagement and impact. It’s demonstrating that young LGBTQ+ people don’t have to leave for the city to be themselves. In the National Park, there are only 20,000 residents in total, so the LGBTQ+ community is small. However, the ally community is significant, which gives us continued hope and determination— especially when anti-LGBTQ+ bullying is still a huge issue in schools.
A rural context also means that you’re always dealing with smaller, tighter communities and plenty of ‘inherited beliefs’ which can cause intergenerational misery and trauma for LGBTQ+ people. Social isolation and the effects of discrimination and stigma are heightened and exacerbated when you add rurality. It’s also understanding the reality of living in a rural location, and what that means. It’s important to understand that some LGBTQ+ people actively head to the hills to get away from people knowing their business, and that rural life can offer a veil of privacy—though it always impacts how much a person feels they can live their authentic life, beyond simply being ‘tolerated’. We have had feedback from people who tell us our presence is important to them—that they feel supported by our very existence—even if they don’t feel able to physically participate in our projects and events. This matters.
Things also take time in smaller communities. Building community relationships is incredibly important. Trust is everything, and consistency too. People will take their time to get to know you and to understand that you are there for the long haul. Flash-in-the-pan ideas are all too frequent, or ego-led projects focused on numbers, which are unsustainable. Real connections with real people over a long period of time are how change is made. That is how Cairngorms Pride has achieved the local support it has, through turning up and doing the work.
What could urban LGBTQ+ organisations learn from rural queer initiatives like yours?
To say every person matters is almost a cliché, but it is true. Connecting with the value of positively supporting one person and then replicating that a story at a time. This connection is what actually matters—everything else is admin. The beauty of a Pride organisation is that it changes everyone who connects with it. It has changed me, as it emerges and develops as a new entity and reveals new opportunities and partnerships and people I now have in my life who are good friends. Done right, it can go a long way to preventing loneliness and bringing joy into lives, which can be made harder in a rural setting.
What’s been your most satisfying ‘They said it couldn’t be done, but we did it anyway!’ moment?
I’d reframe that and say ‘They never thought it was needed, but it turns out it was!’ Sonia, aged nine, who was one of our prize-winners in our first Cairngorms Pride Art Prize, probably says it best. She entered her Rainbow Garden picture because she ‘has a queer cousin, and she wanted to show them how proud she is of them.’
Beyond that, the diversity of our projects is teaching us all the time about what really matters to LGBTQ+ people and allies in the National Park. Our Social Spaces Network is creating a whole series of new spaces, standing up for LGBTQ+ visibility. From nature-based spaces to outdoor sports lodges, from cafés to wildlife parks, we are making a difference one step at a time. Next year is going to be a big year for us!
“Words are overused, and we are all drowning in a sea of information. Design and creative expression cut through the noise and help to convey a feeling or connection indescribably.”
Kath Pierce with Thomas Anderson Thatcher, Co-Founder of Somewhere: For Us
When numbers aren’t your metric for measuring success, how do you know when your work has truly made a difference?
It comes down to relationships and knowing that word of mouth is the most powerful network in a rural setting—that, and having faith that our work is making a difference. The response to our Cairngorms Pride Art Prize and the difference it made to our winners has been humbling. The fact that new friendships have formed from our two ceilidhs, or that a local school in Tomintoul (a remote village) had an art competition, and one of the winning pictures contains our new Cairngorms Pride Village of bug and bee hotels. There’s the fact that we’ve had so many messages of support following being featured on the BBC Scotland Outdoors podcast. It’s the fact that we’ve secured funding to work with local schools and families on a new Diversity in Nature project. Having these heartfelt responses and being offered these opportunities shows us that we are adding value and helping people who previously had little to no LGBTQ+ representation or support.
If you could wave a magic wand and change one thing about Pride events in the UK today, what would it be?
From the results of our consultation, we decided to be a year-round Pride organisation, as we understood that it was important we first established ourselves in the local landscape of events and projects, before considering the more ‘traditional’ Pride march and festival model. (Which we may do on a smaller scale in 2026 or 2027—watch this space).
If I had a magic wand, I would allocate all Prides a level of sustainable funding to allow them to reliably return year on year, as they are SO important. The majority of Scotland’s Prides are led by volunteers, which is an enormous ask given the pressures on people in their day-to-day lives. I just want them to continue, no matter their size. That said, it’s the small, local Prides that are the most vital, as these support some of the most vulnerable and isolated people. Scotland has a brilliant track record of these smaller Pride events, and I hope that they continue to expand into the future and that there is enough will, determination and local resources to make sure that they do.
Kath and CP Arts Prize winner Eoin at Loch an Eilein
Both Cairngorms Pride—and the LGBTQ+ magazine you publish, Somewhere: For Us—create visibility for LGBTQ+ people in ‘unexpected’ places. How important has design been in helping you achieve this mission?
Ever since I graduated from my Enterprise Masters at Manchester Business School in 2018, I truly believe that entrepreneurship is a creative endeavour. Using visual language to express what cannot be expressed in words is an incredibly powerful tool. Words are overused, and we are all drowning in a sea of information. Design and creative expression cut through the noise and help to convey a feeling or connection indescribably. This has been one of the special ingredients in Somewhere: For Us, as myself and my co-founder/editor Thomas Anderson-Thatcher have championed design and illustration since we launched in 2020.
It’s also the reason that Cairngorms Pride will always host creativity-led projects and events because it helps connect people to this beautiful place and to each other. We have had so many compliments about our beautiful website—especially its combination of design and illustration. It has definitely helped us make a meaningful first impression as a new social enterprise. Our logo development and illustration work with Madeleine Leisk has also set us up perfectly as the first Pride in a UK National Park, working to achieve more for queer people and the planet.
“Know in your bones that creating LGBTQ+ spaces where they do not currently exist will immediately benefit someone—and that matters.”
What advice would you give to others looking to create LGBTQ+ community spaces in areas where they might not (yet) exist?
Know in your bones that creating LGBTQ+ spaces where they do not currently exist will immediately benefit someone—and that matters. Believe in what you are doing and know that it will take patience and determination to see the wider impact of your work, and don’t be easily deterred. Seek out fellow changemakers and positive voices; find a supporter who believes in you. We would not exist were it not for the wonderful Cairngorms Trust. They believed in us from the beginning, supporting the Pride Consultation and helping us form as a Community Interest Company. Without them, we simply would not have had access to the resources needed to get a new idea off the ground—and yet here we are! And we’re already seeing the fruits of our early labour. Looking to 2026, we hope we’ll see even more of that blossoming.
Check out our work for Cairngorms Pride here.
