Arkansas has consistently ranked as one of the worst states in oral health, with cost and lack of access to care being some of the biggest barriers. 

The University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences hopes to help address that disparity with its free Summer of Smiles children’s dental clinic on June 15, from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m.  at the Freeway Medical Tower, 5800 W. 10th St., Suite 501.

The medical school’s Department of Dental Hygiene will provide free preventative dental care, including cleanings, exams, X-rays and fluoride treatments, for children ages 3 to 17. The goal of these preventative services is to stave off the need for cavity fillings and root canals in the future. 

Children tend to have better oral health than adults in Arkansas, partly thanks to oral health programs in schools, but still rank lower than the national average. In 2023, 69.2% of Arkansas high schoolers reported visiting a dentist in the last year, compared to 75.9% nationally, according to a 2024 report Arkansas Department of Health. In 2025, 58.6% of Arkansas adults reported visiting a dentist in the last year, according to an annual report from the United Health Foundation. 

A 2023 survey of Arkansas third graders in that same health department report found that 59.4% of them had experienced tooth decay and 17.7% had untreated tooth decay. 

As of 2019, only about 54% of Arkansans had any dental insurance, and among those who did, use of dental services was still low, with only 51% of insured children and 30% of insured adults using any dental services that year, according to the Arkansas Center for Health Improvement.

To schedule an appointment (there are no walk-ins allowed), call 501-686-5733 and mention “Summer of Smiles.”

SOMA PRIDE
SATURDAY 6/13. SoMa. 10:30 a.m.-4 p.m. Free.

When SoMa Pride launched three years ago, the event was met with an “of course” from queer people and allies across Little Rock and beyond. As in, Central Arkansas Pride is great, but of course we also need an annual event that actually falls within the confines of Pride Month. As in, other locations work too, but of course South Main Street is an ideal spot for a celebration of this nature. This year’s parade kicks off at noon, but the whole shebang runs from 10:30 a.m.-4 p.m., so if you want to make the most of the vendors, drag performances and general revelry, prepare for a full day of festivities. If you’re feeling especially on a roll, consider finishing your night at Stickyz Rock ’n’ Roll Chicken Shack, where pop-up series Hairpins is throwing its latest dance party focused on “lesbians, queers, and gender-diverse cuties” from 9 p.m.-1 a.m. Tickets for the latter, available here, are $20. Also of note: Little Rock Black Pride is hosting a free Pride in the Park celebration from 1-6 p.m. on Sunday, June 7 at MacArthur Park.

Watch enough movies with gay characters at the center of the plot, and you’ll become convinced that the closet is, to put it in video game terms, a gay person’s final boss. But one of the hardest things about gay life in a flyover state in the 21st century for me had little to do with coming out. It was a problem of volume. There weren’t many meet-cutes in the course of my day-to-day life. The chances of the handsome guy at the gym, the charming barista working behind the counter, or the Clark Kent lookalike who came to fix my work computer being available were slim. 

The hookup culture of the pre-internet era, already a poor fit for gay men seeking a connection beyond an evening’s duration, shapeshifted long ago into a network of singles apps, edging out any horny humanity that remained of the cruising scene and reducing it to a solitary (and often monetized) swipe gesture. This circumscribed the physical places I could go with the actual hope of meeting a romantic partner to, for the most part, bars or clubs. And once I aged out of my 20s and 30s, going out and spending money on drinks — just to wake up in the morning hungover and still alone — became less enticing.

Sometimes, connection comes by way of serendipity, as it did for Daniel Spillers, who grew up the son of a university professor. Spillers, 48, attended school in the Bryant School District and, as a member of their first gifted and talented cohort, spent third through seventh grade in an isolated class that stayed together, instead of mixing with the larger student population. 

“We were this tight-knit group,” he said. “If I hadn’t had that group of people who knew me for five years before we were let out into the larger population for high school, I don’t know that I would have had as good of a growing-up-gay experience as I did. I felt I was protected by that group.” 

Spillers’ high school experiences as a queer person were relatively positive, if unremarkable.

“I don’t know if I was ever in the closet. … I just kind of was myself. I wasn’t saying that I was gay, except to very few people when I was actually ready to come out,” he said. “But I don’t ever think anybody had any doubt. And I felt a little bit oblivious to it all, maybe.” 

He remembers finding his tribe, spending nights and weekends driving into Little Rock and hanging out on Kavanaugh Boulevard in the Hillcrest neighborhood where his parents had lived as newlyweds, inhabiting Cafe D’Roma. 

During his senior year of high school, Spillers worked on the University of Arkansas at Little Rock campus where his father taught, and in the fall he enrolled there as a student. 

And yet, while he did manage to arrive into young adulthood mostly unscathed, Spillers still felt himself isolating, single into middle age and struggling to meet other gay men.

“While I say I had a charmed existence, it was definitely a delayed existence,” he said. “Being gay meant that I, like many people, especially in the South, wasn’t able to be visibly gay. I wasn’t able to date. So all of the skills, the relationship skills, those things that heterosexual people really are able to do a lot easier and a lot more publicly, I did not.”

Spillers said he compartmentalized that part of his life because dating just wasn’t an option. This was aided by his unassuming presence and a measured manner; flamboyant gestures aren’t part of Spillers’ personality. The lone distinguishable feature about his presentation: a sort of edgy, curly short mullet gone a little long, like a member of Best Buy’s Geek Squad who’s aged out, counterbalanced by a preppy uniform, head to toe. Classic Midwestern creative class professional vibes with a full beard.

“I always say I’m like 10 years behind,” he said. “And when you develop that kind of isolation early on, for survival, you develop an independence. I got really, really good at being by myself.”

Spillers tried breaking out of that lonesomeness by going to Central Arkansas Pride in October, where he came across a booth for the Arkansas Queer Men’s Social Club, a group founded in 2024 by Paul Whannel to combat loneliness and isolation among queer men in Little Rock.

“You know things are bad when an IT guy who’s an introvert decides, ‘I’m going to start a social club,’” Whannel, 43, joked.

A system administrator at the William H. Bowen School of Law in Little Rock, Whannel knew all too well the impact of technology on feelings of disconnection and community. His idea was to rescue queer men like himself from the loneliness epidemic — nearly one in two American adults experiences significant, measurable loneliness, according to former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy — by planning outings for them in Central Arkansas.

“I went out and I printed up the brightest, eye-catchingest rainbow posters you can, and just said, ‘Hey, we’re going to have our first meeting at Blackberry Market, and if you want community, show up,’” he said. “The first 10 times I did it were just terrifying. But as every person showed up, they kept saying the same thing: ‘What took so long for this to happen? This is such an obvious need.’” The terror makes sense, given Whannel’s self-effacing, guy-next-door style — most comfortable in a pair of jeans, or khakis probably, and a slim-fit polo.

Members of the social club now meet for a planned roster of activities five to eight times a month. Their new member gatherings bring out about six people per session. Their game night at Caverns & Forests Board Game Cafe in the Argenta Arts District welcomes about 18-22 people every two weeks. Roughly 100 people have signed up either to join their Discord server or receive emails, and they have an even broader footprint via social media. The club maintains a roster of a few dozen active members, with a couple hundred in a larger orbit, “some [of whom] we only see once a year, and that’s OK,” Whannel said.

‘The apps have replaced the community’

There’s a saturation point you reach when, putting yourself out there as a gay man in Little Rock, you begin to recognize the same profile pics across dating apps. A fierce, animal loneliness kicks up, and you begin to wonder what will even become of your appetite for companionship. Will it become feral, romping through your insides while you careen from bar to bar, or will you stay in, taking your discontent out on yourself? 

“In the bars, you see the same few hundred people night after night after night. And you start to think that those are the gay community,” Whannel said. “But the gay community really, truly isn’t that. They’re integrated. They’re all out trying to live their lives. They’re going to work 9 to 5. They come home, they’ve got a mortgage, they’ve got pets. They’re living their lives. And so a lot of them have the same feeling of disconnect.”

And once the situation IRL has become stale, many default to the apps.

“The apps have really replaced the community. And that’s terrible, because the apps are like people at their worst,” Whannel said. “People are trying to get laid, they’re being really ruthlessly mean. There’s transphobia, there’s racism, it’s just a toxic kind of environment. And so people get the idea that that’s the gay community.” The legacy of “cruising” in gay male culture, a heedless pursuit of sexual encounters defined by a system of performative gestures meant to exhibit one’s availability or appetite, can exert a substantial pressure, and is only juiced by the anonymity afforded by the internet. 

Eric Wells, a member of the social club, faced discrimination on the apps for being HIV-positive.

“I stopped using the dating apps over a year ago, and started with the social club because the toxic environment on Grindr and on the regular dating apps that don’t have an option to disclose made for some really uncomfortable conversations,” Wells, 44, said. “I mean, there have been people who have said, ‘You should have died.’ People online who are like, ‘What are you even doing here?’”

Wells’ boyfriend recognized how deep he himself had fallen into a rut after moving to Arkansas to help care for his ailing mother and younger brother before venturing out into the club. 

“For the first five or six years I’d been here, it had been so much of me just taking care of my mother, taking care of my brother. But before I realized it, it had been almost 10 years since I’d had friends in person that I hung out with,” he said. “All of my friends that I talked to were all on the internet. It would be nice to have friends that I didn’t have to hide being gay from.” 

In fact, many of the group’s members are like me — men who wound up as adults in Central Arkansas serving as caregivers for sick relatives. Upon returning to my hometown of Little Rock about a decade ago, I found myself bewildered by the prospect of making a life that resembled what I’d grown accustomed to in New York. Most remnants from that world that I rediscovered here paled in comparison. Also, while I’d fooled myself into thinking the closet had become a relic of the past, even here in Arkansas, trying to find folks willing to go on the record about their experience of gay life for this essay quickly disabused me of that fantasy.

‘The call of the coast’

Whannel and his partner moved to Little Rock in 2015 to support family, but Whannel, a native of Iowa, spent many years on the West Coast after college. He sometimes still imagines his life elsewhere. 

“Brain drain is such a problem for us,” Whannel said. “You know, a lot of the really capable, smart, bright young people, especially young gay people, young queer people, when they get to be the age where they can cut it and get the hell out of here, they do what I did. They get the hell out of here. And I can understand that. The call of the coast will always be there.” 

But while the allure of bigger cities abides, Whannel has set about the task of building space for queer men here, in the heartland.

“People shouldn’t feel like that’s their only option,” Whannel said. “You should feel confident that if you have a life here, that it’s going to be a good life where you can be your true self and you’re not afraid to express yourself. That’s not a life that I would want anybody to live, where you’re half in a closet and you fear going into certain counties or certain communities.”

Whannel advocates for sticking around and taking up space here in Arkansas. 

“In America right now, it feels like all the values I grew up with — multiculturalism and diversity — are just being destroyed,” he said. “There’s a part of me that’s like, ‘God, if I could make it to Canada or Australia or one of these other countries, would I?’ But I’m just argumentative enough and I’m just cantankerous enough that I’m like, ‘No, I deserve a place on this earth, too, right here. And if you want me to leave, you’re gonna have to fight me for it.’”

Whannel contends that there’s something special about Central Arkansas that distinguishes it from urban centers on the coasts.

“If you have the ambition, Little Rock will let you do it,” he said. “You just have to have that ambition. You can be the person that you want to be. It may not be every single aspect that you want it to be, but that’s a hell of a leg up that you don’t get in coastal cities.”

The room for development in Little Rock doesn’t mean that starting something here is easy, though.

“When we moved here, I was like, ‘Where is the community?’ We went to [The New 610 Center, formerly 610 Center, a gay bar] in the middle of the daytime on a Saturday or something, and I started talking to one of the owners, and I’m like, ‘Well, what do you guys do?’ He’s like, ‘We try and stay open.’”

Organization in the gay community, Whannel found, waxed and waned. Central Arkansas Pride was getting started then, and has grown into a massive annual gathering, but it’s largely a one-day affair. Other queer gatherings, like the sapphic-leaning Hairpins events, wouldn’t be dreamed up for many more years.

“If I wanted to start a powerhouse, if I wanted to start a gay army, how do I do that? The first step was like, ‘Well, we need people,’” Whannel said.

The cold shoulder

“It’s a known fellowship,” Spillers said of the outings thrown by the Queer Men’s Social Club. “You know ahead of time that you don’t have to guess if somebody’s going to be accepting. That’s off the table. So you can get to, ‘OK, now who are these interesting people? Let’s have some conversations.’” 

The group, at present, is really just a blank slate. It is intergenerational, not very cruisy, spans a masc-femme spectrum in terms of its members’ presentation, and skews overwhelmingly white and cis gay despite bisexual men, trans men and nonbinary people being welcome. There’s a loquaciousness among this many gay men given a sudden captive audience. Joining an event is somewhat like slinking into a new school or summer camp, demanding equal parts performativity and self-deprecation, wanting to be liked but not necessarily wanting to be too boisterous.

Despite all of the camaraderie, convincing other local gay queer interest groups of the club’s resilience was a challenge from the outset. Whannel said that Zack Baker, the former executive director of Central Arkansas Pride, told him he should “expect some reluctance from other groups to work with you because they’re going to go, ‘Oh yeah, you’re the latest guy doing this. You’re going to disappear on us.’”

Baker was right. Groups like the Arkansas Black Gay Men’s Forum were understandably reticent, having spent years cultivating their community and retaining their space. 

“Other groups were really frank from the get-go, saying, ‘You’ve got to bring us something to the table. You’ve got to keep coming to the table, or else we’re not going to waste our time interfacing with you,’” Whannel said. “And I’m like, ‘OK. We have a lot of IT people in our group.’ Groups have a hard time with websites. You know, we do web design. So it became like a ‘how can we plug in and inform service.’” 

Whannel and the group developed an organization called Queer Men United, meant to be a behind-the-scenes team dedicated to building up digital scaffolding in Arkansas’s queer circles, and to connect their political power to like-minded organizations across the state. Queer Men United has partnered with the BGM Forum on volunteer opportunities and worked with Intransitive to keep their text messaging system online.

Whannel and Spillers also leaned into their shared IT backgrounds to build the Queer Men’s Social Club’s infrastructure. 

“We really started off with the idea that we should be an offline group doing things in real life, because that’s where the connection forms,” Whannel said. “People can’t hide behind screens. … But we actually outgrew Blackberry Market, so people started putting together a text messaging list so we could all chat offline. Then somebody started a WhatsApp channel. That worked for a while, but we quickly realized there were some things we wanted to do beyond what it gave us the ability to do.”

Much of the group’s communication now takes place online, in a members-only Discord server. 

“It’s a double-edged sword because there’s a learning curve with [Discord],” Whannel said. “We really don’t want to exclude the older people and the people that are not tech-centric. So we really try hard not to become so dependent on it … to the exclusion of others. But I can say on Saturday morning, ‘Hey, I’m going to go for a hike this afternoon. Who wants to come? And we’ll have half a dozen people go on a hike. That’s cool. And that’s something you can’t just do with an e-mail list or a Facebook group.”

Though the club doesn’t blush at members hooking up, Whannel is frank about the intention behind the group being beyond sexual desire. This poses one of the challenges particular to a social group for gay men — redirecting baser energies toward something more chaste.

“We have this goody two-shoes, Pollyanna feel that we’re very wholesome. But we’re a sexual people, and that’s not a bad thing. We should have a place to embrace that,” Whannel said. “But some people see there’s a social club and think that’s another name for sex club. People would come in and they had never been to an event. And they’re like, ‘Hey, who’s here that’s my type?’ And we’d have to shut that down and be like, ‘Listen, there’s a time and a place. But this is for friendship.’”

‘A bigger goal’

I was surprised to discover that the origin of the social club dates to Whannel’s early involvement with political organizing in Iowa, particularly his work to create a suicide prevention program in his teens. His intention behind the social club was less to create dates than to create the kind of group cohesion that could inspire political action.

“We’ve hosted more than 100 events now,” he said, “and every time we learn something. We’ve got our first really good shot at a grant this year for $15,000, which would give us some capacity-building. In 10 years’ time, my goal for this is that we would have a community center that operates every day, where you can just go, and maybe you’re a trans kid, maybe you’re a 50-year-old guy that just moved here. Maybe you just got out of a divorce. Whatever it is, you can go find community.”

In the meantime, he lists last year’s Pride near the top of his experiences with the club because of the merging of the celebration with a No Kings protest. 

“The last Pride was really perfect, especially where the No Kings march integrated with Pride. They were so smart about how they did that,” Whannel said. When organizers discovered they were planning simultaneous events, they decided to combine them rather than reschedule. 

“I’m like, ‘That is brilliant,’” Whannel said. “So we’re right in the view of the Capitol and people are thinking politically because it’s right there. And then we have a political march come through it and lead up to the steps of the Capitol. I mean, I got chills. I was just like, ‘This is fucking amazing. This is what I wanted to see happen.’”

Yet another challenge for a gay men’s social club: retaining the group’s aspirations to create fun opportunities for members to socialize in the face of dire political realities that demand their attention and action.

“We are really focused on the social element. But in my mind, as we’ve spun off this parent organization, these are all building stones to a bigger goal,” Whannel said. “From what I understand, this state used to be blue-ish. I think it could be again, but that’s only going to happen if all of the groups come together and focus their power and build themselves up to be something that’s really unstoppable. Eventually, it should be to the point where it’s politically unwise for legislators to attack us and to write this legislation because they know that we have a power block.”

Honoring the wounds

Members of the club come from very disparate circumstances.

There’s Pastor Victor (a pseudonym), in his 60s, a former Presbyterian minister who came out somewhat recently following two marriages. He’s not out to his family, nor to some people in his church, but has found in the club a way of growing in his own awareness of this newly claimed identity.

“I had a lot of friends and acquaintances in the straight world and in the church world, but they couldn’t really relate to what it was like to be gay,” he said, living life “very much unsure of what it meant to be who I was.”

Victor has found a sense of purpose in the group, helping the fledgling bunch get organized. “In the church, that was kind of my specialty,” he said. “If you wanted to discern a new mission or something, then I would come in and help churches do that.” Gay men bring a wealth of professional capacity to an organization, and as with the mission of the IT-focused Queer Men United, the Queer Men’s Social Club tries to allow them to make use of these varied skills. 

Victor has also found a use for his spiritual inclination among the assemblage, helping members who struggle to reconcile their faith with their sexual orientation. 

“What I see among a lot of gay men who were raised in the South and were raised in the church is that when they decided to be the person that God was calling them to be, their faith tradition told them they could not be that,” he said. “So I see a lot of gay men who are confused about what it means to have a spirit or be a spiritual being, and how do we nurture that in a way that is both affirming to who we are and honors our wounds.” 

Another member, Leslie Campbell, 51, has been out since 1999. Born in Conway, Campbell has lived his whole life in Central Arkansas. The group has given him a way to socialize after a devastating breakup, a former lover having been convinced that an illness caused by a genetic disorder was a spiritual punishment by workers at a religious hospital from which he was receiving treatment.

“It took me like four or five years to even go out on another even casual date,” Campbell said. Carrying the pain of that rejection, along with an adolescence spent among a family that nearly sent him to a conversion therapy camp, Campbell said the social club has been a welcome relief: “I feel comfortable. And it has so far been very accommodating, welcoming.”

About hooking up

But what of the prospect of making a love connection through the Queer Men’s Social Club? 

“We have definitely had a number of people meet each other through the group. It’s just kind of not the primary thing,” Spillers said. “I really didn’t go into this saying, ‘I’m looking to find a partner.’ I went into this saying, ‘I need to have more opportunities to be myself around other gay men.’”

The group also struggles sometimes with internal conflict, but tries to hold space for everyone, even those who might want to leave and eventually rejoin.

“People have come and gone. Sometimes it’s because it’s not a right fit for them,” Spillers said. “There’s friction with any social organization. There’s going to be personalities and friction and valid feelings. Our whole thing is: If this is not a good fit for you, you are always welcome back. People have taken breaks.” 

Whannel said, “One of the biggest reasons that we have to keep marketing ourselves and be always recruiting is because people come and they kind of come in cohorts or in waves, and they start to get to know each other. They form a friend group. And then they start to fall away as that friend group goes and does stuff. When that’s perfect, that’s what we want.”

Still, love in the club sometimes just happens, like for Wells and his boyfriend.

“We were quiet about the fact that we were seeing each other because we didn’t know how to handle it,” Wells said. “It’s not frowned upon or anything like that. But that’s the opposite of why most of the people that I had met were going … It is not the focal point.” Wells and his boyfriend met at one of the group’s events at a local kava bar. They began discussing cartoons, then Wells started talking about “X-Men” and “Storm.” 

“I think that’s kind of where we first started to click,” his boyfriend said. “I was like, ‘OK, you know, this is something we have in common. That’s dope. I found out that he was a ‘Star Trek’ nerd and we just hit it off.” 

And there you have it. A gay meet-cute between comic book nerds at a cafe in Central Arkansas, mundane and poetic enough to convince us there’s still hope for us all. 

In Arkansas, 669 people die each year in homicides and suicides by gun. This inglorious stat, the product of lax gun safety laws and rabid gun culture, puts Arkansas in the top 10 most dangerous states when it comes to firearms.

On Sunday, June 7, the tireless members of Moms Demand Action will circle up the food trucks and convene conversations from 1-3 p.m. at Station 801, 801 South Chester Street, Little Rock.

A roundtable discussion starting at 1:30 p.m. will include Scott Hamilton, CEO & president of the Arkansas Urban League; Eric Brown, executive director of Seis Puentes Hispanic Outreach; Susie Reynolds Reece, a national leader in suicide prevention; and Dr. Whit Hall and Mariah Hatta, volunteers with Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America. Representatives from Parents of Murdered Children and the Center for Healing Hearts and Spirits will also join in.

The Sunday afternoon event, which will include snacks, drinks and kids’ activities, is part of Wear Orange Weekend and National Gun Violence Prevention Month, observed to honor lives lost to gun violence and elevate gun violence prevention efforts.

All are welcome.