5 Reasons Why You Must Not Hide Your Pride on June 29th, 2019!

On June 29th Howard County’s set to celebrate LGBTQ+ pride…for the first time! In advance of that landmark event, I wanted to talk to two of the people putting it all together. Both of them, Jumel Howard, the event’s Chairperson of the Howard County Pride Committee Chairperson and Alex Kent, its Volunteer Manager, said the same thing when I asked them to speak earlier this week: “Sure, Robert!”

A Note on Allies and Angst

Yes, I do have some Ally Angst. And by that I mean, I don’t want to be co-opting a struggle that isn’t mine, a heterosexual, cisgender man. But I am as much of an ally as you can be without actually being a member of the LGBTQ+ community. And I’m doing this for Bruce, too, my best friend who was gay and died by suicide so many years ago. It’s also why I’m writing an article on it and not on the actual planning committee. Alex told me not to fret in a phone conversation last week.

“If you’re in it for the right reasons and willing to give your time, energy, and commitment–come to our meetings!” she told me her voice rising with excitement and emphasis.

1. Only the Lonely

So goes Roy Orbison’s classic by the same name. It’s melancholic melody played in my head when local progressive activist and writer Steve Charing said something to me at a Columbia Democratic Club meeting a few months back that shed a a bright new light on the LGBTQ+ youth experience.

“We all thought we were the only ones,” Steve said. There was so much longing in his voice, so many oceans of distance in his dark eyes suddenly, and his posture seemed to lower a little. I saw little Steve for a moment. I wished I could tell that Steve that he wasn’t alone. I didn’t know what to say, though, in the moment. I wondered if any words would be enough, anyway. I just nodded.

I remembered that when Alex Kent told me about combatting the lonesome feeling so many LGBTQ+ people struggle with.

“I want visibility; I want it to be an event people know is happening for Howard County residents. We have a lot of LGBT people in our community, but they’re not centralized in one place. I want visibility and involvement,” she said.

2. Strangers In the Night and Day and On and On

Sure, when Frank “Blue Eyes” Sinatra sang those words, he meant them in that moony, romantic way. But there’s a darkness to all romance. The struggle of strangeness is how I think of something written in the suicide note we found next to his body. He didn’t think he’d ever find acceptance, love, and happiness. He had, after all, grown up in 1960s United States when the gay rights movement was just beginning to make enough headway with LGBTQ+ young people to tell them they already had all three.

Bruce taught me that no matter how lost I thought he felt…well, he probably felt even more lost. And as awful as it is to say, I now think maybe there was no way I could have saved him. All my pleading, arguing, and making logical cases for his wondrousness weren’t going to do it. He needed to grow up in a culture that told him he was loved, perfect, and most certainly not on his own.

“I feel like a stranger in my own family,” he’d written in that suicide note. I’ll never, ever forget the way those words kicked me in the gut. That’s when it dawned on me I’d never realized, really, the depth of his loneliness. Nothing robs you of joy, darkens all your lights, and generally eats away at your soul like isolation.

Jumel Howard HoCo Pride’s Chairperson, PFLAG’s Vice President and Membership Chair, and local paralegal echoed a similar sentiment when we too spoke on the phone last week.

“I want HoCo’s first Pride to help foster a new sense of family in Howard County’s diverse LGBTQ+ community and celebrate the tremendous progress we’ve made–both inside and outside of our home,” Jumel said.

He said he thinks of Pride a lot like he thinks of Black History Month.

“Despite my people’s so many accomplishments,” said Jumel, who is African-American, ” and so many contributions around the globe, so much is still overlooked. And because people are able to discount all of that for the LGBTQ+ community, too, Pride is necessary.” He said he wants the the area’s kids, teenagers, and adults to know that not only is each and every one loved and supported, there are so many of people here who are just like them.

Alex said that even if the LHBTQ+ community had every right and protection in the world, it’s a cultural group that will always need a space for cultural programing and events.

“My immediate goal, though, for this year’s Pride event is to, as our event motto goes, to all at once, remember, resist, and rejoice,” she said.

3. To Be Real

It’s no wonder that the LGBTQ+ community embraced Cheryl Lynn’s 1970s hit by that name. After all, part of its struggle is to find a space to be authentically who each one of them is.

On an episode of the Oprah Winfrey Show, the Queen of Talk, I being a daytime fan extraordinaire, remember she said the through-line in all the interviews she’d done over 25 years of hosting her eponymous talk show was that everyone wanted to know: do you hear me; do you see me?

“I take tremendous pride in where I live. The whole reason for Pride is that I want to see myself reflected in our celebration. That’s why I’m pouring everything I have into this, so that Pride is not just a success this year but 100 years down the road,” Jumel said.

Alex and Jumel both expressed a hope that HoCo Pride always remains a grassroots, locally-based event.

“We’re kind of scrappy,” Alex said, and we both erupted into laughter. Each of Alex’s warm guffaws connected to the next in a musical sing-song. I imagined her dark, thick hair pulled back as it often is to reveal her bright smile.

Jumel, meanwhile, reiterated his pride in this place he lives, which he returned to after going away for college and traveling the world, with his kitten-like looks and his speech, like the careful cadences of a benevolent monarch, in tow. After several years of being a para-educator, he switched career paths to work in legal aid.

“I hope Howard County Pride always remains a locally-rooted, not-full-on corporate sponsorship mentality. I want it to be all local vendors, all local entertainers, all local volunteers through and through. I want us still meeting in library meeting rooms and sharing work in Google Drive and pouring our energy as opposed to things that don’t come from the community into the event,” he said.

4. Unmistakable and Undeniable

And: Deanna Peel on the life of a political chief-of-staff.

A gay rights activist wrote in the 1990s that he felt the entirety of the gay (LGBTQ+) struggle could be solved if tomorrow morning every gay person woke up with purple skin. The predicament of the community, is after all, one of invisibility that it takes so much courage to shatter the self-imposed chains of. It’s not an easy thing to ask of anyone, to risk losing everything–even if it means gaining everything. Despite their lack of purple skin, HoCo’s LGBTQ+ community members and its allies have been showing up to the events leading up to the June 29th one in big numbers.

Both Alex and Jumel said the launch event that HoCO Pride 2019 had on June 28th, 2018, has been their proudest accomplishment so far, in part because of its unexpectedly large turnout. What was intended to be an event to simply get the word out ended up attracting over 400 people on a budget of under $1000.

“Seeing the smiles on all their faces, reading their comments about the event,” Jumel told me of what floored him about that event. “That we spent relatively little and created a priceless experience for so many people in the county, it really had an effect on me and gave me a lot of energy, because it made me see how important what we were doing is,” Jumel said.

In the same vein, Alex noted that the excitement and energy on display at the launch event warmed her heart.

“There’s been a really big response from people–people are really excited and the amount of people that showed up at our events,” Alex said of the community’s enthusiasm for the event.

She and Jumel both said that even as diverse, welcoming and open as HoCO is, the positive response to HoCo Pride 2019 from people, businesses, non-profits, and elected officials moved them.

5. Closets Are For Clothes

Recently, I was talking to a young straight man who supports LGBTQ+ people and who’s grown up in a time when those identities are accepted in more places and more completely than ever before. He asked me, innocently, when we wouldn’t need Pride anymore. I told him we always would, in my estimation. To help him understand why, I offered some thoughts. I said perhaps “pride” is a misnomer for what Pride celebrations actually are. They’re not about being obnoxious or in your face or belligerent. They’re simply creating an opportunity for the LGBTQ+ to experience total and complete comfort, acceptance, and affirmation just as all of life, essentially, is a 24-hour straight pride celebration.

Alex and Jumel agreed that HoCo Pride is special, though, in that it’s equally a celebration of HoCo and its LGBTQ+ community.

Alex, her wife, and her son moved here from Manhattan, and they chose this place, as she put it, “intentionally,” for its diversity of all kinds. The overwhelmingly positive response to Pride affirmed their choice to move here she said.

It’s been a nice confirmation that we made the right decision to move here six years ago that we’ve seen so many families at the past events,” Alex said with a tone of comfort and satisfaction in her voice. While she has her own network queer families, all the families who’ve been involved in the five events leading up to the June 29th celebration–with one more coming up, a fashion fiesta on April 26th at the Columbia Mall–have warmed her heart, I could tell.

“The only challenge so far in planning Pride is that we’re all volunteers, so we have full-time obligations in addition to this,” Jumel told me. And Alex expressed a similar thought on the one and only obstacle to the effort. But there are still so many people who are ready, willing, and able to help,” Jumel said.

Alex is a professional events coordinator for her local village board, so the event’s in good hands. And she did, after all, get a Master’s in non-profit management at NYU’s Wagner School of Management after a Bachelor’s degree from Yale. There she co-lead the queer —- as she had the gay-straight alliance at her Connecticut high school.

“I did a pretty big coordinated outreach program for Manhattan Pride for two summers,” Alex said of arguably one of the biggest Pride celebrations in the world. Whoa!

I’ve asked Jumel several times, too, where he gets the energy for meeting after meeting after meeting! At the last meeting I was at, the two of us scouted a location for another upcoming lead-up-to-Pride event in the works. I felt my energy slowly draining out of my old body and my equally old bones beginning to ache by the end. Jumel, meanwhile, scampered off to his car to get ready to meet some friends.

A Requisite Request

And so I say to you, readers, come on down to Pride on June 29th in Centennial Park. You can learn more about it and keep up-to-date on important dates on the official website and the event’s Facebook page.

If you come, you’ll be helping to end an LGBTQ+ youths loneliness, the kind I mentioned above, that can be damaging in a very particular way to such a child who may think he, she, or they is surrounded by strangers. The more people who show up and show how proud they are of each and every one of HoCo LGBTQ+ youth, and, indeed anyone with the courage to be his or her or their true self, the less the chance that our precious LGBTQ+ HoCo-ans meet untoward fates because they feel adrift in a sea of rejection. To reiterate Alex’s point, Pride events will always be necessary, as this one is, because the queer community is a distinct cultural group with a need to gather together with allies as much as each other to honor its own existence.

ACT UP is my favorite activist organization. It’s brilliant street theater, fearless persistence, and pioneering efforts helped get us where we are now when HIV is a manageable illness, to develop a pharmaceutical that can prevent it with 99 percent success (PrEP), and to foster research that has led to two people worldwide being fully cured of HIV. ACT UP’s logo is that unforgettable pink triangle and its motto is “Silence = Death.” And it does. The bigger the turnout at HoCo Pride 2019, the louder HoCo will say, with words, deeds, and acts big and small that day, what is another of my favorite queer mottos: “We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it.”

Also: What transpired at the 2018 Maple Lawn Festival.

Thanks for reading! Check back with us each here at rocoinhoco.com every week as Robert, Colleen (and pup, Moses) get to know the many facets—one each week–of this prismatic place called Howard County. We want to take you along with us, so follow us on Twitter at @rocoinhoco, join our Facebook group, and follow us on Instagram at @rocoinhoco.