Something a childhood friend who was gay and died by suicide once said to me feels like a stab in the heart every time I think of it. Bruce was weeping and fell onto my shoulder for support. “I just wish I had a community. You and Colleeen are the best friends I could ask for, Robert, but you’re not gay. I need a gay community.” I felt so helpless, because I had no idea where one was, where I could tell him he could find one. I imagined if, as a Jewish person, I knew not a single Jewish person. I felt an abyss of devastation open up inside me just thinking about how, even if I had supportive friends, not having a community would be absolutely devastating. This is one reason I wanted to be involved in Howard County’s first Pride planning: I want Gender and Sexual Minority (GSM) folks to have a day they can go somewhere to find a community, building one anew or buttressing one that already exists in their lives.
We spoke to Del. Eric Ebersole about all things legislative.
2021’s Pride will be integral to the GSM community because of the way COVID-19 has damaged so many of our relationships, which are at the core of any communal entity. Fortunately, this group of people, as I’ve come to know it since’s Bruce’s death and becoming an activist ally, is resilient in ways that have happily shocked me over the years. I can tell you that this community is not one that’ll be damaged in the long-term by the precautions we had to put in place to stop the spread of COVID, as my chats with Chris Hefty and Jumel Howard, co-chairs of the Howard County Pride Planning Committee, underscored. Still, 2021 Pride is vital to maintain the agency, determination, and vitality of the GSM community in the face of COVID. Those three characteristics are what make up resilience, according to Rick Hanson, Ph.D., author of Resilient: How to Grow an Unshakable Core of Calm, Strength, and Happiness.
“I’ve gotten to see how vast our community is,” Chris said when we spoke on a Zoom call. Gemstones, jewelry-making tools, and rainbow swag surrounded him in the back of Eastern Coral Company, the jewelry store he manages in the Columbia Mall. He told me that growing up, he felt like GSM people in HoCo were just a few “here and there.” Since getting involved in HoCo Pride planning in 2017, he’s seen that that’s simply not the case. “It’s so much more all-encompassing and everybody knows someone.”
Believing and Achieving
‘What we’re trying to accomplish with Pride is just the mission of love,” Chris said, smiling. “We want to accomplish all the love we have in our hearts and project that into the community.” I took a moment to take in this beautiful message on my end of our Zoom. Love will always win over cruelty, I thought. Positivity is just more vital to the human experience than negativity–like the vitriol the GSM community is often on the receiving end of.
“I’ve had people tell me I’m propagating illicit lifestyles or I’ve fallen so far,” Chris said. I could tell these didn’t damage Chris in the long run. If anything, I’m guessing they made him stronger. Attitudes like that are, I guessed as he spoke, part of why Chris runs Rainbow Youth and Allies. That group provides a safe space for GSM youth to gather and connect. “All and all, it’s just made me more ambitious with what I do.”
Jumel said that in 2017, when he got the idea to put together a Pride for HoCo, his goal was for this place he called home to celebrate its GSM members. “I wanted to have an event to provide the experience of acceptance, inclusion, and recognition of yourself and your identity in your community,” he said, sitting across from me at a wrought-iron table in the center of Clarksville Commons. Jumel wanted a local Pride event that echoed the family feeling Columbia’s always had for him.
See what we learned at the Alpha Ridge Landfill.
“Everybody was always watching out for each other, and I think that was a great aspect of Columbia. That’s a great aspect of Howard County,” he said. I nodded my agreement. That’s part of why Colleen and I moved here, after all. It feels like home in so many ways, including the fact that it’s diversity-positive and pro-inclusivity enough to have it’s own Pride. Jumel said that even though Baltimore and Washington, D.C. have had Pride events a short drive away for years, it was important to him for HoCo to have its own.
Our HoCo bestie, Becca Niburg, who’s the logistics coordinator for this upcoming event agreed that Pride is more important than ever after this last year. “We all need those connections more than ever,” she told me during a text exchange on the topic.
Max Crownover, Chair of PFLAG’s Steering Committee echoed similar sentiments when I sent him a Facebook message asking what he hoped this year’s Pride event would accomplish. “I worry that it [isolation this past year] has had an inordinately negative impact on LGBTQ+ individuals who already have feelings of isolation and a lack of connection” He said he wanted Pride to celebrate both what unites the GSM community, but also what makes each member special.
PFLAG is HoCo Pride’s sponsor, but Jumel told me he hoped Pride would be its own organization.
Is That a–Novel Coronavirus!?
When Colleen and I ask our interview subjects what’s surprised them in their work, they usually have to give it a few seconds of thought. I had only just completed my sentence when Jumel told me that COVID has been the biggest surprise when it came to planning HoCo Pride 2021. “Anything outside of the surprise that COVID has been is kind of secondary.”
Back at the Clarksville Commons, where a gust of wind wiped some napkins off our table. Jumel sprung up to get them. As he did so, he said he’s loved learning what other organizations in the community are up to as he and the others on the planning committee plan Pride. “I love learning about things we can possibly bring to Howard County.”
An English lawmaker, the Earl of Arran, said in 1967 upon the passage of a bill partially decriminalizing homosexuality in Great Britain, “Homosexuals must continue to remember that while there may be nothing bad in being homosexual, there is certainly no good.” Writer Jeremy Atherton Lin recounted this in his 2021 memoir Gay Bar: Why We Went Out. This quote gives voice to those who want to “tolerate” GSM people rather than celebrate them. Pride calls for the celebration of belonging to the GSM community. And this belonging must be celebrated, for when people discover they are GSM, they often feel shame. Being a GSM can often make you a stranger in your own family or among your closest friends. So you might become silent–silenced. Pride is a chance to shout it from the proverbial rooftops. And that’s wonderful, because shame can damage GSM-ers to the point of suicide. It did with Bruce.
Some customers in the front of the store were very anxious to meet with Chris, so I decided not to keep peppering him with questions. But as we wrapped up our Zoom call, I remembered something they’d said: “Now…I’m mostly only around gay people, and it’s awesome.” Chris is 23, and despite their youth, they have a poise rare to that age cohort. Their smile is elegant, their eyes are knowing. They don’t dwell on the pain they’ve been subjected to because of who they are.
“It brings up some things that I didn’t wanna have to relive especially when it comes from people that I used to know,” they had said about some of that nastiness they’d been the target of that I mentioned earlier. Now, though, their community is “vast”, as they’d said. The last thing Chris said to me that day was, “I always circle back to, ‘Remember, Resist, Rejoice,’ Howard County Pride’s first motto,” they said. It summed up, for them, so much of what they wanted Pride to be.
A sing-song-y voiced beckoned from the front of the store. “Tell them I’m on a call but I’ll be out there soon,” Chris said.
Despite Chris and Jumel’s passion for putting on Pride, Jumel said harnessing people-power is their biggest challenge. I sympathized with that. I imagined being responsible for launching an event like Pride is no easy feat. But I thought back to an article I’d read in a gay publication back in the early 90’s A gay activist said that a good bit of what the gay rights movement aimed for would be achieved if every gay person woke up tomorrow with purple skin. How far we’d come! Time was, activists focused on getting people to say, simply, “I’m gay.” That’s still an issue, no doubt. But Jumel and the other planners are looking at next-level needs, like getting GSM-ers to help plan a multidimensional event with lots of moving parts.
Celluloid Surprises
Back at the Commons, as Jumel gathered his things to leave, I decided to stay on and jot down some notes about our chat. As he rose, “We’re All In This Together” from High School Musical came on over the loudspeaker. I’d been so annoyed by the music prior to this, as I feared it would drown out Jumel’s voice on my recording of our conversation. But now I was astonished–the rousing chorus from that song is Jumel’s ring tone! Jumel smiled warmly and nodded.
Democratic Central Committee Member Regina King told us about nurturing HoCo’s soul.
Vanessa Hudgens plays Gabriella Montez in the aforementioned film and sings in that song, “We make each other strong/We’re not the same, we’re different in a good way.” Hell, yes! Aaaaaaaaaa yeah! Bring it on home! Oh, yeah! Oh….uh, excuse me. *clears throat and adjust collar* Where was I? Oh, shoot! Well, who knows! But another point I did want to make was that a vital piece of the proud puzzle was to show solidarity. Just like the kids in the high school musical number, the GSM communuty and its allies need to show how very strong we are because of our numbers. There’s much more to Pride than that, but that’s an integral element.
Another eerie coincidence–in a good way, again–occurred to me as I wrote this article. Jumel lived in China for a spell and Chris is fluent in Mandarin Chinese. Now, if I were my wife, Colleen, I’d say their collaborative work had been ordained by the stars. I kind of think it has been too!
“I saw people starting to crawl into their corners and stay there. I saw tradition starting to be embraced more than adaptability here,” Jumel told me of his return to the area. It makes perfect sense that he’d start ed thinking of planning a local Pride event upon his return. It was a little strange that HoCo didn’t have its own Pride until 2019. It may not have been for any reason more than there are two huge Pride events in Baltimore and Washington, D.C., thus having a HoCo one might have seemed redundant. I think not! In fact, everyone should have a little Pride event going on in their hearts, and that’s a lot more than two.
Chris told me that he’s also learning Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese to add to his language repertoire.
“I want to reach underserved populations in our community,” they told me. I imagined it served him well in his work as the head of RYA.
Jumel told me he’s learned never to presume something will happen. This is good pandemic-time thinking! So, to be on the safe side, Chris and Jumel and the other members of the planning committee are looking at a mid-fall event. Normally, Pride shindigs happen in June to commemorate the Stonewall riots of 1969, which are seen as the advent of the gay rights movement. But at this precarious moment in the COVID era, when we could all be living life almost exclusively online again, they didn’t want to schedule an early summer event. Another need-to-know fact about Pride is that it’ll be at —-.
“We’re a bunch of random people from Howard County who came together and are having a great time planning this amazing event,” Jumel said as we walked to our cars. That sounds like the foundation for a great time!
Just after our Zoom chat, Chris texted me to tell me that the final details were in place: HoCo Pride 2021 will be October 9th, 2021 at the Chrysalis in Symphony Woods!
Thanks for reading! Check back with us 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.