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RoCo discovers a community organization whose home is Howard County or whose reach extends into it.

Bagels and Banter With Max Crownover, Chair of the Steering Committee, PFLAG

Dear HoCo Diary,

If Howard County needed to select a delegate to represent the area at a National Convention of Awesomeness, I, Colleen Morgenthau, would nominate Max Crownover to represent us. We met at Bagel Bin in River Hill Shopping Center to discuss his work as a leader of the Howard County chapter of PFLAG, one of the oldest and most influential LGBT advocacy groups in the country and the county. And that is what I thought as I sat down with our sandwiches, that no wonder Max is the head of an organization that’s all about caring and compassion. He’s so much of both–and so much more, I’d soon find–and it comes across right away.

Max’s deep kindness and how it influences everything he does, from the smallest gesture to promoting LGBTQ equity and inclusion, is apparent from the moment you meet him. My first encounter with him was at The Columbia Gym. He entered a classroom just as I was leaving, and he put his hand out to shake mine and said, “Hey, Akbi. I’m Max. I recognize you from Facebook.” I blushed, because how can you not when you’re confronted with his kingly presence: a delicate but masculine jawline, a slender and curvy smile, a straight nose made all the more elegant for the way it rises in the center–and those eyes! Max has blue eyes…or are they green? I was never quite sure that morning at Bagel Bin, and I was convinced they changed color while we spoke over my Everything Bagel and his Eggel sandwich. They dance and divert as he speaks, demanding attention, More than once during our chat, I found myself torn between gazing like a goofball at his dimple-esque laugh lines or…those eyes, I tell you!

Related: See what Robert and Max’s wife, Robin, chatted about last week.

Simple Beginnings

“I definitely grew up in the country, in the central part of Pennslyvania where there’s basically nothing,” Max said when I asked about the Stetson I’d seen him wear in Facebook pictures. “It’s true what they say: you can take the boy out of the country, but you can’t take the country out of the boy.” I nodded my agreement as he chuckled warmly and innocently. Before I move on, I must opine on his laugh. It tumbles out of him regularly, bumping up softly against you. It’s solid and stately, but it has a whimsical lilt to it. “Laugh and the world laughs with you,” was a phrase coined to describe Max’s chuckle! Even his elocution is kind, his words at once rolling around and bouncing about as he says them.

Anyway,  to verify just how downhome his upbringing was, Max told me he remembered being in a friend’s backyard when people pulled out guitars and fiddles, singing and carrying on in an impromptu hoedown. Max’s rustic early days are, perhaps, I thought, the root of his absolutely genuine earnestness. There’s no guile or slickness to Max, even as he has strong convictions and wants to impart them on the community he calls home, Howard County.

“In 2006, my youngest son, Luke, came out to me as gay,” Max said of the impetus for his involvement with PFLAG. “So at first, it was a very personal thing.” The personal quickly took on an urgently political quality for Max, though, when Luke recounted a harrowing gay-bashing incident he was the target of. A group of men approached Luke in a parking lot, one wielding a baseball bat. This brought home to Max an inescapable part of what it means to love your LGBTQ child, which that it’s more than a matter of making your kid happy or even feel loved. Our kids’ lives are on the line.

Max said that his membership in PFLAG went from silent dues-payer to vocal leader when the creation of an LGBTQ affinity group at HoCo’s Applied Physics Lab was met with resistance, a fact that I could tell shocked and displeased Max: “There was tremendous pushback,” Max said of his coworkers’ homophobia [my words], putting a generous spin on the ugliest of behavior. If I didn’t already see how compassionate he was, the way Max spoke good-naturedly about this floored me. Regular readers of this column will know that my best friend in high school, Bruce, was gay and committed suicide because he was in such torment about that simple fact of his being. I have no patience for homophobia, and even as Max is a passionate advocate for LGBTQ equity, inclusion, and acceptance, he lives and lets live. Of course, as a pioneer in this cause in HoCo, he’s making sure that everyone gets to do the same. I asked him how PFLAG works to do so.

Pillars of Society and Mission

“The mission has three pillars: advocacy, education, and support,” Max said when I asked if PFLAG was still the organization that I understood it to be when it was founded decades back, which was primarily a space for the first-responders allies, if you will, of the LGBTQ community to bond with and buoy each other. Anyone who knows the great works PFLAG performs in the County can tell you Max, Jumel Howard, and the rest of the leadership at PFLAG is fulfilling that mission.

And: Another impressive local impresario, David Saunier, dished with me about running a business with integrity in HoCo.

Advocacy often involves issue-based actions, for example, like candidate forums in which people running for political office answer questions and outline platforms. Education, Max continued, involves a variety of awareness-building and guidance, such as a recent trip to the police force that Max and teacher and local activist Suzi Gerb took to the Howard County police academy to train high school resource officers in “LGBTQ 101,” as Max put it. Support can be something like providing assistance to someone experiencing housing discrimination because of their LGBTQ status.

“It’s an all-volunteer organization,” Max said of how PFLAG meets the needs of those it helps. “We don’t always have a staff to help people, but what we do have is connections, and to many different organizations that can provide help to someone.” As the tagline goes, “The extended family of the LGBT community.” Indeed!

Robin Holliday, a local gallerina, proprietor of the HorseSpirit Arts Gallery, and Max’s wife summed Max up this way: “Max is a very bright person who has enormous integrity and compassion. I call him Sweet Max.”

Despite the fact that his son, Luke, doesn’t live in Howard County, Max got involved with LGBTQ activism with the local arm of PFLAG. There’s that compassion, along with a rare commitment to making the world better, locally.

“Few people can muster the same energy for community service and activism as Max Crownover. Howard County is blessed to have a member of the community who is as invested as he is,” said Jumel Howard, PFLAG Howard County’s Vice President.

Talk between Max and me turned to the future of PFLAG and the changing nature of any LGBTQ organization given how rapidly North American culture has gone from utter indifference to the concerns of the community to active engagement with it as serious civil rights struggle–for better or worse.–0ver the past 50 years. Max mentioned some exercises that the LGBTQ affinity group at APL asked participants to do to understand the importance of the work they were doing. One such exercise was to not speak about one’s personal life at work for a week. A coworker of Max’s said she wanted to truly commit to this task, so she not only stopped herself from sharing about her personal life, but she took down all her pictures of her loved ones from the walls in her office, wiped away all evidence of who she was. And then she happened to look down at her wedding ring. As the devastation of realizing the struggle of the LGBTQ community re-occurred to me when Max told me this, I said perhaps “pride” isn’t the right word for what we want. Perhaps it should be, simply, “exist.” If you’re not screaming and shouting, though, it’s too easy to be forgotten.

“I personally think there’s a generational shift occurring,” Max said of how society’s attitude to the LGBTQ community is becoming one of general acceptance and embracing. The membership of both the APL group and PFLAG has gotten an influx of youthful vigor and vibrancy since Max began working with them. Just as he said this, Sean Haney, a high school senior at River Hill High School and someone Robert and I have gotten to know over the past few months walked into Bagel Bin. I introduced the two, and if we needed a visual reminder of the splendor and magic of youth, there we had it. Sean has thick hair, red lips, and stands up tall–proud.

Rain and Shine

No one can–nor should they–comment on family relationships that don’t involve them. Certainly, the parent-child dynamic is fraught, difficult, and endlessly complicated for so many of us. Still, when Max spoke of his estrangement from a close family member, I was speechless. I wondered how anyone could not want to be around Max all the time! Max lowered his gaze–giving me a break from trying to figure out what color they are, at least!–when he recounted the distance between him and this loved one, and his pain was so innocent and tender it could have melted the iciest of hearts. I noticed a broken blood vessel in his left eye then, when he looked to the side. I truly needed a moment to pull myself together, because I saw, for a moment, that this regal figure in front of me knew heartbreak, too. Only the most advanced souls are so loving and deeply good enough to let others see that they hurt, I thought. Though, Max wouldn’t think about doing so or pat himself on the back for it. He just lives it. To me, this is why Max is Chair of the Steering Committee. The development of the LGBTQ movement over the past 50-plus years has underscored how a friend of mine and Robert’s recently said to Robert: everything is political. If we accept that. then, a well-rounded, holistically good person must run it. We who love the LGBTQ community can all take heart in the fact that PFLAG is under the best possible stewardship–the warm, benevolent caring eye of one Max Crownover.

Back at the restaurant, a hot breeze came into the restaurant briefly as someone opened the front door. It lifted a lock of Max’s hair gently. As he pushed it back down, I realized I had to go. It seemed too soon, as if there were so much more I wanted to know. “Oh, fiddlesticks,” I thought to myself. We both rose hurriedly, and Max said he and Robin were going to look for spaces in which to bring back her HoCo-legendary HorseSpirit Arts gallery. We hugged, and I thought–no, I felt–“Everything is going to be OK for the LGBT community with Max at its helm.” I believed this wholeheartedly already, but Max made me feel it.

I’m convinced that Max left out a lot of stuff about himself in our conversation, but that makes me glad, in a way. Now I get to find it out and have something to look forward to! I’m pretty sure he’ll reveal that he was the person that Disney artists based the drawings that became male protagonists on, Eric from The Little Mermaid, Peter Pan, or The Prince from Snow White, perhaps. That’s the kind of handsome, happy, healing, and helpful person that’s leading the LGBTQ community to better days here in HoCo, readers.

Also: Don’t miss out on what Rev. Regina Clay said about the county’s spirit.

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.