Affirmations LGBTQ+ community center is officially reopening to the public on Monday, Aug. 2, after mostly closing its doors over the past 15 months.
"It's great," said Affirmations Development and Community Relations Manager Kyle Taylor. "We've done a soft kind of appointment-only reopening in July. So seeing all the volunteers has been awesome. It's going to be great to see the community."
The center will reopen with regular hours, which are Monday to Saturday, 10 a.m.-9 p.m. Affirmations is closed on Sundays. Support and social groups will open as the leadership of each group decides.
The center's popular Senior Koffee Klatch met in person last week for the first time since the center closed. "We are meeting today," said Rosemary Ruppert, a facilitator for the group. "We are now in the Pittman/Puckett Gallery. Last week was a great success. We had 35 people there. Today we have our July birthday celebrations. It's great to be alive!"
When asked if he ever imagined when the center closed its doors last year that they would remain closed to the public for over a year, Taylor said he actually did.
"Personally, because of the way the pandemic played out and how unsure people were on what COVID was to begin with and how to contract it … yeah, I kind of expected we'd be in it for the long haul."
But, the Delta variant notwithstanding, the haul seems to be over for now.
"We're just trying to get everyone back in the returning groups, and we're having our wine event in December and, obviously, the dinner event in October," he said. "We're just trying to get people excited."
