Letter: Duck Eat Duck

The BTL column, 8-22-07, "Duck eat duck world," by Sean Kosofsky painted a fearsome, conflicted and treacherously competitive portrait of our LGBT community – like a freeze frame from a movie without the context. And as with all still images – you only see what you're looking for.
What did you miss that day at the pond? All the birds not competing for your bread – the ones out there busily building nests, kindling new relationships, nurturing families and working to find alternative food sources in the pond.
When I look at our community organizations, I see amazing change, growth and un-paralleled success.
Ruth Ellis Center is one of only four such youth-serving organizations in the entire country – and it's right here in our neighborhood pond. Triangle Foundation has grown our community's annual pride event, Motor City Pride, to epic proportions and has become a national leader on issues of LGBT advocacy. Black Pride Society annually hosts the Midwest's oldest same-gender-loving pride celebration, growing it every year. These three once-little ducklings now soar like eagles.
These successes don't happen by chance, or in isolation. They happen because people work together. They work together behind the scenes, building relationships, building collaborations across organizations and communities. They may not tell you about all they do. But these successes would not happen without people working together, across gender lines, across race lines, across organizational affiliation lines.
So let's look for the successes in our community and provide inspiration for our ducklings to soar.Let's all look around and see the two swans peacefully paddling, the robin nesting with her eggs, the woodpecker busily drumming away for food, instead of always focusing on overbearing seagulls and rude geese.
"Mother Goose"
Leslie Ann Thompson, CEO
Affirmations