Walking down Woodward Avenue last weekend, it was hard to ignore the feeling in the air. It was more than just another festival or one of thousands of gay pride celebrations worldwide. It was bigger than the sum of all the vendors selling rainbow chotchkies, plus the HRC lackeys with petitions, plus the half-naked men and women on the dance floor, plus the bandana-clad dogs.
Motor City Pride was the unlikely enormous celebration of the LGBT community in a state with a terrible economic situation and equally terrible civil rights situation.
Key word: Community.
As Interim Executive Director of the Triangle Foundation Kate Runyon announced at the Building Bridges march, we may be different shades of skin colors, but we're all rainbow.
Nowhere is that clearer than at Pride celebrations, and at no time is it more imperative to be as one than when our enemies are rallying against us and taking away our rights. We at Between The Lines are thrilled that the some 50,000 people at Motor City Pride realized that and showed up to celebrate Michigan's LGBT community.
Recently, BTL celebrated its 15th birthday. In honor of that, we put together 15 banners of pictures, headlines and quotes that tell stories as reported in BTL from 1993 to the present. The exhibit is on display for the next month at Affirmations.
It was an excruciating project for Jan Stevenson and Susan Horowitz, who spent hour upon hour riffling through old issues and trying to decided what the most important issues were to highlight. The truth is that the exhibit hits only the tip of the iceberg.
But what we at BTL have realized is that we're celebrating more than just our birthday; it's also a celebration of years of changes, good and bad, that have happened in our community.
And what made that realization come to light was watching people view the exhibit leading up to and during Pride. They didn't just see important milestones in BTL's history – they saw important events in their lives. They reminisced about when they first came out to their employer without being afraid of the consequences. They smiled as they thought of the joy of the first same-sex marriage in America. They remembered the rallies and marches they were part of, the friends and family members they lost to HIV/AIDS and the celebratory dinners and luncheons they attended. Sure, there were bad times (November of 2004) and disagreements (ENDA), but the memories were so overwhelming that some people, upon viewing our exhibit, were brought to tears.
We couldn't possibly have covered it all throughout the years. But at Motor City Pride on Sunday, we all saw the results of every event – large and small, reported on and not – culminating in a celebration of LGBT pride against the odds.
From week to week, Pride is just one more event that we report on. But now, it's part of Michigan's proud LGBT history. It's the history that we all share and create, regardless of where in the community we stand, and the one that we report on the pages of BTL. Here's to the next 15 years (and the next, and the next…). Keep working and keep celebrating. We'll be seeing you.
