These are dark times for our country.
Pride festivals, for the uninitiated, are designed to bring together members of the LGBT community (an umbrella term for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender citizens, along with others whose gender identity does not conform to traditional views), plus their families, friends and allies. That community numbered in the hundreds last Saturday on the Visitor Center Green in Claremont, where festival-goers gathered in the late-spring sunshine amid brightly colored balloons and rainbow flags, the ubiquitous symbol of the identity, diversity and solidarity of the LGBT community.
As staff writer Rob Wolfe reported, the activities and entertainments were typically, delightfully over the top, with belly dancers, drag queens and even a purple gorilla with fairy wings — people in joyful celebration of being alive, and being who they are.
“I feel represented,” one young attendee told Wolfe, and that’s exactly the point.
For far too long, the LGBT community was represented — if it was represented at all — with cruel caricatures. Its members were treated with slurs, bullying and worse. Pride festivals provide a potent counterweight to that misunderstanding and bigotry, which is especially important for younger people. “The kids need the support,” Neil Allen of the TLC Family Resource Center’s Rural Outright program, an organizer of the event, told Wolfe. “The whole community needs it, but especially the kids. It’s hard enough being a teenager. It’s even harder being a teenager and different.”
It was a teenager, in fact, who was the catalyst for last Saturday’s event. As calendar editor Liz Sauchelli reported, the notion for the Claremont Rural Pride 2018 festival came from Skylar Ford, a 15-year-old Stevens High School ninth-grader. Skylar had attended a Pride festival in Portsmouth, N.H., had a great time, and thought his city could use a Pride event of its own. He got in touch with the folks at the TLC Family Resource Center — which through its Rural Outright program offers support to the LGBT community in Sullivan County — and they, with help from many other teens in the community, made it happen.
“There’s an amazing amount of support that I didn’t expect at all,” Skylar told Sauchelli.
These are dark times for our country, and for the world. But there are bright spots: Globally, the Vatican is showing an unprecedented openness to the LGBT community by inviting a prominent advocate to speak at its upcoming World Meeting of families in Dublin, and the World Health Organization has announced that it will no longer treat what it calls “gender incongruence” (when gender identity differs from birth gender) as a mental illness and will instead consider it along with other issues of sexual health. Regionally, New Hampshire’s new law protecting transgender people from discrimination takes effect on July 8. And locally, we have the good work of Rural Outright and shining stars like Skylar Ford, who are helping us see that, despite everything, there are still rainbows in this world.