Small-town pride: LGBT stigma fades as rights are won
Associated Press
HAGERSTOWN, MD.
Ron Beachley remembers slipping through the side door of a downtown Hagerstown hotel into the Bull Ring, a gay nightclub, in the early 1980s.
“You didn’t want anybody to see you,” he said, “because sometimes at closing, people would get beat up in the street.”
Beachley, now 69, plans to be out in broad daylight today as the western Maryland town of 40,000 has its first downtown LGBT pride festival, on the same block where the Bull Ring once stood.
He calls it “mind-boggling” that lesbian, gay and transgender people can celebrate openly in the center of the historically blue-collar city 70 miles from Washington, D.C.
Pride events have taken place annually in the nation’s capital since 1975, but change has come much more slowly in smaller communities. Advocates say that only now, after federal court victories legalizing same-sex marriage and affirming other LGBT civil rights, have lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people been able to live openly without fear of discrimination in many small towns.
The proof can be seen in pride festivals and LGBT resource centers popping up across rural America.
There were 252 pride festivals in the United States in 2015, up from 179 in 2014, said Sue Doster, a co-president of InterPride, which tracks and promotes the events.
CenterLink, a network of LGBT resource centers offering everything from legal aid to youth activities, now reaches across 40 states, with a membership that has nearly quadrupled to 170 in the past decade, said CEO Terry Stone.
Tom Nestor said he co-founded the center in downtown Pocatello, Idaho, in 2012, in response to LGBT teen suicides in southeastern Idaho, a conservative, rural region with a large Mormon population. People can visit discreetly, through a coffee shop in the building, or a back entrance displaying a sign and rainbow flag.
Mormon church policy holds that acting on same-sex attraction is a sin, people in same-sex couples can be excommunicated, and their children cannot be baptized until they’re 18 and have disavowed homosexual relationships. Still, Nestor said he’s seen little open hostility.
“I was born and raised in the valley here,” said Nestor, 60, “I never thought I would see gay marriage and a sign that said LGBT on it in the state of Idaho, and now we have both.”
Festival organizer Todd Garnand, 29, is a great-nephew of Ron Beachley, He said he’s never known the kind of hostility that drove Beachley to hide his sexual orientation, and which prompted many of Nestor’s friends to search for acceptance in bigger cities.
“This is my town,” Garnand said. “I was born and raised here. I’m not leaving because I’m different.”