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View ProfilesPublished May 31, 2023 at 10:00 a.m.
Last June, Kris Smith Thyme asked Essex friends on Facebook if they wanted to gather to celebrate their LGBTQ identities. It was just a couple of months after the Morristown stabbing death of Fern Feather, a 29-year-old transgender woman, and the community was shaken by the tragedy.
In the pouring rain, Smith Thyme and about a dozen others stood at the Five Corners intersection in Essex Junction waving rainbow flags and signs that said "Trans People Belong" and "Protect Queer Rights." Many drivers honked in support as they passed, and some returned to join the group, Smith Thyme recalled.
"We had some young people show up with their families, and they talked to us about what it was like to be young and LGBTQIA in school," recalled Kat Redniss, Smith Thyme's partner and a local drag artist who performs as Katniss Everqueer. "It just helped us realize that the visibility of queer community — how important it was in Essex."
That impromptu rally lit the spark for the first full-fledged Essex Pride Festival, scheduled for this Saturday, June 3, at Maple Street Park in Essex Junction. The event will include a roller disco at the Maple Street Skate Park, live music, drag story hour, art activities, free bike repairs and a 21-plus after-party at Uncommon Coffee.
The Essex festival is one of at least half a dozen events springing up this June across Vermont in places that previously had no major marker for Pride month, which is globally celebrated to mark the start of the modern gay rights movement. The tradition dates back to June 28, 1969, when patrons of the Stonewall Inn gay bar fought back against police who raided the establishment in New York's Greenwich Village.
Many organizers said they see this as the ideal moment for Pride celebrations to spread in Vermont. Anti-gay and anti-trans legislation and rhetoric are sweeping the nation. Politicians in other states have sought to quash transgender rights, ban drag shows and censor queer-focused books.
Closer to home, some Vermont residents and lawmakers have questioned the state's efforts to foster greater acceptance of LGBTQ individuals. Mid Vermont Christian School in Quechee recently declined to play another school's basketball team with a transgender athlete and subsequently lost its state qualification to compete. A small group of Vermont Republican lawmakers this session proposed a ban on transgender students' participation in girls' sports. In Burlington, stickers espousing anti-trans messages have appeared in public spaces.
Meanwhile, this spring the Essex Westford School District became the first in Vermont to drop binary gender language in its health education classes, referring instead to "persons" who produce sperm or eggs.
"We are blessed that we live here in what we call the Essex 'gayborhood,' where all our neighbors, I think every other house here, has a rainbow flag," said Smith Thyme, who uses they/them pronouns.
Even so, during school board discussions of the new policy and recent school board races, they saw "some of that really hateful rhetoric bubble up around queer and trans youth here in Essex," Smith Thyme said.
"We need to show people that queer and trans people, we are not the monsters in your closets. We are not the demons that your Facebook algorithms are telling you that we are," Smith Thyme continued. "And it's so vitally important for queer and trans youth to see that this is a safe place ... for them to call home."
Members of the NEK Rainbow Coalition cited a similar need for visibility in the Northeast Kingdom as the driving force behind the first NEK Pride Fest, to be held on June 25 in downtown Newport. Local communities have experienced anti-gay vandalism, theft of Pride flags and shouting of slurs, said Alex Ladd, one of the coalition's festival organizers.
The coalition, which grew from efforts to create local LGBTQ gathering places, hosted a Transgender Day of Visibility in March.
"Having the coalition is a big part of just unifying the town," Ladd said. "It's kind of a statement saying, 'Hey, we're here. We're not going anywhere, and you're not going to make us keep living in the shadows because you don't like us.'"
U.S. Rep. Becca Balint (D-Vt.) is slated to serve as NEK Pride's grand marshal. Vermont's congresswoman received the invitation from Beth Barnes, who resigned last week as Newport's mayor because of what she described as "bullying" and relentless antagonism by city council members.
While Barnes has not publicly described the nature of the harassment, and Seven Days was unable to reach her for comment, Ladd and fellow coalition member Avi IC Ward said they suspect that Barnes' support of the coalition and the LGBTQ community was a factor.
"This makes the event more important," Ward said. "We need to show up for ourselves and for the rest of the queer community in the Northeast Kingdom ... and, frankly, for other people who are living in rural places across the country."
To the south, in Lyndonville, the Wildflower inn will host its first Pride Ride on June 10. After new owners took over the inn in 2022, employee Lydia Gillespie suggested the ride as a way for the Wildflower to shed a decade-long reputation as a gay-unfriendly venue, she said. In 2011, a lesbian couple from Brooklyn sued the Wildflower for discrimination, claiming that the inn's owners at the time had declined to host the couple's wedding because it conflicted with their Christian beliefs. The parties settled the suit in 2012.
"We're just trying to make sure that everyone knows they're welcome here, and that we want you to have a fun time here no matter who you want to marry," said Gillespie, who is 17 and works at the Wildflower's front desk.
The new owners "were elated" by Gillespie's idea and willingness to spearhead the event, said Jenifer Oliphant, the Wildflower's general manager.
"I don't care if we have five people show up or 500 people show up," Oliphant said. "We're going to do it every year, just because it's the right thing to do."
One place where Pride isn't celebrated in June is Vermont's largest city. In 2012, the Burlington-based Pride Center of Vermont moved its annual Pride Vermont Parade & Festival to September.
Organizers had noticed that many LGBTQ Vermonters left town in June to attend big Pride shindigs in New York or Boston, explained Kell Arbor, health and wellness program director of the Pride Center. September is also a better time to include local college students, who depart in late May for summer break and return to campuses in August.
The September Pride festival, which draws about 5,000 participants and receives multiple business sponsorships and city support, left a largely unfilled Pride calendar in June. Arbor, who uses they/them pronouns, expects to see the number of local events continue to grow.
"It is a response to all the hate and rhetoric that's out there, that folks want to do something and have action and stand in solidarity with each other and to do that in joy," they said.
A few years ago, People's Pride Burlington emerged as a June alternative to the Pride Center event. The difference isn't just in timing. People's Pride organizers also object to "a capitalistic pride that collaborates with law enforcement and profits off our collective struggle for liberation," according to the event's posting on the allevents.in website.
People's Pride organizers declined an interview request from Seven Days through an Instagram direct message. "We're not interested in coverage by mainstream media outlets," the group wrote in response to the query.
Residents of smaller communities can always travel to Burlington, Boston or New York to celebrate Pride, but the new festivities serve a vital purpose, organizers said. They show people who might not feel comfortable coming out — let alone marching in rainbow colors in a parade — that a support system exists right where they live. The Essex Pride group has focused on young people, with friends and allies in the Essex Westford schools promoting the event among students.
While most of the events cluster into a single month, Smith Thyme said the message of Pride needs to resonate all year.
"We're not just showing up for the month of June, for our festival, and then disappearing," they said. "We are committed to showing up in these spaces and showing queer and trans youth and queer and trans members of the community that we stand with you."
The original print version of this article was headlined "Queer and There | Vermont towns swell with Pride events in June"
Tags: LGBTQ, Pride month, Pride events
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