The Equity Hour Interview with LGBTQ GC

This is a conversation from Gila Numbra's Community Radio discussing LGBTQ+ issues in Grant County. The LGBTQ Grant County organization was formed in 1995 by Ward Rudick, hosting events like the $1.98 Drag Show. Pride festivals started in 2016, but faced challenges in 2020 due to COVID. Cyril and Scott revived the organization in 2023, focusing on inclusivity and bilingual outreach. They emphasized the importance of representation and community building. Board members aim to reflect diversity and cultural understanding. They highlight the need for bilingualism and cultural sensitivity in community engagement. The organization is working on translating materials and expanding inclusivity efforts. Cyril and Scott are committed to building a diverse board and fostering a welcoming environment for all community members, especially those from the mining district. They aim to bridge cultural divides and create a more inclusive and representative organization. The following program is pre-recorded. The views expressed on this program do not reflect the views of Gila Numbra's Community Radio and belong solely to the program hosts and guests. You are listening to Gila Numbra's Community Radio, KURU 89.1 FM, Silver City, New Mexico, and online at gmcr.org. You're listening to The Equity Hour, where the political is personal, a monthly show. The Equity Hour is part of the Kindred Continuum series and airs on the first Monday of the month at 10 a.m. and is replayed on the air the following Sunday at 4 p.m. I'm your co-host, Cindy Renee Provencio. And I'm your co-host, Kit West. This show is the fourth part of our series on LGBTQ plus issues, and we are interviewing Cyril Nolte and Scott Plait of LGBTQ Grant County. So, can you tell us a little bit about your organization? Like, what are its origins, both historically and locally? And how did you two become involved, and what are your duties at the organization? Sure. Cyril and I will tag-team this. The origins of LGBTQ Grant County date way back to 1995. Ward Rudick, who's a resident of Silver City, basically began forming a gay community in Silver and Grant County in the form of costume parties to celebrate legislative achievements in Santa Fe. So, they would have parties down here, and they were stuff of legend. People came in huge numbers, and I think that was the seed that was planted. And little by little, that evolved into the $1.98 Drag Show or Variety Show, which was an annual event that brought gay and straight people alike. And that sort of set the tone for what became SWANS, which is Southwest Activities Network Society, the 501c3 under whose auspices we operated at LGBTQ Grant County for a number of years. And in 2016, Ted Tufares, who was one of the founding members of SWANS and founding board members, decided there needed to be a Pride Festival, and the very first one in Silver City and in Grant County was in 2016. Although the seeds for a community were planted far earlier, I would say gay men and women with vision and means came and bought and renovated buildings downtown in the early 00s, and so that was a big heyday. You know, there was a zeitgeist in downtown Silver City that had an LGBTQ kind of flavor. And from 2016 to 2019, there were Pride Festivals each year, and then in 2020, there was COVID, and it shut down, and things were shuttered for about three years. And in 2020, we moved here, Cyril a year before I did, and when things were about to go completely south, we realized that there was no LGBTQ organization here, and Cyril thought, you know, this cannot do. And so he stepped up, and I'll let him tell that part of the story, but we became involved with the first Pride Festival when it got back up on its feet in 2023. So when we got involved, Ted Tufares was pretty much it for the committee. And he had, when I met with him the first time, he had pretty much thrown away everything. He said it was done, and all the files, they disconnected the website, everything was gone. So I met with him, and we had a good conversation, and I told him we wanted to get involved and try to help save it. And so he was willing, a little hesitant, I think, at first, and then we got a couple other people involved, and we sort of had three or four people that would do stuff for several years. But then Ted was just, you know, such a great community here and so welcoming that we didn't want to see it die. We wanted to see that still be a part of the flavor that makes Silver City so special. And we had a volunteer meeting, I remember that very first volunteer meeting we had. It was in the back room at the Toad. We just put a call out for volunteers saying we're going to bring Pride back up and running, and boy, like 20 or 30 people showed up, which was beyond our wildest expectations because what we had heard was everybody was really tired. So we asked for the room to say popcorn style what they thought about the gay community in Silver City. And we had these call out words, and it was an interesting range of, I would say, descriptors. But what came through was we are who we are, and we don't judge anybody else for being who they are. And then I asked them to do the popcorn style descriptor of Ted Tufare, and it was different. They loved him. He was, you know, doing this on his own, and, you know, it's a lot of work, as you both know, just putting together a festival. And he, you know, he came through as kind of a curmudgeon, but one that everyone loved. So that wound up becoming an article celebrating him later on in the year. So that first Pride festival went up in 2023, yeah. So our duties at the organization, we're both on the board of directors. Cyril is the president, and I am a member at large. I was the secretary for a while, but you don't want me as the secretary of a board. I'm not a really good secretary. I did okay, but I wound up getting involved in all kinds of other things, other duties, and so it was best to have someone else take that on. And now we have Leslie Zier, who does that, who's an amazing secretary for our board. Yeah, we've been able to build the board up to 11 people now, which is a nice thing. And what really makes me happy is we have six women on the board. Oh, wonderful. And we really worked hard to bring that, because for the longest time it was Victoria Reese and three guys. So having now six women, and they're all active, and they're all doing stuff, which really makes our lives a lot easier. So it's the story of a real comeback. It is, really, and it's a broad spectrum of women, and I would say there's a woman who identifies as bisexual, one is heterosexual, one is transgender, one is lesbian, and the men on the board are gay, one is a trans male, two others identify as lesbian. So it's been interesting. The one thing that we're not is we're pretty white on the board at the moment, and we have Lisa Barber is one Latina, and she's perfectly bilingual and is the reason why we actually have so much of our promo material in Spanish now, because it's a priority for us to make the festival bilingual. So our thought is, you know, if someone from the mining district can walk the fringes of the park and hear a language that's spoken in their own home, that they may have the courage, even though they might not feel safe in their own communities, to come in, to step into the park, and go, you know, maybe there's a place here for me as well. So a priority going forward is to have an emcee who is perfectly bilingual and switches back and forth between languages in the emcee, so we begin to train our Anglo audience to expect this, because, I mean, language is the core of this community, and it's separated in lots of ways. My Spanish is pretty good, I mean, I can hold my own, but Lisa's actually fluent. So we're going to get more of that, hopefully, on the board, and more of that in our public presentations. And she's quite bicultural. She is. Which is really different than being bilingual, because I'm bilingual, but I'm not bicultural. She's both. Right? Yeah. That really made my heart happy, because I am a mining district queer Latina girl, and sorry, and to know that you are taking those steps to be inclusive, to think about, you know, building that bridge for mining district people, it means so much to me, because we're often forgotten in the mining district. It didn't take us too long to figure that out, and, you know, we're a couple of gringos. I mean, Cyril's a native. He was born here, but not raised here, and I'm really glad it moves you. I'm glad it's important to you. I hope that, you know, we can make good on this, because it's a real priority, but culturally there are difficulties to overcome, obviously, because people accept this to differing degrees, but I think it helps if there's someone at the door that either looks like you or sounds like you. Yeah. Other than that, it's hard, you know, and it's interesting. I remember just as sort of a side history, you know, we found our home, and we were getting it worked on, and I tried to walk up to the folks who were working on the house, many of whom spoke Spanish, and I tried to speak English to them, and they would very politely kind of switch back to English, you know, so it's kind of, there's an interesting, like, okay, there's two different worlds here, so we're trying to really address that intentionally within this community, because I think there's so much more richness there if we can. Well, that's why you have your brochure coming out in Spanish, right? Mm-hmm, and hopefully the new website will be bilingual, but certainly to expect, I would be interested to see how we could hold this up, because there's not enough members of our board currently who could hold their own in a conversation, but that's on us to get there, right? Because I feel like the future is completely blended in this way. I feel like, I mean, if you look at an ancestral map of this part of the country, it was Mexico. I mean, this whole part of the country was, you know, so I feel in a way that the border happened arbitrarily, you know, like to people who had neighboring ranches for generations, and all of a sudden there's this new country there, so anyway, that's the hope. I think it's a good idea. And we're definitely taking steps. I don't know if you've seen our new brochure, but we had it in English, and now it's fully translated into Spanish. That's awesome. That's a big step. And we're going to try to move that way as much as we can. It's nice to have one step forward, but we're not done. Yeah. Well, that's part of your outreach, so that's how you get people involved, too. Mm-hmm, and Cyril made the point to, I mean, he set a goal this year, and I'll let him speak to this, that board building was a huge priority, and he reached out directly to people and got a response, and those are the new members, because we were kind of floating along at four or five, the people that Cyril was mentioning, and now there are another nine. Yeah, and we've been trying for a while to build a board, but we finally found the people that were ready to be on the board, and, you know, we're also hosting an event at the Open Space of the Brewery this year intentionally to move into mining district. Great. And, you know, during the Pride Festival, we're going to have a comedian come from Arizona, and we're going to have a comedy show. Charlotte Russell. Yeah. Charlotte the nurse. Friday night the 12th from 9 to 11 at the Open Spaces, and a couple of drag queens mixed in. Nice. And they're thrilled, and the intention is to move into the mining district and start trying to connect. Mm-hmm. And possibly, we'll have to figure it, because I'd love to find out what kinds of programs we could bring a little bit, because Santa Clara is sort of in the middle, in a way, getting into Bay Area a little bit more into, without pushing too hard, just to find out where the soft spot is, where we might host programs and begin a conversation. I would say that we're trying to move beyond, this is more long-term, and we can get to this, but we were traditionally an organization of a bunch of committed, hardworking people who put up a Pride Festival every year, and we're trying to transition gradually into an emerging rural social service organization that is LGBTQIA plus focused. And it's kind of moving from the paradigm of, okay, the show's over, we're going to pack the tent up and put it away, to an infrastructure that sustains year-round. So the funding we've been applying for, and with mixed success, basically is trying to make that case, this is what we would like to do. And of the four proposals we've written, we've been funded on one so far, and a lot of that is due to the fact that we don't yet have the infrastructure, because of that circus tent kind of paradigm, that a funding body really needs to see to have confidence enough, so that's, you know, we just wrote a grant this weekend for the Envision Fund of the Santa Fe Community Foundation, and asking for support to build financial infrastructure so that we can have proper books, and audited books, and, you know, proper ledger, and, you know, to make us inspire confidence in folks who, you know, would support us otherwise. Community partners as well as possible corporate sponsors, those kinds of folks. Right, you're partnering with the Lotus Center, I understand. We're trying to, we are. Jeff Gowen reached out very kindly and said, I'd love to be a part of this, in some ways, incredibly supportive. So we didn't have enough time this year to event what that partnership would look like, so we're looking at how to do that for the following year, but one interest we have is trying to create listening spaces where people of diametrically opposed viewpoints can come together and share space, and realize that I don't need to agree with you in order to empathize with you. So, and the Lotus Center is like a Switzerland in this community. It's perfectly wonderful, and spiritual, and neutral, and have a place to do that there, and maybe find a counterpart in the mining district, like the library with somebody I know works. I was just going to say, I know a library, and, you know, the head librarian happens to be our co-host. Yeah, well, we're kind of. I would love that. That sounds perfect. We're sort of bleeding into the mission and vision question, so we want to take that away. Like, we're really interested in what exactly is your mission, and it differs slightly from your vision. Let's do this vision ID break first. Okay. Great. You are listening to KURU 89.1 FM, Silver City, New Mexico, and online at gmc.org. You are listening to the Equity Hour, where the political is personal, a monthly show, and we are interviewing Cyril and Scott, and they are doing a wonderful job telling us all about LGBTQ Grant County, so let's get into the next question. I love having to say those letters all the time. It's helpful, isn't it? We call ourselves the Alphabet. Right. Alphabet soup. So we had a board retreat two years ago, where we changed our mission statement, and we changed all of our... We were trying to move away from being a part of SWAN, so we were standalone, because as a part of SWAN, we share the same EIN number, and that makes it difficult to raise funds when two different organizations have that same number. So part of that was to create a new mission statement, and our current mission statement is to enrich the lives of a diverse community through advocacy and support, education and celebration. And so our goal is to not just be a pride festival. Our goal is, how do we reach the 80-year-old man that lives at home and is by himself and doesn't connect with anybody? How do we reach the gay ranch kid who can't envision at all, how do you ever talk to somebody, how do you ever connect with somebody? And so we're looking at, how do we create programming that isn't... And we're going to continue to do a pride festival because, one, we can. I think it's more important now than ever that we continue to be visible and we continue to stand up and show who we are and our strengths, especially in this community, because I'm in touch with other organizations around the state, and they can't, these small towns can't do what we do. Places like Portales and Roswell, they have to go indoors to have a pride festival. And they still have preachers that will show up yelling at them when they do it. We don't have that here. We have great support and we have great allies here. So we want to figure out, how do we reach more of the community in an impactful way that's not just of the celebration part? We do dinners. We've had, for several years, a Thanksgiving dinner, and that's been a really positive thing. We've had 110 people at the dinner. Wow. Yeah. This year, we did a Valentine's Day dinner for the first time, and we had about 70 people that came to that. So we're looking at every quarter having to have something like that. We had a teen prom for the first time ever. Alternative prom. Yeah. And it was attended by kids from Cliff High School, from Aldo Lepo High School, Silver High School, and what was the middle school they had? La Plata. La Plata. It was, I think, 20 kids, which was huge. I couldn't envision them when I was in high school having a prom, or even having the opportunity to have a prom. And they were so grateful that we had done that. And I think next year, we're going to do this every year, and so next year, I think it's going to continue to grow, because the first few kids that came to the prom started calling their friends and saying, it's okay to come. It's a safe thing. And that'll go on. That'll continue. That's the plan. They had such a good time. Yeah. And we hope to co-produce that with the E-Flag. They were super helpful in putting this on, although Leopold was the impetus for all of this. There's one story that I wanted to tell from that event. There was a young trans woman who was probably about 6'1", 6'2", and came to the event, looked like she was out for the very first time in her real, the clothes that she would prefer to wear. And her entire family was with her, mom, dad, and two little siblings. She was the firstborn, clearly. And she was way taller than her two little siblings, than they all. She was really scared to go in. And her whole family, mom, dad, and these kids, were like, go on, go on, go on, you can do it. Go on, go on, go on. And you could see her just working up her courage. And she decided to go in, and immediately someone recognized her, and came across and gave her a big hug. And it was a beautiful moment. For me, the most gratifying piece of it was to see her whole family there, supporting her. Very special. And it was a big deal. So that's what we hope will happen. The plan is to make this an annual event. In addition to the program Cyril mentioned, our community is unusual in that there are many young queer people and a lot of older queer people. The middle bracket, from like 25 to 55, tends to pack up and move and go elsewhere for either lack of economic opportunity. So the community, at least that we know that has come out, has had those two kind of age brackets. So trying to prioritize younger folks in our programming and older folks in our programming. So we're partnering with the UU Fellowship to develop an end-of-life preparation class that also covers the idea of aging solo. So many gay people in rural areas experience isolation, whether it's geographic or social. So trying to develop programs that redefine what family is. So for example, gay people have different legal obstacles when dealing with end-of-life issues. People we call family aren't traditionally what the rest of society would refer to as family. So we're also taking into consideration the idea that many of us age on our own and hopefully not die on our own, but very often we do. So the classes have to do with advanced directives and paperwork preparation to spiritual concerns, to identity concerns. And the UU Fellowship developed this course out of serving its fellowship, and we're incredibly generous about letting us take the material and repurpose it for our own audience. So that's part of what's coming up as well. We've partnered with the Silver City Main Street Project to present a queer film festival in the National Pride Month of June every year since our Pride Festival is in September in some way to honor what happens around the world. And so we just need to come up with the money to be able to afford that and consider that. So we're looking for funding for those kinds of things. So just as Cyril said, to create a more consistent presence in the community rather than be this organization that shows up once a year and puts on a Pride Festival and exhausts itself and then spends 11 months recovering. So it's more about, I would say, creating a presence. There have been some activities that have gone on for a long time, even predating us. There's a brunch that happens every Sunday downtown, sometimes at Corner Kitchen, sometimes at Little Toot Creek, that's been organized by longstanding members of the gay community. That's not part of LGBTQ Grant County, but we certainly support it, and it's been going on for a long time. Reasons to gather, reasons for people not to feel isolated, reasons for people to connect in community, and coming out of the pandemic, that was so important. We were talking about it even before we started speaking tonight, was just remembering what we know about how to be together. And I think that's the core of the lesson of COVID, was connection is essential. And we were talking before about morphing more and more into a bilingual organization. Having people there who you recognize as fellow or sister is a big deal, but the nature of our community here in Silver City is so ally-friendly that everyone will be welcome at the end of the day, and I think it's important to recognize that. It's not as big of a step here in Silver City as it is in other places. Yeah, I agree. I think we're pretty close sometimes. Mm-hmm. I agree with you. I think we all need that. And coming out of COVID and now the situation globally and in our own country just makes us acutely aware of that, so I think there's a real need for all of us to connect. Especially after, you know, what happened, the election in the fall, it changed the climate in the country and in our community, the trans members of our community are taking the worst weather right now. They're at the edge of the storm, and they're really ... I think there's a power that trans people have that frightens a lot of people, because I wonder why they would be so targeted in this way. My feeling is that people are afraid of the courage and the power they represent, because the journey you travel inside yourself to go from one gender to another and accept the discomfort that comes from that is incredibly courageous. It's unimaginable for many people who don't really have to deal with that. So we've created some support networks for our trans community. We started with a program called Safe Haven for folks who are feeling disaffected by the results of the election. It was monthly at the Hearth. The Hearth has been incredibly supportive to us. Cyril really prioritized the Trans Outreach Initiative. I'll let him talk a little bit more about that, but just to recognize that the members of our community who are really getting it full front right now need our support in more than just word but deed, places to speak. We just wanted to live lives without fear. We want to present some kind of program where they can come and just meet and talk through what's going on. So we have a new board member, Leslie Zier, who's a former educator, teacher. She's a really fierce person, which I love about her, and she's going to head up that initiative. So we're developing a trans support group that will meet probably monthly at the Hearth again, just giving them a place to gather and talk. We've lost a number of our trans community who left the country just out of fear because word got to us that airports were beginning to confiscate passports if your name didn't match your birth certificate. And so for a trans person to try to travel, that's really fearful. So they thought, we better go before we can't go. And so I'm aware of at least four or five that have lost the country. From our community. From our community here. But if you have a passport, you don't have to show your birth certificate. No, but they can look online and see that it's not the same anymore. And so if it's not matching, they're taking your passport away. And some people have been successful in changing their birth certificate to reflect the gender that they identify with. And others have not. Depending on the state you live in and the bureaucracy you face, it's a difficult time. And it's where identity is really being called into question. And for someone who's really traveled that difficult landscape from male to female or female to male, at the end of the day, to have to then prove that in that way, I know ultimately this will change and it will change for the better. And for anyone dealing with the kind of storm we're in right now, the objective for many of us is if you have some degree of privilege, take care of the ones who can't help getting wet right now. Because just by nature of who they are, they're going to catch more of the weather. I have a coarser way of saying that that I won't repeat here. However, it's really important to remember, even within our own community, what privilege actually affords us the ability to do. And the first obligation of that is advocacy, which is a part of our mission. So we're just figuring out what that means in a rural area. You know, both of us, I mean, I came here, we both came here from Cleveland. Cyril's originally from, he was born here but grew up upstate in Thoreau, a very small town on the southeastern edge of the Navajo Reservation. When I met him, he was living in Santa Fe, I was living in Cleveland, you know, my family's all from New York City. I've lived in Atlanta and, you know, Montreal. And so it's been an interesting place to come to. But it's also been a really accepting place. But we're LGBTQ grant county, not LGBTQ solar city. So this is what we were talking about before. It's like to understand that five miles down the road from us, it's a huge part of our community that often feels underrepresented because we aren't or haven't always been bicultural. No, we are bicultural, but we're not together with that. Yeah, like, the two of us were in a poetry exhibit at the light art space. And I had several women who came up to me, Hispanic women, and thanked me. Did you know that? No, and thanked Karen Heimer, who owns the place. And she said, we were never welcomed before. Wow. And it was a very diverse show. We did the poetry and other people did the art. And we had a woman from Chiricahua Apache, we had a woman from Japan, and we had Renee, and we had me, and we had different, you know, we just, they just came together. And we would just said, yes, that's all we did. But it was very touching. It's wonderful. I know. And older women, they said, we were never, we were never welcomed. We were never invited. Wow. And so Karen and I, without knowing this, both of us sat at the same time in different rooms. That was intentional. Hmm. Hmm. You are welcome. Well, that's hard to swallow, I think, you know. I think the interesting thing is, is we also have to remember that there's generations of evidence of people not being welcome. So for someone to recover, even if you invite them one time, we don't expect people to go, okay, fine, now we're welcome, they're going to come. It's a consistent thing. Consistency. I remember when I was growing up, I was, there was a lot of death in my house, like people were dying. And I remember the difference, my grandmother noted, between the person who'd say, oh, what can we do? Versus the person who would just show up with a tray of lasagna. Right. Like, my family's like saved with food, right? So the ones that would ask, what can we do? Were basically putting the responsibility on me, on our family, for telling them what they should be doing. As opposed to, okay, so the reverse of that is outreach to every member of our community over and over and over and over. And that's the thing, the repetition of it. Yeah. And that's just, I mean, I would like to see many, many more exhibits like this. That's amazing. One. It's wonderful. We're also looking at how to add, like we've had done a lot of sign-ups at the festival and other places, like what do you want to see happen? And so we have people interested in stuff, but we can't find people to lead it. You know, like we have people interested in the book club, we have people interested in the coffee club, we have people interested in the hiking club, but nobody will step up and say, okay, I'll organize that. So that's the piece for this year. I'm going to have to probably start focusing more on that. How do we find people? It's not much to do a book club. It's not much to do a monthly hike. You know, we're not asking you for hours and hours. We'll provide the people. You know, we'll do what we can. And so that's, we're going to strategize about how to get people to step up a little bit. Because once we got the list, I said, you know, I would like send to everybody in the book club, hey, we have this many people who would like to run it. Nobody would like to run it in crickets. Nobody would respond. Maybe your whole idea of partnering could come into play there. My husband works for Spin Housing and they take people out on hikes. That's great. And do campaigns and stuff like that. So it would be really cool. I mean, I'm not offering this. I don't work there. No, no. It's just like an idea. That's exactly right. Right? Because they have the leadership. Well, we had reached out. We were partnered. You are listening to KURU 89.1 FM. So we're sitting in Mexico and online at GMCR.org. You're listening to the Equity Hour, where the political, personal, and monthly show. And we are interviewing Cyril and Scott of LGBT Grant County. And you may continue. We, by happenstance, were placed alongside the Frontier Food Hub at Give Grandly. And so we began talking after a couple of years of finding ourselves neighboring tents about how we might piggyback in some of their rural outreach. Because they've got such a great and well-trodden path into the outlying parts of the county. So this is kind of what you're saying. So going on hikes with partnering organizations or trying to figure out how to work with people who already have an access point into areas we'd like to go and learning from them. Exactly. And people. Leadership. I mean, yeah. You can't do it all like you well know. Right? We need other people. And we need to connect. And we're relearning that after COVID. We are. So I try to do that, too, in my life. It's like, okay, I have all these different personalities. And like, okay, that means that I have to connect with all these people who plug into those different personalities. Well, it's the same. Absolutely. With everybody. So we can't do it alone. And I think that's a beautiful thing. Because then you meet, naturally, you meet people that you might like who rub against really well. By virtue of affinity. Yeah. Yeah. I agree. And I think, you know, from a funding standpoint, one thing that I've learned in generating these proposals this year is funders want to see who you connect with in the community. And that you're actually making efforts to forge relationships. And we've done that. But we also happily, I can say that many have actually just reached out to us and said, how can we help? So that's another big chunk that makes Silver City kind of cool in many ways. I think people are changing, too. I think so. I think they're getting a little bit of a kick in the behind, you know, with the political situation and everything. It's like, what can I do? I don't know how many times a day I hear someone saying, what can I do? What can I do? And as Gavin Newsom says, just be yourself, which is not so easy. We need help. We live in an image-driven kind of culture. And a lot of our narratives are formed around what we do, what we think the world needs us to do. Or we become who we think other people expect us to become. I think most people, regardless of what's going back and forth in national political ideology right now, have a certain modicum of common sense. But I'm learning that when the narrative gets really loud and digital, common sense isn't very common anymore. It goes out the window. So remembering what we know about being together can really happen in a small town in a way that it would be more difficult to achieve in a larger city. I agree completely. And we try to push, especially with our allies, that they're welcome at everything we do. There's nothing we do that's exclusively LGBTQ in Grant County. In fact, we did an art show last year at Light Art Space as part of Pride, and it was wonderful. And there was an artist there who was scared to death to be there. Just, like, wonderful art. And he was married and his wife knew, but he was still, like, so fearful. I said, why don't you just come to some of our events with your wife? If she knows and she's supportive. We have tons of allies that come that aren't LGBTQ, and you've just got to fit in with everybody else. Because it's an event for anybody in Silver City to come and participate. And he couldn't wrap his head around that. Well, this is new for me, really. And like I said last time, my husband's a two-spirit person, and we never considered going to the Pride Festival. Isn't that weird? And now, I think, after meeting you two, I think, well, why not? Why didn't we go? We were planning on it. We should talk about the Pride Festival a little bit before we go off in our different directions so people know what exactly it is and what happens there. But, yes, we're definitely going. It's changed. You've changed me. Good. Because there is a shyness. I feel like I don't belong because I'm straight, relatively. You do belong. We have no borders. We have no walls. Anybody is welcome. We need to have this conversation on the air, don't we? We do. We do. But I'm glad you felt, I would say, brave enough to say that because you're definitely not alone in that viewpoint. There are a lot of people listening who feel exactly the same way you do. But there's not a place for me. Well, there is. It's not about me. Right. Right. It's a club, and I'm not in the club because of my sexual preferences or my lifestyle preferences or whatever, however you want to define it. And that's just not true. No. We have a wonderful partner in PFLAG. They are so supportive in everything that we do, and we really work together really well, and they come to everything we do. And very few of those folks are actually LGBTQ in Grant County. And so we're totally comfortable with it, having anybody be a part of the Pride Festival. So let's talk about that if you guys want to. It's September 12th and 13th. At Friday night in Gulf Park, there's a dance from 5 to 8 p.m. And then there is the comedy show out at Open Spaces from 9 to 11, and that's for 21 and older. And then Saturday, the festival is from 11 to 5. We are going, as always, to have the ever-famous Doggy Drag Show. That's the most... I swear it is the high point of this. It's the highest attendance. Is that that? The park just gets tons of people just for the Doggy Drag Show. We've kind of changed it because before we got involved, it was actually a competition and they give an award. And you know how people feel about their dogs when they don't win. Oh, yeah. The kids, right? Of course. They still complain about their dog should have won five years ago. So we threw the competition out. It's just the Doggy Drag Show, and then we have the gift baskets that we do a draw on. We made them a runway, too. And we have a little runway to go across. The mayor comes every year and is wonderful. What time is the Doggy Drag Show? It's about 3 p.m. 3 p.m. Okay. It's the high point. Okay. There's lots of great entertainment. The cereals are great. We focused on local entertainment this year. So we are bringing in more live participants locally. But we still do have some folks from Phoenix. The House of Renee, which is a drag queen, is going to come and perform as part of the Pride Festival. They've been here before and they're great. Everybody loves them. They're very popular here. And they love coming here. And I feel like they're so welcome when they come here. I'm so glad that Silver City is like that for people. Yeah. So who's doing the music Friday night? It is Doug Snyder who works at Kool. He's the manager. So he also DJed our teen prom and did a really great job. So we're going to have him do the Pride Festival as well. And all this stuff is free. We don't charge for any of these events. Just come down and participate. We're also having a live... Every hour we're having 15 minutes of live mic if you want to get up there and tell your story. Open up there. Wow. Really? If you want to get up and sing a song, if you want to get up and read some poetry. When does that take place? Every hour there's going to be a 15 minute slot for that. If you want to tell your coming out story, whatever you want to do, we're opening it up for people in the community to have a chance. We're hoping it doesn't blow up on us. I don't think it will. It depends on what you want to get up there and say. Well, your success with your other events leads me to believe that it will be. And I want to credit Milo Flynn on our board for coming up with this idea. Because we were... After last year's Pride, some of the feedback was, let's just make this feel a little bit more local. Because we had a lot of guys from Phoenix and they were amazing. But it was a whole house. And it was just... It was a lot. And so we turned it back to the community. And Milo's idea was, why don't we just do... Not so much... Originally it was like a talent show. But then you deal with auditioning people and then you have to vet that. So it became an open mic. And out of that became a serial set. People just coming up and sharing their stories witnessed by the community. And some of our board members, I think, are going to set the example and do that just to kind of stick a toe in the water so people don't feel so. And there's even going to be a table that Milo will curate that people who might not feel comfortable getting up and speaking their story will have help writing it. If they want someone to read it for them, one of our board members will do it. Or if they feel like it's been written, people want to get up and do that. So it's going to have a different flavor. It should be fun. And then that evening from 9.30 to probably 1.00 p.m. is an after party at the Toad. And there's going to be burlesque. There's going to be drag queens. Variety show. Never ending. Yeah. It's a full weekend. What weekend is this again? September 12th and 13th. Okay. Yeah. So Friday the 12th, Saturday the 13th. And that's in Goth Park. We were struggling with vendors, but all of a sudden they're starting to come in. But if anybody out there wants to be a vendor, they can go to our website. It's lgbtqgc.org. And they can sign up to be a vendor. They can also go on there and make a donation if they want to make a donation towards the programming that we're doing and the kind of stuff that we're doing. But it's getting bigger, I think, every year. And this is, I think, people are recognizing the need to have it this year. So we've had more community support, I think, this year than we had in the past. Really? Partly because we have more board members and they're out there. But we also, I think people just feel, you know, it's interesting because we'll sometimes have tables at other events. It always surprises me, the little grandmas that come up to me and just hold my hand and say, we're so glad you guys are here. You know, there's just support in this community for people to have as a part of the community. And so, you know, we just want to make it as positive experience as possible for anybody that's in our community. And that's going to be, you know, we're open to ideas. If you have something you want to try, get in touch with us. We're probably going to say sure. You know? We had a couple of folks who were regular attendees at the Safe Haven meetings that happened from December through June who are now working with Leslie on the Trans Outreach Initiative. Lee Moore Fleet and Aiden Morales who are new to Silver City from Texas and felt safer here. And Lee is now helping coordinate volunteers for us at the festival. And Aiden has volunteered to work with Leslie on the Trans Outreach Initiative. So, you know, people are beginning to materialize and we're trying to give them interesting things to do that are in alignment with what they really care about, obviously. But I think there's been a long tradition here of trying to get this going. And there was a little caesura in there during COVID. And I think we're just getting back up on our feet with the fact that this is actually here and hopefully here to stay. And morphing it, as we said earlier, out of that kind of circus tent. We're going to do a Pride Festival and into a regular sustainable infrastructure. So, that is going to need some prayers, but we're on our way for sure. And we're also looking for volunteers for Pride. So, if anybody's interested in being a volunteer, they can go to our website, again, lgbtqgc.org and sign up to be a volunteer. And what would a volunteer be doing? Because you have a big part of your brochure about volunteers. Yeah. So, for the Pride Festival, it's typically set up on Friday. So, we decorate. We have a bunch of flags and stuff we put up and decorate. Helping vendors. Helping vendors on Saturday morning when they come in to set up. And then also, at the end of it, the most important ones are the ones that come at the end and help us take everything down. Because that's when everybody's exhausted. Right. So, having people that just show up and help us take tables down and chairs and all the flags and stuff. All that stuff's really important and it helps us. And so, if you volunteer during the Pride Festival, we give you a $10 food voucher that you can use at any of the food vendors. And we also maintain an area for volunteers where we have snacks and drinks and things for them to get during the festival if they're volunteering. Yeah. I would say, also, there's help needed within the entertainment area. Helping support the entertainers. Having the tent clear and clean and stocked with refreshments and water because it can get hot in big ol' wigs out there in September. Also, just support in general. Like a presence out there with the vendors, depending on how far flung they are, just to feel like they all belong. People checking in on them. Just a kind of sense of being a good host for people who have decided to spend time here. So, yeah. And outside of Pride volunteers, if you want to get involved, just check in with us because we could plug you into a book club. We could plug you into something. Or you can just help us with some of our other initiatives. You don't have to be on the board to get involved. If you want to just do one thing, we'll plug you in to do one thing. Whatever your passion is, we'd love to connect with that and have you share that with our community. Right. So, that book club was something that you're envisioning for the future that doesn't exist yet. Yeah. So, we have probably eight different things that we've got people signing up for if we just don't have the people to run it. Can you go into a little bit of detail about what those eight things are? So, there was a book club. There was a coffee club. There was... They're just getting together and talking. Yeah. Talking, visiting. There was a hiking club. There was a biking club. Eldercare. Eldercare. Just supporting people in the community. A volunteer club where maybe we find a project and we just get together and go... It's like a community service kind of thing. Yeah. Yeah. So, we just picked a bunch of areas and put clipboards out and said, if you're interested in this, sign up. And we have people sign up all over the place, but we just can't get anybody to step up and... We need to put a clipboard out there for leadership. Leadership. For sure. I think that's going to be one of my focuses this year is, how do we build that? Because that's going to start reaching some of the folks that just don't get involved in anything else. And I think maybe if we start smaller... You're listening to KURU 89.1 FM, Hilo Nunez Community Radio, Silver City, New Mexico, and online at gmcr.org. You're listening to the Equity Hour with the Politico's personal and monthly show. And we are interviewing Fyro and Scott of LGBTQ Grant County. And you were saying? Yeah. I think... Leadership. Trying to start a little smaller with... I think we put out a bunch of clipboards, and I think we got a little far flung. And we didn't have the board membership that we have right now. And to be a little bit more focused and intentional about where we develop, maybe review some of those sign-up sheets and which ones had the most interest, and begin with a couple of those. Good idea. As opposed to... Because it was just... It felt a little overwhelming, I think, at first. We just wanted to find out what people were interested in. So I just created a bunch of sheets and said, what would you be interested in? Which did the best? I'm sorry. I think the coffee club and the book club both. And movie night was also a big one. Oh, movie night. Yeah. And then also on our website, if you want to sign up for our email, you also get a choice, what would you be interested in? And so we have people when they usually sign up for email, they pick some of the things they might like to do. So we have a pretty... We're up to almost 200 people on our email list now. And we have a pretty extensive list of people who want to do stuff. We've just got to work to the next level of starting to pull some of those together. Yeah. Yeah. The leadership thing. It's hard because there's so many pulls on our volunteer time. We want to do so much. If you're any kind of a leader at all, you've got your foot in about three different doors right now. And I'm like getting to this place where I'm like, I can't do that because I'm an artist. When do I do my art? I'm a writer. When do I do my writing? When do I do my work? Right? So it's like, how can I do all these things? But the book club, I'm a book person, sounds really interesting. Our hope is to find people that want to do that. So that's their passion. So they're just a part of the book club. And it's not necessarily leadership. It's just coordination. It's just coordination. Coordinator, that's a better word than leader. And it could be like five book clubs. Maybe there's... If we have 30, that's too many for a book club. So maybe we have... Break it into smaller groups. And it could even be focused on certain issues. I don't know. It just needs a little momentum. And sometimes a coordinator can facilitate that momentum to the point where that little jumbo jet has enough internal combustion to get up off the runway and fly on its own. So that's where we're at right now, is trying to generate that. And we'll see. But it's been a lot. This is our third Pride since 2023. And when I think back on where things were, I mean, the first Pride was the furniture all had dust covers on it. And we pulled the dust covers off and sat down gingerly to figure out which of these pieces would actually hold weight, which ones are going to collapse under us. You know, and I think we've kind of... That's a good metaphor. ...sussed that out. And, you know, we're now just trying to build... You know, it's like you're going to a buffet. You don't go to a buffet hungry. You just kind of go shopping hungry. Just kind of be a little bit more focused and intentional. And also design some of these activities around the strengths of the members of our board, you know, their experience levels, because there's leadership there, you know. And so with this new membership, I would say just within the past 60 days, we're still learning, you know, about what they can do and what they really want to do. And that's kind of our stewardship in a nutshell right there. Yeah, I think we're working a little bit against the current, you know, not just COVID, but also the present political situation. Half the people I know are more active and the other half are less. They're just staying home. They're on the computer. They are not moving. I have a hard time getting people in my classes. You know, we're full. You know, I mean, people just... They're scared and they just stay home. And so it's hard. I really appreciate what you're up against. It's not impossible, though. No, it's not. It's just difficult. Pride was always a protest. It really started as a protest. And so that's why it's important for us not to let it go away, because it still is a form of protest for us. It's also a form of celebration, but it's still a way of standing up and saying we're still here and we're not going anywhere. Oh, but protest and celebration go together. Absolutely. Well, they do. And I think since the program, you know, talks about where the political is personal, I think it's a political statement to take what was used to oppress you and turn it into a celebration. So to take words like queer and other far more pejorative versions and to use it as a badge of identity and a proud and defiant one is political in its essence. So very often people who are, you know, against this kind of manifestation find it just too much, too loud. And so I think it's important that people who are, you know, against this kind of manifestation find it just too much, too loud. But that's what got this needle moved out of oppression, downtrodden, into, you know, we're here and we're, you know, we're members. My dream is for a community where there is no exceptional work required. You know, for example, I was an actor for a long time with a community profile where we came from and very often press would be written and very often press would be written. Openly gay actors, Scott plays like that. Can we just get past where we need to tell people who you go to bed with talk about your profession? It's just not important. This happens to me every day. Someone's describing someone to me and I said, you do not need to tell me what their preference is every time you tell me who this person is. Just tell me their name and that's enough. It's a certain part of a historical march toward progress. I'm going to say this at least but my dream is for a day where there's literally no comment. We're just here because we are all members of this community and what happens behind closed doors is really where it belongs. But I think because of all of the energy used in service of oppression we have to move. It's a difficult maneuver to go from horizontal to vertical and sometimes the resistance is necessary and my teacher used to say that flopping around is what makes you stronger. It reminds me of bra burning in the 70s. It really does. It's the same kind of thing. It's like Jane Fonda in Clue. She's just out there going, this is me. Well, it should be. I'm not apologetic. I think my style is not that personally. I burned his bra. No. No. Bury it. The tree will grow. The tree grows in Brooklyn. I think it's my feeling is I don't want to feed the field anything that's going to make anyone else feel unwell because we're all breathing the same air and we forget that because of the bruise and because of the trauma that many people have experienced becoming who they are very often the lens through which they view the world is informed by that pain and I get that as a part of a natural evolutionary process. However, the goal for me is equality and acceptance and equanimity in the face of that kind of but it's difficult to do. However, that internal strength, the world, we're on a spinning planet and if we're for gravity, we love to be flying in outer space. There's all kinds of things happening in the world that pull our attention out of ourselves. I wish for all of us the capacity to kind of keep our own counsel, have our own story, know that to be true and to remember I don't need to agree with you to empathize with you. I don't have to share you with you. I also don't need to find it evil but I can hold space. That's a word that gets thrown around a lot but I can be with you in a space and still make you feel well even if I don't agree with what you say. Even if you don't understand it at all. Right. And to learn if you're curious. Yeah, but I mean even if you're with somebody and you have no idea. They come from a totally different background. You have no idea what they're talking about but you feel that they really need to say this at this time in this place and so you just say okay. Right. Okay. I'm here. I'm listening. And I don't feel like it's necessary to other people like to be relegated to one end or another of what is proving to be an increasingly intransigent binary. I am not here. My space is everything in between and I want the same for you. So if I want freedom for me then I'm going to advocate for it for you as well because I feel that's only right. It's not about me. It's about the us piece here. The us piece. And it's interesting. I think so. I mean I really do think that prejudice and judgment is boring. I'm sorry. I mean it really does seem to me to be boring because you're just sitting with yourself and people who exactly like you looking in the mirror and after a while it's not boring. Right? It's kind of tedious and then somebody comes in with a breath of fresh air something be unknown. Whoa. That's really interesting. Scary but interesting. And I think for folks who labor with this idea of prejudice and discrimination there's a resistance that comes with that too that feels like I'm doing something. I am working against something I don't believe in and I think we tend to mistake that for effort. We don't realize that what we do is paint ourselves into a corner. We make it impossible for us that old Einstein quote you can't solve a problem the same level of consciousness that created it. So it means something extraordinary to step out from that place and take a risk and understand a different viewpoint. I don't need to agree. I can't emphasize that enough. But I think it's important to also entertain the possibility that something other than your experience can be viable. Well I think that's how we grow right? One pulls the rug out from under you and suddenly you're in a whole new place and a whole new world and it's terrifying and fascinating and then you want more and you're hungry for it. We only have a couple more minutes so why don't you give our listeners your website and so if they want to go to the website and sign up to be a volunteer sign up for your email list What is your website? It is lgbtqgc.org I'm sorry lgbtqgc.org You did that very well. I don't know if I could get all the alphabets out like that. Thank you for this opportunity. It was a pleasure having you both on the show and we look forward to the next show where we're going to have a panel so stay tuned listeners for that one that will be our next show and the last in our series the last in the series so we have one more after this one. Thanks for being so generous with your time concerning LGBTQIA plus issues. Thank you for that. It's important. It is important. It's very important. It's a hard thing. I think so and we do actually I think at the end of the day have far more in common than we don't but I think what calls our attention is what's different and then the story we tell ourselves about what's different but I think I learned in many years in the theater the only way you know a story isn't true is that it always ends the same way. A true story doesn't end doesn't because you're still here the pen is still in your hand you're still creating and you're a writer so you know this as long as you're still writing you have agency when you've decided the ending it's not true that's just not how life works No, J.R.R. Tolkien would agree with you and he has the ova to prove it that was his whole theory he said that's why all these things have happy endings and everyone said oh your stuff is not realistic and he's like yes it is because life doesn't ever end it's always continuing it's a different iteration so well thank you both for coming on the show and I feel like this is a really great one so thank you again and thank you to our listeners for tuning in