A half-century struggle paved the way from Woodbury Heights to Philly’s LGBTQ Pride parade

Volunteer firefighters Sydney Farrell and Molly Hubert didn’t just ride a Woodbury Heights fire engine to Philly’s LGBTQ Pride parade.

The couple walked in front of the fire truck through Center City and carried a homemade rainbow banner that proclaimed to the world their intention to marry.

Along the way there were cheers, tears and a ton of selfies.

“All of the feedback we’ve gotten has been positive,” department Chief Edgar Seibert said a few days after the June 10 event.

“That says a lot to me.”

And to me, as well.

My first Pride parade was New York City’s in 1977. Same-sex marriage seemed like science fiction then, as did the notion that firefighters from anywhere — let alone a tiny South Jersey suburb — would or could appear in uniform to support what was commonly called “gay liberation.”

What a difference 41 years have made.

Marriage equality, military service, and mass visibility in the media and elsewhere have resulted not merely from judicial and legislative actions, but also from the decisions of countless individual LGBTQ folks of all ages, colors, and backgrounds to come out and publicly say what to our opponents remains an inconvenient truth.

We’re here. We’re queer. Get used to it. 

For anyone who came out in the 1970s or earlier, it’s difficult not to overstate the singular sensation, the particular jolt of those early strength-in-numbers Pride experiences — particularly given that many of us grew up in hiding, as if we were fugitives from our own lives.

Which in a sense many of us had been.

To be among the merry band of thousands of people marching along Fifth Avenue on that hot summer Sunday 41 years ago was unforgettable. The sense of literally and figuratively moving forward together was energizing, even inspiring.

And it still is, Farrell and Hubert said.

“When I came out in middle school 10 years ago, it was rough. People looked at me like I was scum,” Farrell, 24, recalled.

At the Pride parade, “as soon as the spectators saw our sign they started roaring and cheering and making heart shapes with their hands,” she recalled. “I looked at Molly and said, ‘I’m going to cry.’ I was fighting back tears of sheer joy.”

Said Hubert, who’s 23: “We don’t have to hide, and younger people need to know that there’s hope for the future. Things are changing for the better.”

Hard to disagree, given that plethora of positive mass-media Pride mentions and the fact that mass-market all-American retailers such as Target are highlighting the  month with special displays.

So what if the, shall we say, rather garish gear I saw in the Clifton and Cherry Hill stores appeared to have been designed by, or perhaps, for, would-be RuPaul Drag Race contestants?

“It’s like, slap a rainbow on anything. But I like it anyway,” said Tony Doran, a founder of Woodbury Community Pride, an organization that has helped raise the LGBTQ profile in the city of Woodbury.

He cites the cheerful message of acceptance the Target merchandise represents, and like me, he’s also heartened by the joyous photos on social media of Farrell and Hubert’s Pride parade appearance.

“I get emotional about Pride,” Doran, 45, said. “I see a spectrum of people, black and white, Hispanic and Asian, men and women and transpeople, who are strong and powerful and amazing. You can’t keep people like that down.”

Lately one can’t help but worry, however. The June 18 “Equality Tipsheet” page on the website of the LGBTQ advocacy organization the Human Rights Campaign highlighted the Trump administration’s efforts to ban transgender people from military service.

Transgender people know all too well that they’ve become a favorite fright-wing fund-raising tool, as the conservative obsession with where certain people ought and ought not go potty continues.

Objections to placing foster children in LGBTQ homes, and lack of explicit protections from employment discrimination, send a similar message of official exclusion, disdain, or worse.

There’s also the none-too-sweet recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling that narrowly, but essentially, upheld a faith-based wedding cake baker’s refusal to make one of his (purportedly) artistic creations for a same-sex couple.

And let’s not forget AIDS. The still-incurable disease may have faded from the media’s radar, but it has not disappeared: Worldwide, more than 36 million people, among them more than a million Americans, are living with HIV, the virus that causes the disease.

AIDS is a reminder of the essential role of coming-out decisions and public affirmations — like those of the two South Jersey firefighters who participated in Philly Pride.

When the disease came to the attention of medical authorities in the United States and elsewhere in 1981, LGBTQ people were far more stigmatized and disenfranchised than we are today.

President Ronald Reagan, in many ways such a fine communicator, said nothing — not one public word — during the first four years of the gravest public health crisis America had faced since polio.

Who knows what the impact might have been of an earlier White House acknowledgment that thousands of Americans were dead and dying?

I do know that too many members of my LGBTQ generation lost a loved one to the disease, before new treatments arrived in the second half of the 1990s.  I lost a lifelong best friend in 1995 and will miss him forever (RIP, Bobby).

So when opponents complain that LGBTQ people never shut up and are everywhere in the media and refuse to stop insisting on our rightful place at the table, I remember the price of exclusion and silence.

I also think of it when I hear from some within my own community about how white “cisgendered” gay men are too loud or too privileged or whatever. Because I remember when silence quite literally equaled death.

And I’m grateful when I see the photos of Huber and Farrell at Philly Pride, standing tall, being proud, and making their voices heard. On behalf of us all.

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