by Mel Green

I spent most of yesterday at Alaska Pride Conference 2011, held in the Carr-Gottstein Academic Center on the campus of Alaska Pacific University in Anchorage.  The Alaska Pride Conference is an annual day-long event held in Anchorage filled with workshops, speakers, vendors, and great food.

This year’s conference began with Doug Frank describing the founding of Alaska Pride Conference in 1994 — Doug was a cofounder of the conference, along with Rebecca Rogers, former executive director of the Alaska AIDS Assistance Association (Four A’s), and community leader F. Ken Freedman.

As readers of Bent Alaska know, I recently took over editorship of Bent Alaska. I’m working to recruit other writers and contributors to the blog — & held a session 1 workshop to that end, “Bent Alaska: Blogging for LGBTQA Alaska.”  I was pleased to meet some really cool people from Anchorage, Fairbanks, Bethel, and Homer — including lots of youth! — whose writing, photos, and other stuff I hope we’ll soon be seeing on Bent Alaska.

Felix Rivera caught a photo of us during the worshop — even as I caught a photo of him!  Felix is one of the conference organizers, and worked especially on putting together the Youth Summit, which brought numerous LGBTQA youth from all over Alaska to Anchorage.  He also took photos of all the conference workshops and other events, which you can view on Alaska Pride’s Facebook wall.

Appropriate to LGBT History Month, Doug Frank led a workshop on “How are we here? Brave stories from our GLBT history,” in which Fred Hillman, Jackie Buckley, and I also participated.  (I took a full audio recording of the session, and as I have time will plan to edit it into a video with photos of the stories described.)

Fred Hillman, now 88, told us the story of living as a closeted gay husband and father of three sons, and the lonely experience of coming out after his wife’s death and finally meeting other gay people and helping to found the Anchorage chapter of Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG).

I spent most of my speaking showing photos from a blog post I wrote on Bent in June about my first Pride march in Anchorage and some of the early 1980s history of Identity — known at the time I came to Anchorage in 1982 as the Alaska Gay and Lesbian Resource Center (AGLRC).  For example, the photo below shows Fred Hillman — with the white beard — in December 1982 in company with AGLRC board president Jay Brause, his partner (later husband) Gene Dugan, founder of Out North Theatre Company (now Out North Contemporary Art House), and, at right, AGLRC board member Les Baird.

Doug Frank told the story of the first Pride March in Anchorage in 1978, when he and other marchers wore paper bags or masks over their heads in order to avoid losing their jobs for being seen in the march.  The sign they carried read, “We’re proud of being gay, but afraid of job discrimination.”

And then Doug brought forward Nick Pestrikoff , who was only 13 years old in 1978 when he traveled from with his family from Kodiak Island to Anchorage — and saw that first Anchorage Pride march.  “I asked my mom what are those people doing, what’s this all about? She says, These people are happy and they’re proud, and I said, Of what?… and I remember watching them, and I wonder if I’ll ever be able to do that…. I remember them vividly, but mostly I remember the brown paper bag, and thinking, I don’t want to hide, because even at that age I was tired of it.”

Jackie Buckley told the story of almost being fired from her job after a photo of her participating in the 1986 Anchorage Pride march appeared in the Anchorage Daily News.  Jackie told her boss, “When I came her, all of your programs were in the red, and now all the programs are in the black, and I’ve only been working here for six months… and I think you should measure me based on my performance.” In the end, she persuaded her employer to keep her on, but it was a close thing.  Jackie pointed out that just as much today as in 1986, employers in Alaska can freely fire LGBT employees for no other reason than that they are LGBT.  (The exceptions are those employers, such as Alaska Pacific University, University of Alaska, and some businesses which have adopted anti-discrimination policies inclusive of sexual orientation and, for some, gender identity.)

Here’s Felix’s photo of the workshop:

I came out of the workshop to find Nathan Belyeu of The Trevor Project — the conference’s keynote speaker — working quietly on his laptop.  But he graciously permitted me to interrupt him to introduce myself and take a photo.

And it was lunchtime!  The Last Frontier Men’s Club served up a fantastic lunch, as they’ve done at Pride Conference for the past three years. Thank you, TLFMC!

Nathan Belyeu then presented his keynote speech, in which he described the work of The Trevor Project, of which he is  Senior Education Manager. The Trevor Project aims at ending suicide among LGBTQ youth by providing life-saving and life-affirming resources including a nationwide, 24/7 crisis intervention lifeline, digital community, and advocacy/educational programs.

Before we went up to our afternoon workshops, we worked some of the sitting-around-all-day sleepiness out of our systems by doing some Zumba fitness dancing.  Check out Doug Frank (in the pink shirt) getting his groove on!

Nathan Belyeu ran two afternoon workshops — one for adults and elders, and another for youth and young adults — on supporting LGBTQ youth and preventing suicide.  The session I went to was well-attended, and we had to borrow chairs from another room to make sure everyone had a seat.  Bent Alaska will be presenting some of the information given to us in a later post.

For my last workshop of the day, I chose “Living Mahu,” presented by Tim Flynn of Alaska Pacific University.  Tim is a recent arrival in Alaska, having come here from several years at University of Hawaii.  Māhū are third gender persons with defined roles in traditional Hawaiian culture, similar to Tongan fakaleiti and Samoan fa’afafine. We also discussed western cultural expressions of gender identity and expression — which was something of a strange experience for me, as I realized that none of the people present (to my knowledge) were trans, so it felt rather like talking about people behind their backs.  This is no reflection on Tim, who led a great discussion and pointed out some excellent resources, but did cause me to wonder at how few transfolk were at this year’s conference, and also the need in Alaska for the LGB portion of our community to educate themselves more about the trans issues and challenges.

I chatted with Tim for a bit afterward.  Some of Bent’s readers may remember a 2007 story by Anchorage Daily News columnist Julia O’Malley about UAA student Tafi Toleafoa, a fa’afafine born in Samoa, which I also wanted to tell him about.

As the conference wound down, the youth from all over Alaska who had made it to the conference stepped outside the Carr-Gottstein Academic Center to express their thanks to all of those who had helped them come for the conference and Youth Summit.  We are so glad you came!

And then it was time to clean up and put stuff away.

Here’s my slideshow of the conference, including the above photos (except for Felix’s), and a whole lot more.

Thank you to Identity and to all the sponsors of this year’s Alaska Pride Conference.

Tweeting the conference

I was so busy at the conference that I didn’t tweet as much as I might have… but for what it’s worth:

• Bent is at Alaska Pride Conference – just got done w/ our workshop recruiting new contributors to Bent Alaska!  #
• Now listening to gay elder Fred Hillman talk about coming out in midlife, a widower & father, & founding PFLAG Anchorage. #
• Alaska Pride Conference is lining up for lunch. We’ve got a few pics on our FB wall – check ’em out! #
• I’m here in line catching the gay from Tim Pearson, who’s catching the straight ally from Barb Clark. Contagion!! #
• Just heard keynote for Alaska Pride Conference from Nathan Belyeu of the @TrevorProject on stopping #lgbt youth suicide. #