As the bright, multi-colored flag signifying Pride Month attests, we’re fortunately moving past a time in our country when people have to hide or be ashamed to simply live as who they are. Of course, that truth is only fairly recent and must be supported on a regular basis, just like all of our country’s civil rights and individual liberties must be.
While the history of progress on LGBTQ+ rights is thought by many to have originated with the 1969 Stonewall riots in New York City, it obviously goes way farther back than that. Looking more recently, later this month, we will mark the six-year anniversary of the landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling, in Obergefell v. Hodges, which ratified that the Constitution requires that same-sex couples be allowed to marry no matter where they live in the United States. Of course, this didn’t make our country trailblazers in this area of civil rights, as the United States became the 17th country to legalize same-sex marriages entirely on that day.
More personally, my own experience is probably fairly on par with many of my generation. In high school and then college, I became more aware of the diversity of sexual identities that exist in our country, and as I entered the workplace, I had the privilege of working with many people whose sexual identity was different than mine. I began to more clearly understand how critical it is that we have a society in which everyone is not simply accepted but given the opportunity to thrive as full participants in this American experience.
About ten years after graduating from college, and while living in New York City (my birthplace and about as diverse a city as you’ll find in this country), I had dinner with a close friend from college who had become a successful business journalist and was also living in NYC. I could tell that he had something on his mind all through dinner, apart from our usual college-friend banter that we habitually engaged in when we were together. Towards the end of dinner, he told me that there was something he needed to tell me, and he proceeded to “come out” to me as a gay man. It was a moving moment for both of us, but for some reason, all I could say was that I had always assumed he was gay and that it was “great.” I could tell that he was understandably deflated about my matter-of-fact response to him telling me something that was so central to his being and yet never spoken about between us to that point. That was the late 1980s, a time in which it was perhaps less of a revelation in a city like New York, but still, something that a young man like my friend Dave, who grew up in a small Southern town, felt he had to hide from too many people.
I learned a lot that day, and I’m still learning to this day.
That’s one of the many reasons I feel proud of being able to lead an organization like the Y, which works hard to be a safe and welcoming place for all, and that respects the rights and dignity of all. We serve a richly diverse community and have a likewise wonderfully diverse workforce. We don’t always get it right, and we have “many miles to go” to live up to our core values of caring, honesty, respect, and responsibility. But we work on this every day, and that’s the responsibility we not only accept but embrace.
So, please join Buddy, the Hoey family labradoodle, in wishing a happy Pride Month to all Y associates and members of the Y community.
All the best,
John
John K. Hoey
President & CEO
The Y in Central Maryland