Hudson Pride - Saturday, August 18th in Jersey City

On Saturday, August 18th, the OASIS will take part in the Hudson Pride Festival, a community event located in Jersey City's Exchange Place, from noon to 7pm.

This event, celebrating its 12th anniversary, provides an opportunity for members of the LGBT population in New Jersey's Hudson waterfront communities to network and celebrate who we are. Organizations, merchants and food and drink vendors will line Montgomery Street between Washington & Hudson streets, and the main stage is located at Exchange Place & Hudson Street.

The OASIS will share the Episcopal presence at the event with Integrity NYC-Metro. We will have an information table and celebrate a Street Eucharist.

TRANSIT:
NJ Transit to Hoboken Station, Hudson-Bergen Light Rail to Exchange Place
OR
PATH World Trade Center-Newark line to Exchange Place

PRIDE SERMONS: Stacy Graffam at St. Mark's: Teaneck

Stacy Graffam, a member of St. Mark's Episcopal Church in Teaneck, N.J., gave a reflection at the parish's Pride Service on Sunday, June 24th. Stacy blogs about her life with wife Donna and their two kids at Out In Suburbia and has also written for Gay Parent magazine.

PRIDE SERMONS: Michael Petti at St. Peter's: Clifton

Mr. Michael Petti, a long-time advocate of LGBT inclusion and former commission member of The OASIS, the LGBT Ministry of the Episcopal Diocese of Newark, has shared with us the text of a reflection he gave at St. Peter's Episcopal Church in Clifton on Sunday June 24th, when the parish observed its patronal festival and celebrated Pride Sunday using the readings for the Feast of St. Peter & St. Paul, which fell later in the week.

Michael compares Jesus' seemingly nagging Peter by repeatedly asking "do you love me?" to the distrust many LGBT people have for the institutional church, in light of how religious institutions have historically treated them. This is a distrust we, the church, have earned, and Michael urges us all to strive towards a place of welcome upon which our brothers and sisters can count.

Pride Events at St. George's: Maplewood

As a courtesy to a longtime Sponsoring Congregation of the OASIS, we are sharing word of the following events to take place at St. George's Episcopal Church in Maplewood to commemorate LGBT Pride Month:

• On Sunday, June 3rd at 12:00 p.m. (following the 10:30 Eucharist service), noted civil rights leader Joan M. Garry will lead a forum entitled LGBT People, Bullying, and the Deeply Held Religious Belief Card.
  
  Ms. Garry is former Executive Director of GLAAD (Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) and came to prominence in 1993 by successfully challenging New Jersey's second-parent adoption law to become the first lesbian in the state to adopt her partner's biological children. She is currently an Adjunct Professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School of Communications and writes a blog for The Huffington Post.
• On Saturday, June 9th, members of St. George's will host a table at SOMA Pride at Memorial Park in Maplewood.
• On Sunday, June 10th, IntegrityUSA Founder Dr. Louie Crew will be the guest preacher at both the 8:00 a.m. and 10:30 a.m. Eucharist services. In addition to a lifetime of advocacy for LGBT people, Dr. Crew is a retired Professor of English, most recently of Rutgers University, an accomplished writer and poet, and a longtime member of the Executive Council of the Episcopal Church.
• On Sunday, June 24th, members of St. George's will be joining us marching in the annual Heritage of Pride in New York City.

Recently, St. George's Rector, The Rev. Bernie Poppe, was quoted in the Newark Star-Ledger in response to President Obama's personal endorsement of marriage equality for LGBT persons.

St. George's is located at 550 Ridgewood Road, Maplewood, NJ., a very short walk from the Maplewood train station.


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Episcopal Presence at NYC Pride 2012

Please see details below regarding the Episcopal presence in the Heritage of Pride March, which is organized by the LGBT Concerns Committee of the Diocese of New York.  Your congregation or group can march as part of the Episcopal group without registering separately or sending someone to the marshal training.  You may bring your own banners, t-shirts, etc. and walk together.


In a year that has had a lot of anti-LGBT messaging from the pulpit, it is more important than ever that we have a strong progressive presence at this very visible parade.   If your congregation has not marched in some years, please consider retuning... we'd love to see you there!  Details will be posted here as they arrive.

Dear Fellow Episcopalians,

For the past several years, the Committee on LGBT Concerns has organized a float in the annual LGBT Pride March, to be held this year on Sunday, June 24^th, 2012. Several hundred Episcopalians, from parishes large and small, from Staten Island to Sullivan County, march down Fifth Avenue with the float under the slogan “The Episcopal Church Welcomes You”.  For the past two years we have been by far the largest religious contingent in the entire March!

The Episcopal Church has, for years, been in the forefront of the full inclusion of LGBT persons in all of the sacraments.  While we may not yet have attained all of our goals, we are well on our way.  The annual LGBT Pride March is one of the most visual and important ways that we have of reaching out to the LGBT Community, many of whom have given up on or been driven away from any organized religion.

In order to do this again in 2012, we need your help.  The LGBT Pride March is not a budgeted item.  We rely on donations from individuals, parishes and groups in order to make it possible.  The cost is between $5000.00 and $6000.00 and our suppliers (float, music, registration) require payment in advance. 

The Church of St. Luke in the Fields has agreed to act as our treasurer again this year.  Please make your checks payable to The Church of St. Luke in the Fields, note Pride March in the memo field and mail to:

                Paul J. Lane

                c/o The Church of St. Luke in the Fields

                487 Hudson Street

                New York, NY 10014

The March takes place on Sunday, June 24, 2012.  It will proceed down Fifth Avenue from the lower 30s to its usual end point on Christopher and Greenwich Streets in the West Village.  Our exact meeting  time and location won’t be known  until about two weeks prior to the actual March, but you are welcome to join us at 11 a.m. for Eucharist at the Church of the Transfiguration, 1 E 29 Street, and proceeding to the muster location from there.  

Anyone is welcome to join us.   You will not need to register your group separately.  We will take care of registration and marshals.  All you need to do to participate is show up.  We will post the information on the LGBT Concerns web-page:   and Facebook page:   as soon as the March organizers let us know.

If you have any questions, please contact Paul Lane at 646-456-8705 or LGBTConcerns@dioceseny.org

Thank you and we look forward to seeing you there,

Paul J. Lane - LGBT Pride March Coordinator

The Committee on LGBT Concerns of the Episcopal Diocese of New York

Cyndi Lauper to be Grand Marshall at 2012 Heritage of Pride

The Huffington Post has reported that award-winning pop diva and long-time LGBT-ally Cyndi Lauper will be the Grand Marshall of the 2012 Heritage of Pride March in New York on Sunday, June 24th.

The OASIS will once again be part of the Episcopal presence at the March, which is organized by the LGBT Concerns Committee of the Diocese of New York.  Area individuals, congregations and groups are invited to march with us or under their own banners as part of the church's representation.  The Committee will be announcing details in the coming weeks.

 Lauper, a native of Queens, won a Grammy Award for Best New Artist in 1985 and has been recognized repeatedly by MTV, VHI, Rolling Stone and others. She has been a staunch ally of the LGBT population. In September, she opened the True Colors Residence, a supportive housing  facility in Harlem specifically for young LGBT adults with a history of homelessness. She also created the Give A Damn Campaign to educate heterosexual people about youth homelessness and how it disproportionately affects the LGBT population. 

Joining Lauper on the reviewing stand will be Chris Salgardo, president of the Kiehl's body care company which was recently recognized in AdWeek for its social responsibility, as well as Phyllis Siege and Connie Kopelov, the first residents of New York City to be legally married in the state.  The couple was wed on July 24, 2011 after 23 years together.

"Our choices for this year's Grand Marshals embody everything we look for in representatives that give back to the LGBT community and have made a huge impact on the overall movement," state Mike Dunlap, March Director, said in a press release.

Jersey City Pride

For the past ten years, gay and lesbian organizations in and around Jersey City have staged their own Pride festival on the last weekend in August. This nicely brackets the summer and allows them to avoid competing with the statewide celebration in Asbury Park and the original commemoration of the Stonewall riots in New York, both of which take place in June.

A seventeen-month-old Long Island boy was beaten to death by his mother's boyfriend because he "acted like a girl". Tinky-Winky aside, do we really expect a toddler to be aware of rigid gender roles, much less adhere to them??

This event centers around three blocks or so of Exchange Place, a street that ends at the Hudson River in the heart of the city's financial district. As the surrounding office towers are mostly abandoned on weekends, the streets can be closed with a minimum of disruption, and there's plenty of parking to be had. For the first time, this year's celebration also included a short parade from City Hall a little bit further inland.

Several organizations of the Episcopal Church have taken part in these events at various times. The OASIS, the LGBT ministry of the Episcopal Diocese of Newark, has sponsored a table where area parishes are invited to give out information and meet community members. This year the OASIS, as well as the NYC-area chapter of the its national equivalent (Integrity) and the Episcopal Response to AIDS all shared the time and expense for this outreach. It also gave us the opportunity to discuss plans for some future collaboration.

What none of us had really given much thought to was the possibility of any conflict. Surely we were past this; our immediate area has become pretty comfortable with LGBT issues, with the majority of the population even supporting marriage equality even if the governor and legislature do not agree.

So I was somewhat surprised when -- dispatched to the pharmacy for twine and duct tape to keep our rented canopy grounded against the fresh breeze coming off the river -- I saw a handful of people with placards and a bullhorn organizing themselves on a street corner a block or so from the festivities.

Truth be told, they've been there before. They showed up several years ago and walked up and down the sidewalks on the perimeter of the event using a bullhorn to bray their various threats of hellfire and damnation at the passing crowd. After a quick ecumenical "Situation Room" discussion, the various church groups responded in a way that we knew would probably infuriate them, but could not be labeled as combative or even really acknowledging their hateful rhetoric: We followed the same path up and down the street, just INSIDE the event, and sang hymns, loudly. Hymns such as "Jesus Loves Me, This I Know", "God Loves All the Little Children" and so forth, in an effort to counter their efforts.

Don't leave home without it!

The only problem is, we quickly discovered that we didn't collectively know much beyond the first verse of anything, and in some cases the Methodists knew one version that might be different than what the Episcopalians or Lutherans remembered. Thus was born one of my bright ideas, that -- as is typical -- gets immediately forgotten until the next time it would come in pretty darn handy. I had made up my mind that I would put together a handful of common, public-domain hymns that suited the occasion and have copies of the lyrics ready to facilitate the singing.

Then, for the next few years, the protesters didn't come, and I forgot about it. But I can see that -- maybe as a hallmark of the progress we've made with the general public mindset -- this event is back on their radar. And apparently, once they figured out where the church tables were, they parked on the nearest corner and kept the commentary up all afternoon. Interestingly, there were two "groups" of them this year... the hellfire gang were joined by one or two people from a more "compassionate" crowd: they represented an "ex-gay ministry" ... something the American Psychological Association and most other credible witnesses describe as pointless and more likely harmful. When it was that guy's turn with the bullhorn he kept telling us how we didn't have to be this way, we could change like him, etc. I recently met a young man who endured eight years of this "therapy" only to realize that sexual orientation is not something that can be "cured", and luckily today he is learning to celebrate and live into the identity he is meant to have.

One event-goer was apparently either prepared or resourceful, because he appeared with a sign that said "I'm with stupid" and an arrow and followed the protesters up and down the street.

Truth be told, with a few exceptions nobody was really paying very much attention to them, and everyone -- even the cops -- were getting annoyed with the bullhorn after a while. We were too busy networking and trying to keep our tent from blowing away to "gracefully engage" them, let alone regale them with ecumenical hymnody.

As the afternoon wore on, the commentary got more random and dejected, wandering between taxes, the speaker's kids and Lady Gaga. I'm not really sure what they were trying to accomplish, but I don't think they won over any supporters, and the tone was in stark contrast to the merriment going on all around them. Nobody present seemed to be experiencing the shame and misery they kept insisting are part and parcel to same-sex attraction.

Would that everybody would be so lucky. In the weeks since, news (and by news I mean blogs and the independent press, since these stories never seem to make the papers) broke of yet another teenager who committed suicide after enduring years of bullying. This follows on the heels of another case, this one in Minnesota, in which the mother reports she had been asking the school to intervene for years. They are hardly alone, as a recent survey by the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network shows that nearly nine out of ten LGBT teens endure harassment at school.

Does anybody else find it ironic that supposed Christians, trying to portray themselves as "compassionate", would come to a LGBT event and preach conversion to a crowd that is apparently pretty much okay with its sexual identity? The underlying message is, of course, that to be LGBT is to be somehow broken or "less-than", and unfortunately, despite logic, experience and the advice of medical experts, this message continues to imbrue our young people's collective consciousness, courtesy of trusted role-models including preachers, teachers and coaches, and apparently with the tacit approval of parents and other community leaders who refused to stick out their necks when this was pointed out as a problem.

And this abuse does not always wait until a child reaches the age where (s)he even knows what sexual identity is, let alone aware that his or her mannerisms, speech or clothing might be advertising it. In a heartbreaking story this summer that didn't seem to make it past the Huffington Post, a seventeen-month-old Long Island boy was beaten to death by his mother's boyfriend because he "acted like a girl". Seventeen months old. Tinky-Winky aside, do we really expect a toddler to be aware of rigid gender roles, much less adhere to them??

These are sobering reminders of how much work remains to be done, and they stand in sharp contrast to the joyous community gathering I witnessed. I can only hope that -- whatever it was they were trying to accomplish -- the protesters couldn't help but notice that what they were witnessing was not a depraved orgy, nor a gathering of unhappy deviants crying out for help. It was ordinary folks of all persuasions, enjoying the freedom to be who they were and love whom they love. Even if they didn't get to hear us sing.