Proud of Gay pride in Baltimore
I stepped into a colorful, harmonious, proud group of 10,000 people this weekend supporting Baltimore Pride 2013, and I couldn’t have been prouder to have been there to be part of it.
Baltimore Pride was a festival of epic proportions today, and made history. ‘There’s a mass wedding,’ two very proud PFLAGS (Parents and Families of Lesbians and Gays) told me with excitement. This I had to witness and share.
Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake rocked up to officiate the mass wedding for same-sex couples. It was a statement of how far Maryland had some as a state toward equality.
The Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) Community Center of Baltimore and Central Maryland, which organized the celebration, had announced last week that Rawlings-Blake would serve as grand marshal for the event in recognition of her support of gay rights, and, boy, did the crowd love her! They whooped and cheered her and shouted ‘we love you’ as she took to the stage (albeit 20 minutes late!).
Baltimore Pride can pat itself on the back for organizing this celebration – it was the first time couples had come together for the first mass same-sex wedding ceremony in the state and more than a dozen couple celebrated at Druid Hill Park, with the local faith leaders and LGBT supporters cheering the officially named ‘WeDo Baltimore’ marriage event.
Event organizer and local LGBT activist Carrie Hiers had the idea for a large-scale marriage ceremony last year and in addition to managing the smooth running of the day, she too married her partner of over 12 years, Tonya Cook.
It was a beautiful, uplifting thing to behold, and a real sense of unity swelled within the crowd as the blessings took place.
With faith leaders, politicians and members of the LGBT community standing side by side, it made me realise just how far we’ve come. And it’s definitely in the right direction.
Claire Bolden McGill is a British expat who lived in Maryland for three years and moved back to the UK in August 2015. Claire wrote about her life as a British expat on the East Coast and now works in travel and hospitality PR in the UK. She still finds time to blog about her repatriation and the reverse culture shock that ensued – and she still hasn’t finished that novel, but she’s working on it. You can contact Claire via twitter on @clairebmcgill or via her blog From America to England.