A proud 1,000 revel in ‘positive gay community’

BY KIMBERLY C. MOORE • FLORIDA TODAY

MELBOURNE — More than 1,000 of the Space Coast’s gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender residents spent Sunday afternoon at the Wickham Park Pavilion, strolling past nearly 90 vendors, listening to live music and letting their children play.

“It promotes diversity, and it gives members someplace to go and feel safe,” said Trish Brown, vice president of The Living Room. The group, founded in 2005, organized Sunday’s Space Coast Pride Festival. The event supports the local “GLBT” community.

The festival included three live bands, six female impersonators, a disc jockey and a children’s play area. In addition, free commitment ceremonies were performed throughout the afternoon; gay marriage in Florida is illegal. Adoption by gay couples also is illegal in Florida.

Brown said their members are just like everyone else in the community who wants to go out to dinner on Friday nights, take their children to parks and playgrounds on Saturdays and go to church as a family on Sundays.

“Some places, if two moms or two dads bring their kids, they get discriminated against,” said Brown, who is transgender and is transitioning to a female identity. Brown lost her job last year at a large local retailer (she declined to say which one) when she informed her bosses that she would be starting hormone therapy and dressing in women’s clothes.

She said the GLBT community is not out to convert heterosexual people. “I don’t get a toaster if I convert someone,” she joked.

But she was serious when she said straight people who have questions about the GLBT lifestyle should simply ask. “The stereotypes out there are not true,” she said.

This is the second year The Living Room has organized the festival. There were no protesters at Sunday’s event.

And it was the second year that Pastors Jerry Seay and Mike Lufriu set up a tent to tell people about their church, East Coast Christian Community.

“I don’t think the Bible condemns loving relationships,” said Seay, who has been partners with Lufriu for 18 years. They joined together in a church commitment ceremony in 1992, participated in a civil ceremony in Vermont in 2002 and got married in Calgary, Alberta, on the day in 2005 that gay marriage became legal there.

Seay, 53, said he struggled silently for many years with his homosexuality because there were no events like Sunday’s festival. “This would’ve changed my life,” he said. “I did not even come out until I was 30. I did not even know there was a positive gay community.”

Seay and Lufriu started their church to provide a welcoming place for gay people. Many conservative churches point to passages in the Bible, particularly to the book of Leviticus, that say homosexuality is “detestable” and that homosexuals should be put to death.

“I’ll accept them and show them that God is love and not condemnation,” Seay said.