Pride Fest seeking allies in fight for rights

By Rosemary Winters – The Salt Lake Tribune

The Utah Pride Center wants attendees of this week’s pride festival to bring more than rainbow flags and sunblock. Gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender revelers have an assignment: Bring a straight friend.

“Our allies are very important to us,” says Michael Westley, spokesman for the pride center. “Blacks didn’t get equal rights until whites took action. Women didn’t get the vote until men voted to give them the vote. We need our allies now.”

Riding a surge of activism after the passage — and last week’s California Supreme Court validation — of Proposition 8, the Golden State’s voter-approved, gay-marriage ban, organizers of the Utah Pride Festival are placing extra emphasis on political action in the event’s 26th year.

The theme: “Pride. Voice. Action.”

The three-day gathering draws close to 20,000 people each year and boasts a parade eclipsed in attendance only by Utah’s iconic Days of ’47 festivities, heralding the arrival of Mormon pioneers in 1847.

On Sunday, renowned activist Cleve Jones will lead the pride parade as grand marshal. Jones served as an intern in the 1970s for Harvey Milk, the slain San Francisco city supervisor and first openly gay man to hold a major elected office. Jones, founder of the AIDS Memorial Quilt, was played by Emile Hirsch in the 2008 film “Milk.”

The pride center and other advocates encourage Utahns who are gay or transgender to be “out,” both for the individuals’ well-being and as a way to propel greater acceptance of LGBT people and support for their civil rights.

An Equality Utah poll released earlier this year found that 70 percent of Utahns know someone who is gay or transgender, and 83 percent support at least basic legal protections, such as hospital visitation and inheritance rights, for same-sex couples.

“Politically, [coming out] is the single most important step that any of us can take,” says Jones, who will spearhead a political rally on Saturday amid the usual pop concerts and dance parties of the festival. “When we reveal our true nature, it becomes much harder for our friends and families to take away our rights.”

For the first time at the festival, a giant map will be used to illustrate where, in Utah, attendees hail from. On the “Pin Me Out” map, one color pin will be for out, gay Utahns, another for those who are not out and a third for straight allies.

“This tells us three things: Who we are, where we are and how we live,” Westley says. “It will show us where we need to do some work.”

Matthew Burbank, a University of Utah political science professor, says pride festivals provide the gay-rights movement with at least one important asset: visibility.

“One of the things that helps with any kind of political movement is that indeed there’s a human face to it,” Burbank says. “To the extent that this becomes an issue about friends and family and people that you know … it becomes something that has a more direct impact on people than if it is seen as something that involves people you don’t know.”

Jon Rosky waited until he was 30 years old to come out to his siblings and parents. But doing so created an activist in the family: His straight brother, Cliff.

Cliff Rosky, a University of Utah law professor who serves on a legal advisory panel for Equality Utah, plans to do the reverse of the pride center’s request. He’s a straight ally who will bring his gay brother to the festival. The pair plans to march in Sunday’s parade together.

Rosky was 19 when he learned his older brother is gay. He quit his Amherst College fraternity and later attended Yale Law School, developing a focus in sexuality and family law.

“I was surprised that I was participating in a fraternity that made anti-gay jokes every week,” Cliff Rosky recalls. “It was a wake-up call that treating everyone with dignity doesn’t always come naturally. It takes work.”

After law school, Rosky practiced in San Francisco before becoming a research fellow at the UCLA School of Law’s Williams Institute, a think tank devoted to LGBT legal matters. He filed an amicus brief in the California Supreme Court case that, temporarily, legalized gay marriage in that state last year.

“We always think it’s kind of funny that in the family [Cliff's] the straight one, and he grew up wearing pride flags and living in the Castro,” Jon Rosky says. “I’m living in a semi-rural place [in New Jersey], where the nearest gay bar is 50 miles away.”

Both brothers have promised, at different times, to be there for each other.

“It’s a very emotional and rewarding feeling to have someone almost dedicate their life’s work to helping me in an indirect way,” Jon Rosky says. “He certainly could have helped me in many ways and gone on to be a patent attorney or a tax attorney. He chose to make this his life’s work.”

The pride center hopes this year’s festival creates a few more such allies.