By William Stieglitz
With Pride Month bringing to Suffolk County both joyous parades and calls for greater support of LGBTQ+ community members, TBR News Media reached out to two local nonprofits, Gender Equality New York and Pride for Youth (a division of the Long Island Crisis Center), to ask what issues most impact LGBTQ+ people in Suffolk right now.
Juli Grey-Owens, executive director of GENY, founded the organization in 2016 in the aftermath of the group Empire State Pride Agenda disbanding. She said that after the passage of marriage equality in New York and nationwide, “all the LGBT people who were giving money to keep the organization up and running left.” “And so with them going out of business,” she continued, “there was no statewide advocacy organization to fight for transgender civil rights.”
So, she founded GENY to empower transgender, gender nonbinary and intersex New Yorkers, and GENY now provides educational training for Suffolk and Nassau police academies, local hospitals and houses of worship.
PFY, an LGBTQ+ health and human services organization, was founded in 1993 in response to its parent organization receiving many calls on its crisis support hotlines from people looking for LGBTQ+-based services. “Back in 1993, nothing like us existed in a suburban setting,” explained Tawni Engel, associate executive director of LICS, adding that PFY became the first LGBTQ+ organization in the U.S. to offer the services it did in a suburban area.
PFY now offers 32 programs and services throughout Suffolk, Nassau and Queens, including social spaces for queer youth, family counseling, housing support and HIV testing and education. “I feel like if you name the service, we offer it,” Engel said.
Both directors said one of the most prevalent issues facing LGBTQ+ Long Islanders now is hate and disinformation, especially toward the local trans community, leading to fear, bias and discrimination. “There are people walking around that believe that transgender kids are getting surgery at eight years old; that is a fallacy,” said Grey-Owens. “There are people walking around thinking that school nurses are handing out hormones. I mean, school nurses aren’t even allowed to hand out a cough drop.”
Engel also spoke on the rhetoric around trans community members, saying it is often dehumanizing and federal actions like the erasure of the “T” from the now “LGB+” pages on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website don’t help. “I think the message that that sends to people, especially young people, is just so demoralizing.”
Funding for services is also a major issue. With diversity, equality and inclusion programs dissolving, she explained, corporate sponsorships PFY used to rely on are falling through. “We have received many letters, come to find out they were sent to us illegally by the government, telling us that ‘x’ amount of dollars were gonna be pulled literally within twenty-four hours. It got reinstated, but it’s just been this roller coaster ride.”
The complexity these issues have on Pride Month, said Engel, was a consideration when organizing PFY’s annual pride gala and fundraiser. “It absolutely is a fun celebratory night of queer celebration and celebrating pride. But at the same time, especially this year … how do we strike that balance between educating and facing the realities of what’s going on, but also celebrating and taking care of ourselves?” she said. “We kind of started off with, okay, let’s talk about the realities of what’s going on, and then just dance our butts off the rest of the night and take care of ourselves and each other, you know.”
The gala featured Glen Cove city councilmember Marsha Silverman (D), who is the first-out lesbian councilmember on Long Island on the North Shore. Both Engel and Grey-Owens emphasized the importance of involvement and support from local officials, with Grey-Owens being a member of the Suffolk County Legislature’s LGBTQ advisory board and the LGBTQ task force for Huntington.
“Attend a school board meeting,” said Grey-Owens. “Make sure that the school board is representative or has representation or is aware of our community. Go to town council meetings. Visit your legislators… These are all people that have local offices here on Long Island, so it’s not like you have to travel to DC to see somebody. You can do it right here on Long Island.”
For more information visit the GENY website: www.genderequalityny.org.
