One of the Williamsburg area’s first Pride events is Saturday from noon to 5 p.m. at Jamestown Beach Event Park.
It’s the brainchild of grassroots group Virginia Organizing and a coalition of faith groups such as Williamsburg Baptist, St. Martin’s Episcopal and the Williamsburg Unitarian Universalist churches. The day will be full of music, vendors, yard games and all-ages activities.
WHRO sat down with Brian Brewer of the planning committee to talk about what it means for the LGBTQ+ community.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Nick McNamara: What inspired you to start Williamsburg Area Pride this year?
Brian Brewer: There are events that take place from Richmond on down to Newport News and Virginia Beach.
However, nothing was hyperlocal for Williamsburg residents and Williamsburg-area residents. There aren't really the sorts of gathering places that have traditionally existed for members of the LGBTQ community; affinity groups, bars, that sort of thing. So, where are we together, even who are we? And that was really the biggest question. Can we identify and meet one another and come together as a community in a day of fun and celebration of just who we are?
And I think another reason why those faith-based organizations chose to do it this year is we're facing unprecedented attack; our community, the LGBTQ community, is facing unprecedented attack at all levels of the national government.
We're particularly concerned about the attacks on the trans community as well as immigrants. LGBTQ people are part of every demographic, every group you can think of, so anything that affects anyone in that LGBTQ community affects all of us, right? We're already seeing basic human rights being stripped of LGBTQ people, or trans people specifically, in parts of the country.
So, we're here to say we're here, we're queer, we're proud of it; we're your friends, we're your neighbors, we are your family.
NM: What does it mean to have the backing of several religious groups for the event?
BB: You don't need something like that necessarily. In fact, a lot of members of the LGBTQ community have a kind of trauma response to having grown up in conservative faith-based traditions that say God created man and woman, so that's how you're born and leave it at that; or God meant for men and women to marry, and not anything else.
Not everyone responds well to that, and, you know, certainly we've made a point that it's important for them to get the message out that there is an affirming faith; there are people of faith, there are people here who have felt shunned by their religious groups, and now they have a home.
NM: What do you think opportunities like this that bring the LGBTQ community together can do to help people come into their own and feel accepted?
BB: I can speak from my own experience on what makes a Pride event meaningful for me as a gay man, cisgender man.
Growing up in the '80s in kind of a fundamentalist Baptist background and also military adjacent, I learned pretty early on that when the idea of sex, sexuality, and dating became known to me, that there were certain expectations and anything else was, you know, you're going to hell.
I didn't know anyone else who was gay. I knew there must have been people in theory, but back then, it was just really difficult for folks to come out.
Going to college, I encountered my first group. There was the Gay and Lesbian Student Organization at the university I attended. That was just so uplifting. It's a moment of connection, it's a moment of realization that you're not alone, it's a moment of possibility where there was nothing but negativity in the past.
Those social networks are really important to long-term mental health. And with a suicide crisis affecting the LGBT community, which is coming from all the negativity, and especially directed at youth. Things like this, that can elevate one's mood and make one feel not so alone, I think we know that that is beneficial to anybody — no matter who you are.
NM: What does success look like for the event?
BB: Being our first year, this is like a toe in the water for us. We wanted to provide an opportunity for vendors and businesses to participate. We were very successful there. I think we have more than 30 participating vendors and sponsoring organizations. We hope to build on that in the future.
A success is that folks come with their families, they take advantage of the children's area that we'll have set up if they're bringing their children with them; that's being sponsored by Williamsburg Unitarian Universalists.
There will be a live DJ, and we want to see people dancing there. We want to see people interacting with the local businesses and knowing who they can shop from and feel that they're in a safe space when they do that. We want people to make connections.
And from that, we’d like to build as I hope, and members of the planning committee hope, that this will be a springboard to future activities.
