The parades and other festivities are behind us. The flags and banners are starting to come down. Even the rainbow crosswalks in cities and towns across Maine will begin to fade until they are refreshed in 2025. But while Pride Month may be over, the hard-fought progress we celebrate each June must be protected year around, and we still have a lot of work to do.
I grew up in Portsmouth, Virginia, in the 1950s and 1960s. I vividly remember “Whites Only” restrooms and water fountains, lunch counters and city buses with seating restricted by race and other foul vestiges of the disgracefully oxymoronic “Separate but Equal” doctrine. Change took far too long — a century after the Civil War ended, I attended segregated schools until the ninth grade when my freshman class of more than 400 was “integrated” by one Black student. But when it gains momentum, change can come more soon. By the time I graduated high school, nearly half of our class was African American.
I moved to Maine nearly 45 years ago and eventually settled in Hallowell for more than 40 years. Sadly, one of my earliest memories of Maine’s LGBTQ+ community begins with a heinous crime that shocked the state and made headlines around the nation. On July 7, we will mark the 40th anniversary of that event which broke hearts but greatly energized Maine’s budding LGBTQ+ rights movement.
On July 7, 1984, 23-year-old Charlie Howard and his partner, Roy Ogden, were walking home from a potluck supper at the Unitarian Church in Bangor. A car pulled over to the curb, three teenagers got out and began to verbally harass and then chase them. Charlie died when his attackers caught up with him and threw him off the State Street Bridge into Kenduskeag Stream.
Ten years ago, a much better writer described this tragedy’s impact far better than I can:
“It’s easy enough to see what happened as a stupid crime, a kind of felonious accident, fueled by booze; hazing that got out of hand.
“Probably too easy.
“In the aftermath of this inoffensive young man’s death, the community underwent a period of self-examination that hasn’t ended to this day. To me that suggests one good thing came out of Charlie Howard’s death, but when I look back on it, I’m still overcome with feelings of sadness and shame. I don’t feel responsible, exactly, and I’d never lay that on the community.
“But it’s our town. We live here. Which means we have to live with Charlie, and continue trying to make it right.”
— Stephen King, apring 2014
In the four decades since Charlie Howard’s death, we have made great progress “to make it right.”
In 1978, Portland’s Gerry Talbot, Maine’s first African-American state legislator, had introduced the first bill to prohibit discrimination in the workplace, housing and education based on sexual orientation. It took 15 years for non-discrimination legislation to pass both houses of the legislature only to be vetoed by Gov. John McKernan in 1993. Passed again in 1999 and signed by Gov. Angus King, it was repealed in a 2000 referendum by 4,000 votes out of nearly 650,000 votes cast.
But Maine’s LGBTQ+ community was not to be denied and discrimination was definitively banned in 2005 with the support of Gov. John Baldacci. And we have since successfully taken on even more daunting challenges. Most notably, on Nov. 6, 2012, by a 53%-47% margin, Maine voters were the first in the nation to approve LGBTQ+ marriage equality by referendum — three years before the Supreme Court legalized it nationwide.
It’s also inspiring to know that Maine voters have elected many LGBTQ+ candidates and advocates to public office. In 1990, Kennebec County voters elected state Sen. Dale McCormack as Maine’s first openly gay state legislator, a seat now held by Maine’s first openly LGBTQ+ African American legislator, state Sen. Craig Hickman. In 2020, Biddeford’s Ryan Fecteau became the first LGBTQ+ speaker of the Maine House of Representatives. And perhaps most appropriately, in 2022, Rachel Talbot Ross, daughter of Gerry Talbot, was elected to succeed Ryan Fecteau to become Maine’s first African-American speaker of the House.
Clearly, we have much to celebrate. But we must also continue working “to make it right” by broadening and strengthening those protections and fending off potential threats posed by forces determined to turn back the clock. That is what makes me most proud to support Maine PRIDE!
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