Finding Pride Through Generations

Contributed

Much has changed since Amy Pezzani (left) and her partner Danielle (right) fell in love, when Amy's daughter Eva (center) was young, she lamented that Amy and Danielle couldn't get married. While much legislative progress has been made, the road remains long and arduous ahead of LGBTQIA+ folks in the Trump era.

Even at a young age, Eva Jentzsch understood "Pride." In 2010, the five-year-old asked, "Mom, are you and Danielle going to get married?" Amy, her mom, sighed and explained, "in this country, girls can't marry other girls." Eva's universe collapsed. She demanded of Amy, "No! How do you know that? Who told you that?"

Fourteen years later Amy Pezzani still giggles at her daughter's innate Pride. But the 52-year-old knows her daughter's incredulity was also blissful ignorance. Today, Amy is proof positive of LGBTQIA+ advances. The chief executive officer of a Fort Collins, Colorado food bank had once subsisted on food stamps and hid her true self. That world, for her, at least, is history. She's out, successful, and has "zero shits left to give."

Amy's story demonstrates the necessity of Pride and why we celebrate it.

In 1990, Amy left St. Louis for college without much sense of her sexual orientation. Sure, she crushed on a girl in high school and was fully immersed in St. Louis' queer scene. But she, from all appearances, played the part of the straight girl. Besides, in her conservative Catholic family "I could be anything, but I couldn't be gay." And she surely chose just about the worst place in America to explore her sexuality — the Ozarks.

Covering northern Arkansas and southern Missouri, the Ozarks Plateau is home to poverty, Pentecostals, and prejudice. Second only to Idaho in hate groups, the Ozarks is where I met Amy. We attended college together at Missouri State University. Located in a city about the size of Erie, Springfield was no college town. The Pentecostals set the cultural tone.

Similar to Springfield, in Erie it was the Catholic Church that established the cultural barometer. Like the Pentecostals, the Holy Mother Church was not tolerant. In the 1980s, the Church reaffirmed that same-sex relations remained "intrinsically disordered." In this milieu, laws against same-sex dancing and drag shows, much less sexual relationships, kept Erieites closeted. Life for LGBTQIA+ in Erie was much as it was in the Ozarks. Craig Morton, a Springfield native, admitted to me "I never thought I'd be out. I had never even met a closeted gay man."

But small acts made cracks in the wall. In 1987, Pope John Paul II said of AIDS patients, "God loves you all, without distinction, without limit." For many queer Catholics, this was an earth-shattering affirmation. And by the early 1990s, signs of progress emerged, even in Erie. In 1991, activists, led by Michael Mahler, formed the Erie chapter of the League of Gay and Lesbian Voters. The very next year, the League helped defeat a "gay baiting" Republican in a 1992 state assembly race.

Such LGBTQIA+ activism was still unthinkable in the Ozarks. In 1990, the year Amy and Craig started college, the KKK burned a cross at the "gay park," located less than a mile from Missouri State University. The Grand Dragon assured local journalists, "We have nothing bad to say about [African Americans]." Instead, he admitted, "we have a lot of bad to say about gays."

Despite the hate, Amy searched. She told me, "When something is oppressed and you can't be yourself, the subculture emerges." And she craved that subculture without knowing exactly why. Eventually, she met someone, Debbie. Craig, meanwhile, took a longer path. But when he did come out, he laughed and admitted, "I exploded out of the closet." An activist, he led the university's BI-GALA organization. On national coming out day, he promoted the event by "coming out" to the Ozarks on the region's television networks. Thankfully, his parents had already grudgingly accepted this new reality. They realized, as Craig put it, "Having me gay was better than not having me at all." For Amy, the path was not so (ahem) straight.

Amy and Debbie stayed together for three years. In that time, Amy graduated, got a job, and became executive director of the largest (church-affiliated) food bank in the Ozarks. With friends, Amy was out. But at work, Amy explained to me, "in the 1990s Ozarks, you weren't allowed to be gay." To keep her job, she hid who she was. Then there were her parents. Amy hid Debbie from them as well. Eventually her mom trapped her in a basement and demanded, "Amy, are you gay?" When she admitted she and Debbie were in a relationship, her mom replied, "I love you, but I won't accept it." 

In those years, Amy came to understand the contours of her sexuality. She told me, "I don't like putting a label on who I am. Throughout my life, I've been attracted to the whole person first and sometimes the person is biologically male and sometimes female." She eventually married a man. They moved to Colorado and had a baby, Eva. Her husband, sadly, struggled with his marriage vows. Amy, left a single mom, moved on. Amy jokes that she lacks "a type." But when she encountered Danielle, she thought to herself, "I must know this woman."

Unlike Amy, whose presentation matches her gender, Danielle's does not. Outdoorsy and a sports lover, Danielle wears her short hair combed to the side. Her preferred outfits consist of pants, button-down https://www.cbsnews.com/news/catholic-church-fights-gay-unions/shirts and sweater vests. This caused problems even in liberal Boulder, Colorado. One night, the University of Colorado senior walked across campus and three men attacked and beat her. Campus police ignored it. A few credits short of graduation, Danielle packed her bags and moved to Seattle, Washington. It was Amy who wooed her home.

Thirteen years later, they are still together. When Amy told her mom about Danielle, her mother said, "I thought that was a phase." As for Amy's dad, his deep Christian faith proved an obstacle. But the world had changed. Both eventually came to adore Danielle. As for the rest of the family, "they think Danielle is awesome." At home, Amy feared Eva might suffer from discrimination by having two moms. To her surprise, no parent ever seemed to care. And by junior high, Amy realized, to her delight, "Eva was cool AF because she had two moms."

In 2020, Amy conducted an Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion assessment. When a board member questioned why it was important, Amy, for the first time ever, spoke about Danielle with the group. Although she regularly mentioned Danielle in one-on-one conversations, this was different. She told her colleagues "People should not feel like they can't bring their whole self to work. I want to create an environment where they can." This marked a turning point. Today, Amy told me, "It felt freeing that a weight had been lifted off my shoulders now that I named it in a group. It didn't matter to them, and this is how the world has changed for the better."

As anyone who has lived in the Ozarks or Erie can tell you, LGBTQIA+ progress is real. In 2003, the Erie Diocese Bishop, Donald Trautman, led the nation's charge against same-sex marriage. Twenty years later, his successor, Lawrence Persico says of such unions: "We have to be open to others and treat others with respect and dignity."

The advance is authentic but so is the backlash. For Danielle, her "bathroom choices are vexed with anxiety and grief." The right wing's conflation of pedophilia with LGBTQIA+ Americans has bled into the mainstream. Amy told me, "Danielle gets yelled at and spit at in public bathrooms all the time." Strangers scream at her: "You are a pedophile!" Amy's fix for this is to signal Danielle's gender by calling out loudly to her as they enter a public bathroom, "Hey Babe, do you have a tampon for me?"

But this humor is merely a band-aid for the pain.

Curious about the backlash, I called my old Missouri State history professor, Dr. Holly Baggett. Baggett has chronicled the LGBTQIA+ experience in the Ozarks. At the university, she helped secure same-sex partner benefits and the inclusion of sexual orientation as a protected class. These advances convinced her, "I thought we were rolling along." But the Trump era has, in her mind, pushed the Ozarks backwards. In a recent school board race, LGBTQIA+ issues predominated. Her preferred candidate came in dead last. The bigots won. She terms the current atmosphere "God-awful."

Craig, who now lives in Upstate New York with his husband, sees the backlash, too. He is, as he told me, "Pessimistically optimistic." His Ozarks upbringing tells him "I can survive anything. I know I have resilience." But he worries that the progress of the past years means that for some in the LGBTQIA+ community, "Their whole life [has become] one long brunch." He, nevertheless, believes, "Stonewall shows us that we will take quite a bit, but we'll fight back."

Amy agrees. She sees the progress but also burns with fury over Danielle's experiences. Her hope lies with Eva. For her daughter's generation, Pride is normal. They expect it. Two years ago, Eva went before the State Board of Education to demand it. In 2022, Colorado considered a "Don't Say Gay" bill modeled after Florida's law. A 17-year-old Eva reacted the same way her five-year-old self-did — with Pride. 

Eva hates public speaking. From the womb, she was an anxious kid. But the Colorado bill constituted an attack on her family. Speaking to the State Board of Education, she demanded, "I have two moms. As a kid, I felt embarrassed. I want younger kids to know it is a normal and a unique experience to grow up in a household of feminine power. Love is love. When we teach our kids about LGBTQIA+ we are not talking about their sexual encounters. We are talking about their stories and perspectives. All families are always appropriate at all levels."

We live in an era of backlash politics. Eva shows us that Pride is how to respond.

Jeff Bloodworth is a professor of American political history at Gannon University. You can follow him on Twitter/X @jhueybloodworth or reach him at bloodwor003@gannon.edu