And every year, the numbers grew, turning Up North Pride from a niche event into one of northern Michigan’s biggest and most beloved celebrations.
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By year two, the event was already expanding into other free programming, from youth outreach efforts to LGBTQ+ storytelling events to a popular drag night at The Little Fleet bar and food truck lot. That year, they said, about 250 people showed up for the first Visibility March. In 2014, Cameron co-founded Up North Pride. Carruthers went on to win the mayoral office in 2015 and won re-election to a second term last fall. One of the people sitting on that city commission was Carruthers, who is openly gay.
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The update made it illegal for employers to fire or otherwise discriminate against employees due to sexual orientation and set similar rules for landlords, apartment complexes, and other housing facilities. In particular, Cameron recalls October 2010, when the Traverse City City Commission voted to update the city’s anti-discrimination ordinance. In Traverse City, at least, things have changed a bit in the past 20 years. There was not much visibility, aside from maybe a sticker on the door of a bookstore or The Bookie Joint, which I think is the first place I remember seeing a rainbow sticker.” “My wife, Elon, graduated from Traverse City High School in 1991, and she remembers very well how it was here for queer people at the time,” Cameron told Northern Express. Jonny Cameron, who co-founded Up North Pride and serves as its chair, echoes Carruthers’ words. “It was not a welcoming community or an accepting community to diversity, at all.” “When I first moved in the early '90s, it was a very different community,” said Traverse City Mayor Jim Carruthers. In honor of Up North Pride’s 2020 Pride Week celebrations (which, because of COVID-19, will run virtually in 2020, from June 22 through June 28), Northern Express took stock of where things stand for the LGBT community today, including how far we’ve come over the years - and how far we still have left to go. It’s an event that has become, in the six years since it began, the single largest LGBTQ+ Pride march in the state of Michigan.īut Traverse City wasn’t always known for being an open-minded and welcoming community to LGBTQ+ populations, and most other smaller towns throughout northern Michigan still don’t have that reputation. In 2019, the Up North Pride Traverse City Visibility March drew more than 6,000 attendees. LGBTQ+ Up North: How Far Have We Come? And how far is left to go? By Craig Manning | June 20, 2020