Susan J. Demas
As Pride events prepare across Michigan, officials in Ottawa County aren’t quite sure what to expect, but they are doing their best to celebrate the LGBTQ+ community.
“The goal here is to create a welcoming, fun, festive space for everyone,” says Kate Leighton-Colburn, executive director of Netherlands-based Out on the Lakeshore. “Really everyone. This is not the opposite of exclusive.”
Pride events
For a complete list of Pride events in Grand Haven and the Netherlands, visit ghpride.org/festival or outonthelakeshore.org/holland-pride.
Grand Haven, which will host its second annual Pride festival on Saturday, will feature live music, food trucks, vendors, a drag show and family-friendly activities.
Despite resistance from the influential Ottawa County GOP, organizers say they are undeterred.
“Anyone who has been in any area of Pride has seen what that backlash looks like,” said Chelsea Folk, co-chair of the Grand Haven festival. told The Grand Haven Tribune this week. “We didn’t really feel it. We see it. We saw the letter that came from the Ottawa County GOP, but we really have a great community in Grand Haven.
The Ottawa Republican Party called Pride events “devastating” for the local community and concluded that children are victims of “sexual solicitation” at such events.
“Because what happened last year was devastating to the Grand Haven community and Ottawa County at large, we feel a responsibility to inform the public about what took place and ask our responsible citizens to spread awareness,” the spokesperson said. The GOP writes this in its May newsletter.
“If you care about protecting children and preserving family values in Ottawa County, we encourage you to take a deep dive into the candidates running for this year’s primary election on August 6. Incidents such as sexually soliciting children in our province will stop if the people who represent us make it stop.”
The provincial party, together with the candidates it supports are members or supporters of Ottawa Impact, a far-right fundamentalist group formed in 2021 amid frustrations with the province’s and state’s COVID-19 mitigation measures.
The group currently has a controlling majority of six seats on the eleven-member board. County commissioners on the board have shared concerns about drag shows and other Pride-related events that all ages can participate in.
The OI-led board members have gone so far as to claim that Pride events “promote sexual promiscuity” and “groom children.”
They have also repeatedly expressed dismay over the provincial health department’s presence at Pride events.
“At a time in our nation’s history where trust in health care systems is in question, I wonder why our Department of Health would choose to participate in Grand Haven’s Pride Festival,” Commissioner Allison Miedema said at a meeting last June. “By being present, the (OCDPH) promotes sexual promiscuity, which in turn may assist future public health clients who will seek positive STD testing, along with mental health services.”
Administrative Health Officer Adeline Hambley — who the board tried to demote and later fire before agreeing to let her stay in her role earlier this year to settle a lawsuit — said the department plans to have the same presence as always at Pride events.
“We will provide a stand [monkeypox] vaccinations and education, as well as materials and information about our STDs and family planning clinic,” Hambley told the newspaper Deposit. “It’s just like all previous years: we are not a sponsor.”
The board, led by chairman Joe Moss and vice-chair Sylvia Rhodea, who co-founded the Ottawa Impact political action committee three years ago, defended a resolution last year that claims “protect the innocence of the child“by prohibiting County personnel and resources from being used for “activities, programs, events, content or institutions that support, normalize or encourage the sexualization of youth.”
It is unclear whether Moss and Rhodea plan to invoke the resolution in response to the OCDPH’s participation in Pride events this year. As part of her settlement agreement with the county reached in February, Hambley has additional legal rights until the end of the year if the county tries to fire her again.
In the meantime, she said she plans to do her job to serve the entire community.
“Our plan is to continue as we always have,” Hambley said. “We provide services to everyone.”
Leighton-Colburn said the Holland festival, which takes place June 29, will feature a 5K walk/run, a party in Centennial Park, as well as performances, a signature cocktail event and a speaker series.
“We will have an intergenerational panel to talk about the similarities and differences between generations of queer communities and what we can learn from each other,” she said, as well as a forum to discuss the AIDS epidemic that peaked in the 1980s and 1990s. “We’ll have some people who were kind of in the thick of it at the time, and we’ll also have some people who can talk about the medical advances.”
She said Pride is important for the queer community to ensure everyone feels they belong.
“We want to ensure that the Netherlands is a place where everyone can thrive,” she said. “I think festive events like this raise morale, bring people together and ultimately make the community as a whole all the better for it.”
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