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Big Sky Pride President Kev Hamm spoke at Montana State University-Northern Wednesday evening - his second talk of the day in Havre - about his experience growing up gay in Helena, his work organizing gay pride events and issues facing the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer community.
Hamm said growing up in Helena, especially during his high school years, was difficult. As a teenager in the 1980s, he said, he remembers how posters from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, warning against Gay Related Immune Disorder or GRIDS - the name for what is now called AIDS, auto immune deficiency syndrome - and how if someone had gay sex they would contract the disease and die, hung on the wall of a health class he took.
He said he can't remember specific people or incidents where he was treated negatively, but he recalls his high school years as being negative.
The evening talk was the second that Hamm gave in Havre Wednesday. At noon he gave a talk in the Fireside Room of Northern's Student Union Building. Both talks were sponsored by Northern's Office of Diversity Awareness and Multicultural Programs.
Once he finished high school, Hamm said, he was eager to leave Helena.
"When I graduated, I really wanted out," he said.
After briefly attending Montana State University in Bozeman, he moved to Portland, Oregon, a city which he said jokingly is what Missoula hopes eventually to be.
Hamm said that while in Portland he finished "coming out" - the process by which individuals in the LGBTQ community discover who they are and come to terms with their sexuality.
"It's done in stages and, sometimes, you think you are done coming out and then something happens and you find out, 'Oh I wasn't finished yet,'" Hamm said.
Coming out is a difficult process because it varies with each person, so people cannot show others how to arrive at that point, he said.
Hamm said it was in Portland where he took part in his first Pride event, a gathering of members of the LGBTQ community and their allies to celebrate their identity and celebrate the strides they have made.
He said that growing up in Montana there were no pride celebrations like Big Sky Pride, the state's annual gay pride parade that began after he had moved out of the state.
After three years in Portland, Hamm said, he moved to several cities including Phoenix, Dallas and Houston.
He said he had friends who questioned the need for Pride parades, which some of his friends considered to be weird.
In the 1990s, issues affecting the LGBTQ community became the center of national debate Hamm said, debate on laws such as "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" that stopped gays and lesbians serving in the military from being open about their sexuality, and the federal Defense of Marriage Act that, for federal purposes, restricted the definition of marriage to being between a man and a woman. He said such legislation were attacks on the gay community and attempts to make them second-class citizens.
"It was an attempt to say, 'You are not really people.' Well, I don't like that at all," he said.
Though he knew the history of the Pride events, Hamm said, it was then that he discovered why they were necessary.
He said a big gap exists in the number of younger and older openly gay men and many older lesbians, bi-sexual and transgender people who need access to services and are discriminated against, something he said made him angry.
"And instead of being that angry person in the corner yelling at the sky, I thought I would channel my anger into something worthwhile, and I put it into Pride," he said.
Hamm said he takes part in pride because it reminds him of all the good things the LGBTQ community has and can accomplish.
In 2002, he moved to Caribeau, Maine, a place, Hamm said, where the wider community did not have a problem with LGBTQ people, mainly because they had a presence, were well-liked and known in the community.
The experience was a turning point for him, he said, and he realized that he had left his home town.
"And my home town was filled with people who hated me and have probably grown up, but they don't know me any more," he said
Hamm returned to Helena for his 10-year high school reunion. At his reunion, people came and apologized for the way they treated him, Hamm said.
He moved back to Montana in 2006, he said.
Many people in the LGBTQ community leave their home towns for what he called "the gay ghettos" - places such as San Francisco, New York City and London that are seen as more accepting of the LGBTQ community.
"Those people know us," Hamm said. "The cities know us. They don't have a problem with the gays."
He founded nine years ago The-Soon-to-be-Named Sunday Social Group, composed of people his age and older who left Montana but returned and younger people who never left They live in Montana's large cities, he said.
"It's interesting, because we have this great group of people, but we are also out in the community," he said.
Pride Inc. that used to organize Big Sky Pride disbanded in 2014 and announced they would not be able to hold the annual Pride celebration.
Hamm said that, when the news came, he was contacted by a friend who said they should be the ones who put on the event. Hamm took the helm, filled out necessary paperwork with the IRS, and put it on. The event is now organized by Big Sky Pride.
That year, Big Sky Pride held their parade in Butte, where Gov. Steve Bullock spoke,
Last year, the event was held in Great Falls where Bullock and then-Superintendent of Public Instruction Denise Juneau, who later that year revealed she is a lesbian, spoke.
Hamm said the Pride parade brings not only a celebration of identity and people to the cities where Big Sky Pride takes place, but also money to businesses within the communities in which they are held.
Business owners have been supportive, and they want the parade to come back, Hamm said.
This year, Big Sky Pride will be June 16-18 in Billings. Hamm said this is in part because Billings is one of the few major cities in Montana that has not passed a nondiscrimination ordinance that prevents discrimination against LGBTQ people in housing, businesses and public accommodations.
Allies outside the LGBTQ community have been instrumental in success, such as getting homosexual acts removed from the state sexual deviance laws, he added.
In the 1997 case Gryczan v. Montana, the state Supreme Court upheld the ruling of a lower court that laws against homosexual acts violated individual privacy rights. With the help of outside allies, Hamm said, the LGBTQ community was able to persuade the state Legislature to remove language against homosexual acts in the state's sexual deviancy laws in 2013, something he said took a long time.
"And it was because the people who didn't know us still believed the horrible awful things they were told," Hamm said.
That is why when he organizes Pride, Hamm said, to make them visible in the communities they are in.
"When we are visable, when we are known, we are liked," Ham said. "People don't want to be, 'Oh I hate that other,' because we are no longer that other; we are a person."
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