Making Space to Belong: Straits Pride Celebrates Five Years

The LGBTQ+ organization gears up for June events, a September festival, and lots of connection points in between

By Jillian Manning | June 1, 2024

In the late 2010s, the queer community on Mackinac Island felt like it existed “under the radar” for Straits Pride co-founder and vice president Kyrsten Cavazos.

“There really weren’t opportunities to have spaces for the queer community to engage socially,” she says, noting that most gatherings were casual, word-of-mouth events. She’d been living on the island working in hospitality for five years, and it was in 2018 that the idea for Straits Pride was born with friends Travis Sredzinski, Bart Berkshire, and Philip Rice.

“We took all of those ideas that we had just been sharing and spitballing over several years as friends and thought about how we could make those actual formal events and activities and programs … under a new umbrella name of an actual group called Straits Pride,” Cavazos says.

While the founders were on the island, they knew that there were people in St. Ignace, Les Cheneaux, Cheboygan, and Mackinaw City who were looking for the same sense of community. By 2019, Straits Pride was officially a nonprofit ready to “provide advocacy and support, encourage understanding, and promote visibility for the queer community in Michigan’s Straits of Mackinac region,” per their website.

“We made that space for ourselves,” Cavazos tells Northern Express. “We love it here and we love living here. And we want people to know, [including] young kids in our community, that if they’re growing up queer they don’t have to flee this little town to go to a big city because that’s where they have to be to belong. They can belong right here.”

The First Years

Cavazos and the team were excited for the launch of Straits Pride—and had built a jam-packed inaugural calendar of events—but they were also wary of how the community might respond.

“In a rural region like this, gay communities are generally viewed by most of the general public as something that really just exists in large metro areas. We knew we were going to be pushing back against that mentality from the start, and we were ready for that,” Cavazos explains. “We wanted to live in a small rural community like what we have here in northern Michigan, and we didn’t want our queerness to deter us or anyone else. So that was a big part of our mission in that first year, was being as involved as we could in the local community.”

She says many Straits Pride members are active community volunteers, involved in arts, culture, and theater, own local businesses, and have started and grown their families in the region. Those touchpoints helped the nonprofit get support—to the point that Cavazos says almost every business on Mackinac Island now displays one of Straits Pride’s rainbow stickers in their windows.

But after a busy and successful first year in 2019, the pandemic struck.

“We were devastated to think … that because we were such a young organization, we might lose steam and lose the support because we had only been around for less than a year,” Cavazos says.

But the all-volunteer organization got to work—Cavazos credits the think-on-your-feet skills of folks who work in the changeable world of hospitality—and managed to adjust almost all of their programming to be outdoors. There were patio coffee hours at Watercolor Cafe, bike trips around the island, and barbecues to attend (in addition to the less thrilling Zoom happy hours).

The Big Celebration

By the time the world opened back up, Straits Pride had had plenty of time to find out what worked for the community and what didn’t. Those casual, low-key events and meet-ups proved to be just as valuable as fun nights out or marching in a parade. The takeaways from that inclusive programming helped them develop their next big step: a Pride Festival.

In 2022, the organization hosted their first festival. June was the goal as it’s nationally recognized as Pride Month, but between the Lilac Festival and the high season for tourism, the timing wasn’t quite right. Like Up North Pride’s festival in Traverse City, September was a better bet for planning and attendance.

“It was just a much bigger event than we ever could have imagined,” Cavazos says of the first festival. “We were blown away by the support and the turnout at each and every single element of our first Pride. And then the second pride was the same way; we were just astounded by the amount of unfamiliar faces that we were seeing… We love seeing the same faces all the time and having those same supporters, but to know that people were willing to make those trips to come all the way across the lake to Mackinac Island to celebrate Pride, and to celebrate Pride with us, was just incredible.”

She adds that the rural nature of northern Michigan can make it challenging to connect, but people regularly drive not just to the festival but to other Staits Pride events from southern towns like Wolverine and northern cities above the bridge. Being more mobile and hosting events in the greater Mackinac Straits region are two of the top goals of the nonprofit moving forward.

Straits Pride’s third annual Pride Festival will be held Sept. 19-22 on Mackinac Island, but even though June isn’t the month for their cornerstone event, that doesn’t mean the organization isn’t busy. (Check out the sidebar for the full list of their June events—many of which are free!)

The Larger Picture

And while Cavazos is excited about all of the celebrations to come, she acknowledges that those happy moments are balanced with challenges here in Michigan and throughout the country. Though she finds that “living in Michigan is such a blessing as a queer person” thanks to the current state government’s protections of LGBTQ+ rights, safety, accessibility and inclusivity, that’s not the case everywhere.

“It’s heart wrenching living in Michigan, to know that we have protections here in our state that other states don’t,” Cavazos says.

Despite Michigan being a relatively safe place for the queer community, Straits Pride events do draw protesters, both at events and on social media. Cavazos says that people who aren’t part of the community and have never been to Mackinac Island will still seek them out for online or verbal confrontations or even escalate to acts of vandalism, particularly on Pride-related signage.

“Unfortunately that animosity and that negativity and that hatred is still there, and our focus … is to acknowledge and fight against that equally as hard as we celebrate our own pride,” Cavazos says. “[We] remind ourselves that we are a vibrant, rich community that’s worth spending time with and celebrating regardless of what any other group or office or government or anyone is going to say.”

Learn more at straitspride.org.

June Calendar of Events

June 2: Cruising for Pride, a Straits of Mackinac brunch cruise from 10:30am-12pm ($55)

June 2: Get Tie-Dyed for Pride, a tie-dying party from 2-5pm (BYO tee or buy a Straits Pride tee for $15)

June 8: Spoken Word Showcase with dramatic readings, monologues, poetry, and more on LGBTQ+ topics by local creatives from 7-8:30pm (free, location to be announced)

June 14: Drag Queen Bingo at Community Hall from 6-8pm (free, donations recommended)

June 15: Drag Brunch at Community Hall from 11am-2pm ($40)

June 15: Drag Queen Story Time from 4-5pm (free, location to be announced)

June 16: Pride Ride following the Lilac Festival Grand Parade at 5:30pm (free)

June 22: Saint Ignace Pride Festival 11am-3pm at American Legion Park (free)

 

Photo courtesy of Straits Pride.