‘You are who you are, and you don't need to be fixed’: Sandpoint to host first Pride event this July

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Editor's note: This story has been updated.

It’s been a long time coming, but Sandpoint will host its first Pride event this July with the help of organizers at PFLAG Sandpoint, a local LGBTQ+ family and ally organization.

Jeff Bohnhof, president of PFLAG Sandpoint, said it was an idea the group has had since they started six years ago. Until this year, it was difficult to organize as a small group with limited resources. Then this year, he got an idea.

“For whatever reason, I just drove to the [Granary Arts District] parking lot here one day, and thought, ‘this would be a perfect spot for it,’” he said.

Bohnhof approached Andrea Marcoccioo, co-owner of Matchwood Brewing, along with Rick and Randy Evans from Evans Brothers Coffee.

All three agreed to sponsor the event, and since then PFLAG has garnered support from other local businesses and community members including Syringa Cycling, Azalea Handpicked Style, The Fat Pig, Heart Bowl and others. The support, Bohnhof said, has been “incredible.”

That community backing is especially meaningful, he said, because there were several times over the years that the group almost folded due to a lack of interest and community support. Starting about a year before the pandemic began, the group started picking up new members.

PFLAG is an organization for allies and families of the LGBTQ+ community as much as the members of that group, Bohnhof said. Founded in 1973 by a mother in an effort to support her gay son, a big part of the organization’s mission centers on providing resources and peer support to LGBTQ+ community members, youth and their families.

“The journey that the child is going on is the same journey that the parent is going on as well. They have to go on it together,” Bohnhof said.

In recent years, one example of the group’s mission in action, at a local level, was a transgender boy named Korey and his family.

“When he first started coming to PFLAG, he was very reserved, very quiet. And as time went along, [with] this accepting atmosphere, he just blossomed,” Bohnhof said. “His dad [had been] like, ‘Oh, it's just a phase, he's gonna get over it.’ As time progressed, and things went on, his dad just accepted the fact that, OK, I have a son now’ … in the summer, and he was down there for his birthday. And [his mother] said his dad actually baked him a rainbow birthday cake.”

Although the group still hovers around 20 members, Bohnhof said he’s learned to look at the service it provides like a bus route.

“It doesn't matter if there's one person on the bus, two people or less, [it] goes around the same route every day,” he said. “You think about your chapter like that, just that it's there. And if somebody needs support, we're always available.”

The event, which will be held July 17 from 2-10 p.m. in the Granary Arts District at 510 Oak Street, will include advocacy booths, Pride swag, a poem read by PFLAG member Adrian Murillo, remarks by Mayor Shelby Rognstad and a keynote address by Rep. John McCrostie, the first openly gay man in the Idaho Legislature.

That address will be followed by music from JJ Dion, steel drum band Bram Bratá, drag performances by Misty Boxx, Corbin and Maximus Thicke and Ida Nailder, and an end-of-the-night dance party hosted by DJ Coral.

In anticipation of the event, Matchwood Brewing is also coming out with a Pride-themed summer beer with a portion of proceeds to benefit PFLAG, Marcoccioo said, and Evans Brothers is also planning a Pride-specific coffee roast.

Although the Pride event has garnered considerable community support, Bohnhof said when PFLAG Sandpoint started six years ago, many people were not comfortable coming out. Even as acceptance has grown, much of that discomfort, and the fight for equal rights, remains in Idaho.

“We want to be treated the same as anybody else,” Bohnhof said. “It’s not special rights. It's equal rights.”

As a whole, Bohnhof said, the city of Sandpoint has been accepting. In 2012, it became the first city in Idaho to ban discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity years after the state Legislature recinded its previous acceptance of the Equal Rights Amendment.

Although the group has faced occasional booing at Fourth of July parades, Bohnhof said he’s mostly felt safe and accepted as a gay man in Sandpoint.

At the same time, the organization for LGBTQ+ rights, Add the Words, Idaho, has been advocating since 2010 to have “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” added to Idaho’s human rights act. Thus far, they’ve “hit a brick wall,” Bohnhof said.

“You can be fired [in Idaho] because of your sexual orientation or your gender identity. You can be denied certain basic services, you can be denied housing, you can be fired for who you love and how you identify,” Bohnhof said. “That's part of Pride, is [saying], ‘OK, we've come this far, but we still have a long way to go.”

Another part of celebrating Pride, Bohnhof said, is remembering the LGBTQ+ people who struggled before them.

Pride arose from the Stonewall riots in New York in 1969 when members of the LBGTQ+ community decided to fight back against repeated harassment and police raids at Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in the Greenwich villiage.

At the time, “homosexual acts” were actively criminalized, and many of the first protesters, such as Marsha P. Johnson, (the woman indeterminantly attributed as “throwing the first brick”) faced added discrimination as a a black transgender woman.

Across the country, LGBTQ+ people are also at a higher risk of being the victims of crime, with the most notable example in recent years being the Pulse Nightclub shooting in 2016 that killed 46 people.

In Idaho, a 49-year-old gay man named Steven Nelson was killed in 2017, with the killer indicted on federal hate crime charges.

Family members Jason Fox, who was killed in 2020 in Pend Oreille County, have also said they believe his killers were motivated by his identity as a gay man. His killers were not indicted on hate crime charges, but many in the LGBTQ+ community, his death seemed erieely similar to the murder of Matthew Shepard, a gay college student at the University of Wyoming, in 1998.

“We're celebrating the things that we've accomplished,” Bohnhof said. “But at the same time, we still have to remember all of these people that have come before us.”

Despite the challenges, expected pushback from a few community members and even the potential danger of being out, Bohnhof said he does what he does to make sure other LGBTQ+ people know that it’s OK to be themselves.

Sometimes, Bohnhof said, he’ll be asked why there isn’t a straight Pride.

“Not as a dig against anybody, but straight people — they haven't had the Supreme Court decide whether they can be married or not,” he said.

One day, Bohnhof said, he hopes there won’t be a need for a special Pride event — people will just be able to be who they are. Until then, he plans to keep making sure LGBTQ+ people know there’s a place for them.

“That's why I'm out, to show them that it's OK to be out,” he said. “You are who you are, and you don't need to be fixed. you're not broken.”