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BBH Pride
Broadview Heights’ first Pride Fest last year.
On April 15, about 60 or so Broadview Heights residents showed up to their City Council chambers, some heated, some empathetic.
All were focused on what they perceived to be a subject of prime importance: whether or not the town’s second Pride Fest should or should not happen on city property.
Most present, the Plain Dealer reported, were against the festival.
“We are Broadview Heights,” Robert Kilo, an organizer with the Center for Christian Virtue policy group, told Council. “We are not Lakewood. We are not Cleveland.” Citing religious beliefs, Kilo warned, “You try to cram this down our throats, we the people will have something to say.
“And tonight is just the beginning,” he added.
That festival, slated to go on from 11:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. on June 8, is being hosted by Broadview-Brecksville Heights Pride, an area nonprofit that formed in May 2022 as an anti-discrimination advocacy group for LGBTQ+ folk. Pride Fest, as the group advertises, is one its prime events to showcase its uniting mission.
But not without its difficulty. Though long threatened by religious extremists and hate groups, LGBTQ organizations have had to ramp up security plans and insurance policies in light of a more vocal opposition, from Proud Boys protesting drag in Chardon, to tension with evangelists at Cleveland’s own festival last June.
In Broadview Heights, a majority white suburb of 19,936, such vocal opposition to a Pride Fest has driven public confusion as to how some in such a seemingly peaceful town could reject such festival. Just as it has, for BBH Pride, for the underlying laws that have led to tension in the first place.
“You know, some organizations reached out to city council to kind of explain to them, ‘Hey, let’s understand the line between free speech and hate speech, and it’s fine that residents say, oh, I have a concern, or I don’t care for Pride Fest,” BBH Pride director Jennifer Speer told Scene.
“But the fact that they want to influence policy over this, and they are coming after the mayor?” she said. “That’s really bad.”
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Photo by Mark Oprea
Counter-protestors outside Element 41 at a contentious drag brunch in Chardon last April. Tension between the LGBTQ community and hate groups has become more apparent in recent years.
Speer is talking about a 97-year-old statue that gives the Broadview Heights mayor—in this case, Mayor Sam Alai—the ability alone to say whether or not an event is hosted on city grounds. Because the city is co-sponsoring Pride Fest, Speer said, Mayor Alai was allowed to bypass any necessary council greenlight.
It’s seems to be why Vince Ruffa, the law director for Broadview Heights, expressed confusion at the April 15 meeting, as to why Pride Fest sparked a revisit to the longstanding laws.
“When it is a city sponsored or co-sponsored event it is an administrative function good, bad or indifferent, Council doesn’t vote on that,” Ruffa said, according to the minutes. “I have been the law director or almost 21 years we have never used that process for a city sponsored or co-sponsored event.”
On Thursday night, half of Broadview Heights City Council will be gathering at council chambers to entertain a possible change to that law, thus requiring council approval for future events held on city property.
As for BBH’s seminal Pride Fest last June, Speer recalled similar tones of opposition, mostly regarding the group’s choice to host it at Broadview Heights Middle School. (On a Saturday though, Speer said.) Despite one protestor, Speer said the event surpassed its mission. Six-hundred showed up. It was rated seventh best Pride Fest in Northeast Ohio.
“We’re talking dozens upon dozens of people have approached us since the last Pride Fest, and saying, ‘This has changed my outlook. This has changed my perspective,’” Speer said. “‘I now believe I might be able to stay in this town.’”
BBH’s festival on June 8, Speer said, will host a range of activities, from a feminist choir to flowerpot making and karaoke. There will also be vendors touting crochet or dog rescuing, along with four churches and one voter registration agency.
It all goes swimmingly as planned, Speer believes that this year’s Pride will help the nonprofit segue nicely into finishing, and distributing to City Hall, a city action plan that would act like a blueprint for how to train city employees, or teachers in the Brecksville-Broadview Heights School District, to better accommodate the LGBTQ population.
“If people would just come and meet their neighbors,” Speer said. “These lovely people work around you, they raise children around you.
“And guess what?” she added. “They attend church, too.”
