To celebrate Pride Month, members of the local LGBTQ community and supporters marched through downtown Oneonta and hosted a festival at Neahwa Park Saturday, June 6.
Pridefest organizers with the Otsego Pride Alliance estimated about 1,800 people attended the event, which began in the early afternoon and continued into the evening. The march processed from Water Street through downtown Oneonta before heading south to the park, where vendors, booths and a performance stage awaited.
Organizers presented awards to community members, spoke out against threats to the LGBTQ community and memorialized lives lost to anti-transgender violence and harassment. Musicians and drag queens also performed.
“We need to fight against trans erasure, we need to fight against queer erasure, and we need to celebrate queer joy as a form of resistance,” said Kerri Lincoln, the new president of OPA. That fight, she said, “looks like advocacy, it looks like showing up, it looks like being visible.”
Oneonta Mayor Dan Buttermann and Oneonta Town Supervisor Will Rivera each presented proclamations recognizing Pride Month at the festival. Rivera said the town’s was its first, and he intended to make it an annual occurrence.
The unanimously passed town resolution recognized the 1969 New York City Stonewall Inn uprising and the following year’s Pride march, considered the nation’s first. The resolution recognized Oneonta as “home to a vibrant LGBTQ+ community” and acknowledged that “despite significant legal progress, LGBTQ+ individuals continue to face discrimination, harassment, and violence at disproportionate rates.”
Buttermann read aloud the city’s proclamation, a version of which it has passed every year since the first Pride event affiliated with what is now OPA in 2017.
The “goal of Pridefest is to celebrate diversity, raise awareness of LGBTQ plus issues and build community,” Buttermann read aloud. He said he proclaimed “this day in honor of Otsego Pride Alliance and Pridefest, and that it should be celebrated as such in perpetuity.”
Central to the event was recognition of lives lost to violence, harassment and suicide, particularly for trans people.
“Today, as we celebrate, we also pause to remember those who are no longer with us, members of our community we’ve lost to hate, to violence, to isolation and rejection,” Maddie Kehoe said from the stage, before she and other volunteers read aloud said individuals’ names, at times through tears.
“I am so damn scared every single day,” Kehoe said, referencing “over 500 bills out there in this country trying to legislate us out of existence, to take away our medical care, to classify us as domestic terrorists, because of how we love, because of how we honestly express ourselves.”
Two local families who lost their trans children spoke at the event. Kristina Buscema, of Schenevus, read aloud a letter to her son, Harvey Ferris, who died in November. She remembered her son as her treasure.
“That is what you are to me, no matter what,” she said, recalling that she always felt he was a boy since he was in the womb. “I hope I get to be your mom in the next life too. The truth is, there’s no version of me that exists without you.”
The family of Kota Flood, who died in 2021 and is memorialized with an OPA student scholarship, also spoke.
“As we celebrate these incredible individuals, we also remember my brother Kota, whose life was tragically cut short in 2021 due to bullying and transphobia,” said Abygail Best, Flood’s sister. “He was only 14 years old.”
Alana Gorence and Luna Rios were presented with the scholarship. Later, OPA’s Amazing Community Member Award was presented to Zak West; Outstanding Ally Award to the Unitarian Universalist Society of Oneonta; and the OPA Award to Rebecca Bonker.
OPA presented its first Get in Good Trouble Award to Angela Eardley, Anthony Eardley and Celena Eardley for their efforts to support the homeless community during the coldest parts of the winter.
Some who spoke with The Daily Star criticized a recent Facebook post from congressional candidate and state Sen. Peter Oberacker, R-Schenevus, as an example of narratives that harm trans people.
Oberacker’s May 26 post boosted an article by the conservative outlet The Daily Wire purporting to show that U.S. Rep. Josh Riley, NY-19, had “financial ties to gender mutilation of kids.”
As evidence, the article cited Riley’s financial disclosures showing he maintained an investment of $1,001 to $15,000 in a Washington, D.C., distillery which donated a portion of its profits to the nonprofit Advocates for Trans Equality which “fights for the legal and political rights of transgender people in America” through litigation, advocacy, education and other avenues, according to its website. The distillery has supported other progressive causes. The nonprofit does not offer trans health care.
The post soon spread within OPA and drew hundreds of comments on Facebook. Multiple local elected officials, among them Rivera and city Common Council member Elayne Mosher Campoli, D-First Ward, criticized the post as an attack on the trans community.
Lincoln said Oberacker was “actively causing harm,” and that a following June 3 post celebrating his daughter for Pride Month did not repair it.
“You don’t get to go on Facebook, then, and put a picture of your queer daughter, and say, ‘This is me supporting Pride,'” Lincoln said, adding an expletive. She said the original post’s information was false and that Oberacker was “trying to work to get that bigot vote.”
For more information on OPA’s work, visit www.otsegopridealliance.org.