Culture & Community | LGBTQ | Pride Month | Arts & Culture | New Haven Pride Center | APNH
Peg Oliveira, who didn't think of herself as a trailblazer when she and Jen Vickery got married outside of New Haven City Hall on Nov. 12, 2008. She joked about the number of people who had been saying that they "found" her this year—because she never left New Haven, and has no intention to. Lucy Gellman Photos.
The first time Peg Oliveira asked Jen Vickery to marry her, the two were standing in IKEA, pushing a pallet jack down the store’s aisles. There, among the stocked shelves and high ceilings, Vickery leapt onto the jack, sticking her landing. “Marry me,” Oliveira said.
At the time, she didn’t know that the two would make New Haven history. Oliveira, in fact, didn’t even know if Vickery would say yes (she did, in a more formal proposal in 2007). And she didn’t know that 17 years later—and 10 after the country had legalized same-sex marriage—she would still be fighting for the basic rights of LGBTQ+ people like herself.
Oliveira, one half of the first same-sex couple to get married in New Haven on Nov. 12, 2008, brought her story to the New Haven Green Tuesday afternoon, as city officials, excited onlookers and members of the New Haven Pride Center raised the Progress Pride Flag in the center of the city. As it waves over the Green, the flag recognizes both Pride Month and the 10-year anniversary of Obergefell v. Hodges, in which the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) ruled that same-sex marriage is protected under the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
“This fight is not over,” said Oliveira, now the director of the Gesell Program in Early Childhood at The Yale Child Study Center (she is also the founder of 108 Monkeys, which uses yoga as a tool for public health). “While for strength, and to stoke hope, we must celebrate these victories, it’s important too that the fight for feeling like an equal American is recognized to be an ongoing struggle, becoming increasingly challenging every day.”
“This Pride, we must raise the flag as a call to allyship, and to creating safe and inclusive spaces for all,” she added. “We raise the flag as a symbol of ‘We The People,’ and a call for the end to the splintering of our communities.”
The Progress Pride Flag, designed by Daniel Quasar in 2018, features Gilbert Baker’s original 1978 design (six thick, geometric bands of rainbow color), with a nesting doll of black, brown, blue, pink and white triangles in the lefthand corner. Those colors are meant to recognize members of the Black, Brown, and Trans communities who have too often been left out of, or erased from, mainstream, whitewashed conversations around LGBTQ+ visibility.
Fittingly, it joins Ben Haith’s red-and-blue Juneteenth flag on the Green’s flagpole, a reminder of the ongoing fight for Black liberation that went up in a ceremony Monday afternoon.
Part of that fight for visibility, Oliveira said, is understanding the full history of how Connecticut—and the country—got to same-sex marriage in 2008 and 2015 respectively. In 2004, “eight crusading same-sex couples” filed for what could have been the state’s first same-sex marriage licenses in the town of Madison, applications for which were all ultimately denied.
Instead of accepting that decision, the couples pushed back, becoming plaintiffs in a suit that GLAD (GLBTQ Legal Advocates & Defenders) filed against the Connecticut Department of Public Health and Madison-based registrar of vital statistics Dorothy C. Bean. At the time, Bean said that the town “ really just did what we had to do” in denying couples the right to marry, according to a 2004 article in the Middletown Press.
The case took years, bouncing from the New Haven Superior Court in 2004 to the Connecticut Supreme Court in 2006 before a final decision in November 2008. It was that decision that brought Oliveira and Vickery to City Hall—”gleefully!” she noted—with their infant daughter Willow in their arms.
Mayor Justin Elicker, who has stepped up as an ally in the past two years with a $30,000 line item for the New Haven Pride Center in the city's budget. "We will not shy away from this moment," he said. "We will continue to step up and partner together, and that is why we proudly, proudly are raising the flag together to acknowledge the work that has been done in the past to get us to this point ... but we clearly have as a nation a lot more work to do."
The two ultimately said their vows amidst throngs of people, including several other couples who got married that day, beside Ed Hamilton’s Amistad Memorial outside City Hall. Specifically, it was Hamilton’s inscription of the words “Make Us Free” and depiction of Sengbe Pieh, who led the Amistad Rebellion, that pulled them to the spot.
Growing emotional, Oliveira remembered the late Judge Herbert Gruendel, who both officiated their nuptials and was the first to suggest that the two wed beside the Amistad Memorial (“he was our wedding planner,” she said with a smile). At the time, Oliveira remembered, she naively turned to him, and suggested that the marriage was "no big deal.”
“Oh,” he told her. “It’s going to be a big deal.”
And it was. “New Haven showed up,” Oliveira said. When Connecticut legalized gay marriage in 2008, it was the second state in the country to do so (Massachussets was the first; a rainbow-patterned bench still sits outside Cambridge City Hall to commemorate that ruling). It paved the way for Obergefell v. Hodges, which effectively ruled that same-sex marriage was a right allowed and protected by the U.S. Constitution, seven years later.
Caroline Tanbee Smith, who currently serves as the alder for Ward 9 (East Rock and Fair Haven).
“Thank you so much to Peg, and to so many advocates for fighting for this right,” said East Rock/Fair Haven Alder Caroline Tanbee Smith, who filed for her first aldermanic run in 2023 with her girlfriend by her side. “As a result of this ruling [Obergefell v. Hodges], people across the country can marry the person that they love. Including me.”
“I really hope we see this milestone and this celebration as fuel,” she added. “Fuel to think about the work that lies ahead to support our entire LGBTQ community."
The recognition could not come at a more critical time for LGBTQ+ rights. This year alone, President Donald Trump has signed multiple executive orders targeting LGBTQ+ and particularly trans people, as well as gender-affirming care. Across state legislatures, the year has seen over 900 pieces of anti-trans legislation introduced across 49 of 50 states. Of those, 112 have passed.
And yet, 10 years after Obergefell v. Hodges, New Haven has continued to support its LGBTQ+ community, from jubilant Pride Month celebrations to an LGBTQ+ youth conference to the city’s first LGBTQ+ resource guide. In the past three years alone, city officials have watched—and lent their support—as the New Haven Pride Center changed leadership, lost and regained its nonprofit status, withstood a bomb threat and made the move down Orange Street, all while continuing to serve the community.
Lou Perno, interim executive director at the New Haven Pride Center.
For the first time last year, the full New Haven Board of Alders approved a $30,000 line item for the Pride Center in the city’s annual budget, for which there is funding again this year. Also last year, New Haven received a score of 100 on the Municipal Equality Index (MEI), a report put out by the Human Rights Campaign Foundation.
"As we begin the celebration for this month, let's keep in mind more than ever that we must continue our resilience and renewed hope that we are not going back, despite harmful legislation and rhetoric targeting the LGBTQ population," said Lou Perno, interim executive director at the New Haven Pride Center. “We are not washing away acceptance in our country, which is what Pride Month is all about.”
This month, that work continues in the community with New Haven’s sixth annual New Haven Black Pride, an initiative of A Place to Nourish Your Health (APNH, formerly AIDS Project New Haven) that has become a weekend-long event. On June 12, that celebration begins with “Come Get You A Piece,” a conversation with RuPaul’s drag race star Trinity K. Bonet at Blue Orchid New Haven.
“We are here, we are queer, we are educated, we are beautiful,” said APNH Safe Space Coordinator Jovanni Cabanas, pictured at the right beside Linda-Cristal Young.
On Friday the 13th, it continues at the Whitneyville Cultural Commons, with the third annual New Haven Visibility Ball. Then the next day, New Haven Black Pride will hold its annual festival, with over 30 vendors, free resources, and 150 free fans—which APNH Safe Space Coordinator Jovanni Cabanas snapped theatrically.
“We are here, we are queer, we are educated, we are beautiful,” said Cabanas. “That’s one thing that they fear, it’s education. We have to be here to be open, to be willing, to make sure that we’re moving from a place of love.”
Just as in years past, those events are intended to celebrate the revolutionary, radical and too-often-overlooked role and legacy of Black trans women in the struggle for LGBTQ+ rights and queer liberation. As they spoke, Cabanas invoked the memories of Marsha P. Johnson and Crystal LaBeija—Black trans women whose trailblazing advocacy included the Stonewall Riot and revolutionary house or family system that documentaries like Paris Is Burning popularized years later.
“Let’s keep it real,” said APNH Safe Space Coordinator Jovanni Cabanas, invoking the memories of Marsha P. Johnson, Sylvia Rivera and Crystal LaBeija (Cabanas’ drag alter ego is the fabulous, love-centered Afro-Boricua queen Xiomarie LaBeija). “When we talk about Pride, when we talk about our culture, where we come from, we need to make sure that we are uplifting and empowering those that really do need it.”
Deja Scott, who will be teaching in special education in Bridgeport starting in July.
That message resonated for Deja Scott, who had come out to the event after spotting a post from the New Haven Pride Center on social media. Born in Philadelphia, Scott moved to New Haven when they were 13, to be closer to their grandmother, longtime educator Wanda Gibbs.
After several years away from the Elm City, Scott returned last year, for a job in DEI in Bridgeport. When that fell through, a sudden consequence of the Trump Administration, they found the New Haven Pride Center as a safe affinity space to land.
“I needed more queer spaces," they said. “It was in the New Haven church that I was told to minimize parts of myself,” such that coming back marked a kind of reclamation.
“Seeing the flag here is really powerful,” they added. “It echoes what the mayor was saying. We’re here. We are here, we are queer, we spread love to everybody.”