Pride Center Fêtes Reopening Before Reopening

Top: Board Co-Chair Hope Chávez. Bottom: Mikayla Horton, Jupiter O'Brien, and Lyra Garcia. Lucy Gellman Photos. 

When Jupiter O’Brien was in middle school, they yearned for a safe space to simply be a queer kid without the fear of being bullied. So when they found the New Haven Pride Center a few years ago, they flourished there. Now, after its near-closure and a miraculous $500,000 fundraising campaign, they are excited for its bright future.

That is, when it actually reopens later this summer. For now, the doors are still closed—with an end date to that closure now in sight.

Monday, O’Brien joined dozens of LGBTQ+ advocates, allies, arts and nonprofit leaders, and city, state and national elected officials at 50 Orange St., to celebrate the New Haven Pride Center, which has announced that it will formally reopen after it installs an interim executive director sometime this summer. This year, it comes as the Center turns 30 years old, with a history that criss-crosses the city.

The organization has been closed, and staff furloughed, since late February, following the disclosure of a $200,000-plus debt to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) that the board has known about since late 2023. In April, it announced that it would reopen in May, thanks to a fundraising campaign called “Project Phoenix” that brought in half a million dollars.

Then in May, the end of which saw an open house last week, board members suggested reopening as soon as June. When asked for an official date, Board Co-Chair Nick Bussett said “soon.” Last week, he added that the board is in the process of finishing interviews with two candidates for interim director.

Until that time, the Center is not yet formally open, and members of the public art still unable to access its emergency services. Once an interim director is there, Bussett said, the priorities will be the emergency food pantry and clothing and hygiene closets.

"New Haven is a city that welcomes everyone, and we do not just welcome everyone, we stand side by side with people that want to be a productive part of our community," said Mayor Justin Elicker. "The Pride Center is too important to fail. It is too important to fail."

“Today is actually a day of rejoicing,” said Board Co-Chair Hope Chávez, who has been working closely with longtime board members Bussett and Chloe Lasky, and new members Chris Freimuth and John Stachniewicz. “The New Haven Pride Center reaches 30 years this year, and thank God we didn't have to close our doors. This is 30 years, this is a phoenix that is rising, and we are really proud.”

The Center’s path to reopening has been remarkable, she and others added. In 2022, the organization lost its 501c3, tax-exempt status, setting into motion what would ultimately be the admission of a significant debt to the IRS, and a series of leadership transitions that have continued into the present. At the time, the board terminated the Center’s first paid director, then furloughed eight of nine employees. Even after the space regained nonprofit status, it shrank its staff, restructuring the organization from the basement of 84 Orange St.

For a while—and thanks largely to the leadership of Executive Director Juancarlos Soto—the Center seemed to regain its footing. In 2023, it grew out new partnerships and navigated a move down the street, to a first-floor multi-purpose space at 50 Orange St. It hosted wide-ranging, intergenerational programming, from monthly dinners to book clubs, support and affinity groups, joyful, neighborhood-based Pride Month events and access to emergency services and case management.

Then last year, Soto left the organization, beginning what would become a long and difficult search for an executive director (last November, Edward Summers stepped into the role briefly, but resigned later that month after just a week in the position). In February, the board announced that it would furlough staff and temporarily cease operations. On the final day, employees left without knowing if or when they would see each other again.

Top: Amara Everlasting (Smith is in the blazer in the background). Bottom: Ward 7 (East Rock/Downtown) Alder Christine Kim, whose ward includes the Pride Center. "What I'm feeling today is hope. New Haven is a city where we care about each other and show up for each other," she said. 

In March, Dubois Walton and staff members of the Community Foundation for Greater New Haven helped convene a meeting of donors, during which board members mapped out their vision for survival. Without that meeting, Bussett has said in multiple interviews, Project Phoenix would not have been possible.

In addition to the $500,000 the Center has raised, New Haven Mayor Justin Elicker said Monday that he expected the city to renew its financial commitment to the organization in the next fiscal year. In both 2024 and 2025, the city allocated $30,000 towards the center in its municipal budget. That number is not included in this year’s finalized budget.

“Today is certainly more than the reopening of the Center,” Dubois Walton said, pointing to the power of donors who chose to back the Center even and especially in a moment when LGBTQ+ lives are under attack across the country (including in Connecticut). “It is about what our community chooses to stand for … we’re choosing to be visible, we’re choosing to be connected, and we’re choosing to build something stronger together.”

As sun drenched a rainbow-patterned section of Orange Street on Monday morning, speaker after speaker praised the Center for coming back from the brink of closure. East Rock/Fair Haven Alder Caroline Tanbee Smith, who has spoken about her own journey as a gay woman and elected official, pointed to the Center’s reopening as vital in ways that board members may not yet even know or recognize. She thanked donors, volunteers, and Pride Center board members “for choosing the harder path of rebuilding.”

“The results of your courage are both joyful and, I believe, deeply serious,” she said. “Rainbow Elders can continue to gather here. The food pantry and the clothing closet can continue to be stocked. And the kid across the street, who isn’t ready yet, who hasn’t told their family, who has only written it in the margins of the journal, can now look at this building and know her city loves her for who she is and for who she loves.”

Rosa DeLauro: “It is a buffer and a barrier against hatred.”

Many also focused on the work that board members have ahead of them, in a political and legislative climate that has become openly hostile to and unsafe for LGBTQ+ people, and particularly trans youth seeking gender-affirming care. Noting a growing mental health crisis among LGBTQ+ youth, U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro stressed the importance of the Pride Center as a safe and affirming space for a multigenerational LGBTQ+ community, where people know they are not alone.

She warned attendees that anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric and legislation has become a near-daily presence in Washington, where she constantly sees bills—including those with sneaky and hidden riders, slipped in at the last minute—aimed at erasing and disempowering queer people. In the past year, she and her colleagues have been proud to defeat “99 percent of those,” she said.

“I believe it is more important than ever to celebrate the role that the Pride Center has played, and will continue to play, in creating positive changes, safety, and belonging within our community,” said DeLauro. “The journey to where we are today has been long and fraught with many setbacks and frustrations, but throughout it all, this community never gave up, never backed down, and never took no for an answer.”

DeLauro, whose own support of gay rights has moved significantly to the left in the past three decades, knows that firsthand. In 1996, the legislator personally invited Pride Center Founder John Allen to her offices to inform him that she would be voting for the Defense of Marriage Act, which defined marriage as between one man and one woman. At the time, she told Allen and Pride Center Co-Founder Jane Griffith that the vote came from her “traditional” values, he told the Arts Paper in 2018.

Thirty years later, she has become much more progressive on the issue, including advocacy for the Equality Act in the U.S.House of Representatives in 2015, and support for its reintroduction in the House last year. In 2022, she came full circle on her DoMA vote, voting in favor of the Respect for Marriage Act, which safeguards the recognition of same-sex marriage under federal law. Then-President Joe Biden signed the legislation into law in December of that year.

“This is a place to gather and to find hope,” she said of the Center as a Pride Flag flapped joyfully on her left. “It is a buffer and a barrier against hatred.”

Tahnee Cookson Muhammad.

Tahnee Cookson Muhammad, a community outreach coordinator Community Alliance for Research & Engagement (CARE), New Haven Public Schools (NHPS) parent and member of the New Haven LGBTQ Youth Task Force, expressed both excitement and gratitude for the space’s bright future in the community.

Six years ago, Muhammad remembered, she was concerned for the safety and wellbeing of her child, and found herself in a situation “where unconditional love alone could not fix the problem or ease the hurt.”

“I felt powerless,” she continued. “That changed when I found the New Haven Pride Center.”

At the Pride Center, Muhammad felt listened to and welcomed, at ease with the people around her. With fellow members of the task force and the New Haven Board of Education, she helped craft and push forward Policy 5145.53 on Transgender and Gender Non-Conforming Youth, which is designed to protect the rights of trans and gender nonconforming students. She found a community “not just for my child, but also for myself.” For her, that’s the power of the space.

As speakers heaped additional praise on the organization, Amara Everlasting, who leads the Decolonial Sex Worker Justice Empowerment Project, urged attendees not to be complacent, or satisfied with the reopening alone. Rocking a bubblegum-colored, curly wig that glowed in the sunlight, they noted the necessity of including “Black, Indigenous, Latinx, migrant, disabled, sex working, and drug using queer and trans people” in the Center’s vision.

Turning the clock back to 1969, they reminded attendees that Stonewall—instigated by a Black trans sex worker named Marsha P. Johnson—was an uprising and a riot, and not a quiet or tame confrontation that went on to be whitewashed by history. They shared the history of Sylvia Rae Rivera, a Puerto Rican sex worker and trans woman who created mutual aid systems to protect and support queer people of color when no one else did (Rivera later spoke at the New Haven Pride Center, then at 50 Fitch St., during the 2000 International Festival of Arts & Ideas).

They pointed to the work of LGBTQ+ advocates, including sex workers and drug users—not buttoned-up public health messengers, and certainly not the federal government—who did life-saving harm reduction and education work during the HIV/AIDS epidemic, decades before answers like Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP) were even shimmers on the horizon.

“The future of the Pride Center must meaningfully include us, not as tokens but as leaders, as experts, as wisdom-bearers, that hold to our collective liberation from white supremacy, from homophobia, from transphobia, poorphobia, stigma and oppression. Because we will never be free until we all are free.”

Following the press conference, O’Brien stood off to the side, taking it all in. Now a junior at Co-Op, they spent years enduring bullying in the Hamden Public Schools, before transferring in high school. Back then, “a space like this would have really helped.”

As the president of the school’s Gender-Sexuality Alliance (GSA), they have since collaborated with the Center multiple times, including in a district-wide GSA summit two years ago.

“I like it!” chimed in fellow junior Lyra Garcia, there with her dog, Archer. “It’s really good to have a safe space.”