Pride Western Australia Incorporated today announced the theme and patrons for the 2007 Pride Festival. ‘Imagine… One better world’ calls on all of us to put aside our prejudices and think about how we interact within our own community and the wider world. It recognises that GLBTI people are not the only minority group, but we all coexist.
‘We need to respect and honour one another and all those who make our world what it is, regardless of race, gender, religion, age or disability,’ Female Co-president, Tanya Croft said ‘It’s about celebrating our diversity and differences, not attacking one other because of them.’
‘Attitudes are a lot harder to change than laws, which was evident this last week in Perth. It’s incumbent on us to celebrate our lives, our families, our role models, our young and our old. The people within our community and the world are so diverse – if we open the door and share with others and call on everyone to be more inclusive, we are on our way to creating one better world.’
In a first, two people have been invited to be 2007 Pride Festival Patrons. Kelly and Sam Pilgrim Byrne have accepted the position and are honoured to be involved.
Kelly and Sam are long-term GLBTI advocates. They spent several years as executive committee members of Gay and Lesbian Equality and are two of the founding members of Australia’s only national lobby group, the Australian Coalition for Equality.
Their special area of interest is in GLBTI parenting, and having spent 3.5 years trying to conceive through donor insemination and IVF. Sam is now six months along in her pregnancy, and the couple anticipates the birth of their daughter in September, just in time for Pride.
‘We are really excited to have Kelly and Sam as our patrons. They have been very public in their quest to become parents, appearing in local papers, The West Australian, talk-back radio and also speaking at the recent Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission’s national inquiry into financial discrimination against same-sex couples and their families.’
OUTinPerth caught up with the newly named Pride Patrons to ask what they had to say about being selected.
OUTinPerth: What do you think of being selected as 2007 Pride Patrons?
Kelly: I just think there are so many more deserving people to be Pride patrons, but it is appropriate because we are in a federal election year where international adoption is going to be an issue. As it turns out in WA, parenting is an issue and will continue to be an issue. It is important we get out and talk about our families and show that we are there and we are just as capable. And that our children are just as happy and content and well-adjusted as any other children.
It is a real privilege, as cliché as that sounds, to be asked.
Sam: When you look at past patrons, it’s kind of spooky, isn’t it. It is a big honour. The timing is just perfect in terms of what is happening in our private lives and in terms of the gay adoption issue. It has come together amazingly well.
Kelly: We feel like we are the tip of the iceberg in so many ways. All we are is a face and a voice for thousands of families that are out there and have been families for decades, but haven’t perhaps had the support structure they should from our community over the years. We really are just a voice and a face to that.
Sam: They [gay parented families] have had it really tough. They faced opposition from their own families, societal opposition, no government support structures. Just more power to them, and they should be so proud of how they have raised their children because at every turn someone was telling them it was the wrong thing to do.
Kelly: Older women have lived through fears of having their children taken away from them. If they have been in heterosexual relationships and they had broken down, they would have lived in fear as to whether or not those children would be able to stay with them. And in many cases, they weren’t. We are in a much more privileged position than what people used to be. It is about time that the community recognized that we [collectively] are shapeshifters. In that the latest survey from WA Health Promotion and Research showed that 22% of lesbian or bisexual women are currently parenting, which is a significant number. As a community we need to make sure we have events, we have publications, we have attention drawn to parenting for lesbians and gay men – who are parenting at a lesser rate, but are still parenting and often co-parenting with lesbians. We are creating a new family structure, but one that is just as successful, if not more, than other family structures. So, I think good on Pride and congratulate them for seeing that shift in focus.
OiP: How did you find out you were selected?
Kelly: Email [laughs]
Sam: I heard a voice from the office, say ‘Oi, get a look at this!’ Then I came through and went, ‘Oh, wow!’
Kelly: It was a really nice email and a lot of thought had gone into it. The person who had sent it had listed the reasons they had wanted to select us as patrons. It was a lovely email.
Sam: The committee had given it a lot of thought…
Kelly: [adds] which was even more of an honour.
OiP: Did they invite the two of you or the three of you?
Kelly: The two of us, though I think there may be spot in the car for a third!
Sam: We’ve already got grandma putting her hand up, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll babysit. Don’t you worry about that!’
Kelly: When we were first asked, we thought it was terrific, but we are not going to be able to do an awful lot other than just be public about who we are because we didn’t know how the pregnancy was going to progress. They [Pride] were fantastic at accepting that and saying they would work around us. Given she is due at end of September, it is probably fair to say she won’t be at Fair Day.
OiP: What were some of the reasons Pride gave for selecting you?
Kelly: It started off with the contribution we had made as members of GALE (Gay and Lesbian Equality) because we had been on the executive for 3 years. Plus the public way in which we have been open about trying to get pregnant and become lesbian parents.
Sam: Because we blog…[hesitates then corrects herself] Kelly blogs, and I am the subject of that blog.
Kelly: I blog about the weight of her tits. [laughs]
Sam: It was a joint decision to blog about the process because you couldn’t go anywhere and find out that information. So, we started doing it and it has become a bit more than that because someone doesn’t know how to keep her mouth shut. [laughs] The blog has been good and has put us in contact with other lesbians from all over the world and gay dads, which has been such a great experience. Particularly, we have some people we are in contact regularly with from New York who are a biracial couple and have adopted a little biracial girl because they couldn’t fall pregnant, they had some difficulties. They blog as well. So, it has been great seeing their journey as well and just seeing how in the U.S. they don’t seem to have the backlash against adoption as what we have here in the last week.
Kelly: Our next big thing is childcare.
OiP: What about childcare?
Kelly: I want my child to have her family recognised and represented and mirrored back to her in her own learning setting. I would like her to go to an early childhood centre and see a poster of a same-sex family on the walls. Or for the childcare leaders to be reading a book about same-sex families. I don’t want it to be the main focus, but I would like it to be part of the ‘normal’ curriculum, so that it is part of a ‘normal’ experience for our daughter and her classmates, making it inclusive. The more of our families that are out there, the more our children are going to be attending these daycare centres. We need to be responsible for educating the people who educate our children because they don’t know what they don’t know. It is not necessarily through malice or hostility that they don’t be inclusive. It is simply because they don’t know. If we aren’t willing to teach them, then they are never going to learn. We have to take responsibility for our own children and their safety.
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‘Imagine… One better world’ will be launched on the last week of September (date TBC) with City of Perth Pride Fairday in Russell Square to be held on Sunday, September 30. The arts and culture festival will continue throughout the month of October, culminating with the Pride Parade through the streets of Northbridge on Saturday, October 27.
