Fifteen LGBT activists will set off from Philadelphia in March to spread a message of acceptance in college campuses around the nation, with two Philadelphians at the helm of their quest.
Locals Jason Conner and J. Mason will serve as co-directors of the 2012 Soulforce Equality Ride, which brings LGBT education and awareness to campuses that embrace homophobic discrimination, often because of religious convictions.
The Equality Ride bus will leave from Philadelphia March 4 and head south to Atlanta, with 11 stops scheduled throughout the two-month tour.
Conner and Mason, both 27, were drawn to the Ride because of their own life experiences dealing with discrimination — through Conner’s coming-out in a Mormon community and Mason’s work for The Attic Youth Center.
Conner participated in the last Ride, held in 2010, and it was a transformative experience.
At the time, he was living in Salt Lake City and, despite reparative therapy, was struggling with his orientation when he saw “Equality U,” a documentary about the first Equality Ride in 2006.
“I was watching this really powerful scene where a mother is talking about how her son would be better off dead than gay and my brother walked into the room. I turned to him and I was outraged about this scene and his response was just, ‘Yeah, that’s about right,’” Conner said. “It was a turning point for me. I realized that I was doing a very big disservice to my family by not being open with them about who I was. So right then I decided I was going to apply for this ride and, if I got accepted, I was going to come out to them.”
While the coming-out process was difficult, Conner said his family has made a lot of progress in the past few years.
“It’s been hard because I think they didn’t see a lot of the internal struggle I was dealing with,” he said. “For them, it was one day I was engaged to be married to this nice young Mormon girl and the next day I was riding around the country on this big, gay bus. So it’s been a process for them to understand what led me from one point to the next.”
His coming-out did lose him a number of friends, as most were fellow members of the Church of Latter-Day Saints; however, he has found a new community in Philadelphia, he said.
While he was on the 2010 Ride, the tour passed through Philadelphia, and Conner said he loved the city so much, he decided to make it home, coming directly here with his suitcases after the journey wrapped up.
Mason comes to the Ride with five years of experience as the training coordinator at The Attic Youth Center’s Bryson Institute, where he works to heighten awareness about the challenges LGBT youth face in numerous entities.
“I’ve been doing outreach work to everyone from teachers to medical professionals to lawyers and church folk,” he said. “The biggest issue I’ve seen that’s stopped people from supporting LGBT youth wasn’t their own capacity to learn but just their own religious convictions. That has stopped so many people from being able to provide support for these youth. So I wanted to help people address their spiritual and religious needs in a way that also addresses the needs that LGBT people have.”
While the Ride will focus on colleges that embrace discriminatory policies, this year there will also be a new emphasis on community-wide education, as Riders will spend five days in each city working on collaborative service projects.
Although religion has a strong bearing on the LGBT-rights movement, Mason said open, honest conversations that strive to bridge the gaps between LGBT and religious communities are rare.
“I’m really excited to have a dialogue about religious issues in a way that I don’t think always happens in LGBTQ activism,” he said. “In a lot of ways, I think that’s where our activism falls short. Faith and religion impact so much of what we do as LGBTQ activists, and if we’re serious about fighting for our rights, we need to get people more comfortable having a dialogue about religion.”
Starting that dialogue is not always an easy process, however.
During the first stop of the 2010 ride at Valley Forge Christian College in Phoenixville, Pa., the group encountered protesters from Repent America, whose leader, Michael Marcavage, spurned a rider who attempted to introduce herself to him, Conner said.
“He refused to shake her hand when she held it out,” Conner said. “So she just held it out for about two hours. People had to actually come over and hold it up for her. And that was such a powerful moment for me to see where some folks were and that this guy wouldn’t even shake her hand.”
Mason said confronting such realities while on the road will be a difficult combination.
“We’re going to be away for two months and we’ll be dealing with some people who are excited to see us and others who are not excited to see us,” he said. “That’s going to be extremely hard, to interact with folks who may not even know why they don’t like us but who will be throwing negative energy our way.”
However, reaching the young people who are eager for their message, and others who are willing to be open to it, will outweigh the challenges the Ride will present, Mason said.
“A lot of LGBTQ people who grew up religious are now distanced from their own spaces of faith,” Mason said. “I hope that by us doing this ride, it gives them a space to come back home in a way. The hurt that you can feel when a family or friend says they don’t like you because you’re gay is bad enough, but to hear that God doesn’t like you can affect people in a different way.”
For more information, visit www.soulforce.org.
Jen Colletta can be reached at [email protected].