RUTLAND — The “I Love Rutland” logo has decorated car bumpers, water bottles and lawn signs for several years, but a new version of the logo, unveiled this week, makes a statement many haven’t seen in the city before.
Lampposts in the center of downtown have donned a new version of the logo. It replaces the red heart with a heart featuring a Progress-Pride flag — a more colorful version of the rainbow flag that includes people of color and those who are transgender. Beneath the logo is a new slogan: “All Are Welcome Here.”
For the first time, Rutland is celebrating Pride, an event held around the country every June that recognizes the LGBTQIA+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning, intersex, asexual, plus) community.
The movement was sparked by Avery Provin, 21, who is originally from Rutland and returned home during the pandemic. Reminded of childhood feelings of displacement that prevented him from coming out, he left again and recently took a job in New York City.
“I started to think about this more, and I was like, wow, I just don’t see myself here,” Provin said. “There is no queer visibility here.”
A 2019 Youth Risk Behavior Survey conducted by the Vermont Department of Health found that 14% of high school students identify as LGBT in Vermont, and significant disparities exist between heterosexual, cisgender students and those who don’t identify that way.
In 2019, LGBT high school students across the state were more likely to report being in a physical fight, twice as likely to experience bullying, more likely to be threatened with a weapon or carry one, more likely to skip school, much more likely to experience unwanted sexual contact and 2.5 times more likely to feel so sad or hopeless that they stop activities.
They were four times as likely to have made a suicide plan and to have hurt themselves intentionally in 2019.
Provin said he’s received messages from LGBTQIA+ youth around the state who have asked for advice.
“To get those messages was pretty heartbreaking because I didn’t know what to tell them,” he said. “I personally escaped because I wanted a queer life, and for a queer youth to reach out to me and ask what to do — it was like, how am I in the position to say what to do when I personally escaped what they’re going through? That’s another reason why I did this campaign.”
New people to Rutland
Provin recently reached out to Steve Costello, a co-founder of the “I Love Rutland” marketing campaign, which aimed to counter negative media attention about the city.
The original campaign, he said, “boiled down to us feeling like we were in a position to help better highlight some of the positive things happening in Rutland that weren’t necessarily being highlighted in any way.”
Costello, also vice president of customer care at Green Mountain Power and chairman of Rutland’s Regional Marketing Committee, said the new version fits with the original mission.
“The whole focus is on trying to bring new people to Rutland,” he said. “We should be welcoming to everyone.”
Jeannette Langston, founder of Social Tinkering, an organization that works to reduce barriers to social connection, helped organize the campaign. She coordinated with Awesome Graphics, which has printed 20 banners and will print thousands of stickers and, depending on funding, lawn signs with the new logo.
“I see a gap here, that the LGBT community was not well represented previous to now,” she said. “I think we’re doing a lot better job right now. But I wanted to work on this because we need to support all people and from all different backgrounds — they need to be seen and know that they’re supported.”
Meanwhile, on May 3, Rutland City passed a declaration of inclusion, which “condemns racism and discrimination of any type and welcomes all persons, regardless of race, color, religion, national origin, sex, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, or disability.”
On May 17, Rutland alderman Thomas Franco, citing the Department of Health study, proposed that the city explore avenues for supporting the LGBTQIA+ community. Board members voted unanimously to have the Community and Economic Development Committee consider the idea.
Franco is, to his understanding, the first openly gay person to serve on the Board of Alderman.
“I take that really seriously,” he said. “I think it’s important to uplift the community as much as possible because I don’t want to be the last.”
His partner, George Hodulik, grew up in Rutland County and faced his own set of challenges when he came out. Hodulik, too, is calling for “all community leaders to be vehemently, unequivocally and outspokenly inclusive.”
“I was never beaten up by my peers,” Hodulik said. “I don’t recall a time where I was called a slur. It was really these authority figures who were so concerned for what this would mean for me, they actually were really perpetuating that sort of trouble.”
‘Seeing someone like me’
Franco, Hodulik and Povin say they’re focused on prioritizing the visibility of LGBTQIA+ people and conversations in Rutland. Franco said that’s particularly important for youth.
“Seeing someone like me in an official capacity talking about these things in a positive way, I hope will make all the difference for them and feeling like they have a place here,” he said. “Like they don’t have to leave to Boston, or whatever part of the country, to feel included. That they can be themselves right here at home.”
While, so far, the Board of Aldermen appears to support Franco’s initiatives, the group also wants to see Mayor Dave Allaire back up the movement as a whole.
Allaire said Rutland tends to get “a bad rap” because of controversies that developed during the past several years, but said the city “is an open and welcoming place” and always has been.
“I can tell you that, from my experience, we welcome folks into our community — doesn’t matter the color of their skin or their belief system or anything from their background,” he said. “We are open, and we want to tell the world that story. I very much believe in that, and I want to help out the folks that are trying to tell that story, too.”
He said he’s met several times with Franco and hopes to meet one-on-one with Provin soon.
“There are certain things I’m sure that the mayor’s office can do to help out on top of all the other things that we have to do in the course of a day, too,” Allaire said.
In conversations with the mayor, Franco said Allaire was cautiously supportive but didn’t sign on to everything Franco presented.
“I tried to be pretty ambitious with where I wanted to see his office play a role,” he said. “I don’t think that he feels as ready as I would have hoped.”
Franco said Allaire may not want to move faster than residents are ready.
“You know, I think there’s times where as a leader — you certainly don’t want to ignore the community in any sense — I don’t think that’s the case here,” Franco said. “I do think Rutland is ready to turn the page.”
Franco has been working with Karly Haven, who founded a chapter of Queer Connect, a nonprofit that also has locations in Bennington and Brattleboro. Together, they made a website, rutlandpride.org, that hosts a calendar of summer events.
“We’re part of the fabric here, and we just want to be visible,” Haven said. “As queer people in history have been treated over time, we don’t want to be shunned or second-class citizens. We just want to be able to be who we are and acknowledge that in public.”
The beginning of division
In the past several decades, Rutlanders have been divided over a host of issues.
A heated debate about whether to change the Rutland High School mascot over its racist origins continues, though the school board already voted for the change.
City officials argued over whether to condemn Jan. 6 riots at the Capitol and whether to implement implicit bias training for city employees.
Before that, residents argued about whether the city should host Syrian refugees.
State Sen. Cheryl Hooker, D/P-Rutland, has been involved in state and city politics since the 1990s, and she traces the divide back to one historical moment: Vermont’s decision to introduce civil unions. The city leaned politically Democratic until a number of legislators lost their seats, she said.
Of five state representatives from the city — including Hooker, who had been appointed to replace a representative who stepped down, and has since been elected to the Senate — “the other four were all defeated because of civil union,” she said. “So that was the divide. It was pretty stark.”
Hooker said, at the time, some expressed fears that Vermont would become a “hub” for people who sought same-sex rights.
“I don’t know what they were afraid of,” she said, later adding, “this was all emerging back then.”
To her, the “All Are Welcome Here” campaign — albeit two decades later — “confirms that fears were unfounded.” She’s happy to see a more accepting culture but said the persistent divides are evidence that the city has more work to do.
“The fact that we have young people now who are willing to speak out and are taking a lead on these important issues is a lot different I think than it was 21 years ago,” she said.
Franco said he believes the city is changing. Pushback, he said, comes from “voices in power that have held on to power for a long time, and I think that’s coming to a pivot point.”
“I think a lot of this stuff that’s happening is just the reckoning between those two things, right?” he said. “The folks who have been part of the past and are looking to the future and feeling a bit uncertain, and the people who are just ready to turn the page.”
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Rutland City will celebrate Pride for the first time - vtdigger.org
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