R A I N B O W R E S I S TA N C E
Progress through Pride
The House of Assembly and Supreme Court of B e r m u d a . Credit: Iain Read.
A Gay Bermudian’s Journey from Boston Pride to the Supreme Court of Bermuda By
Roderick Ferguson
Sometimes I get so swept up in the excitement of Gay Pride that I end up doing things I wouldn’t normally do. Like event planning. Or filing a lawsuit to challenge the law in Bermuda that repealed the right for same-sex couples to marry. I’m pretty sure one year I even flirted with a cute guy. What can I say? I get carried away! I swear this is all connected, somehow. Let’s start with the event planning, since that was the most disastrous and rewarding. I joined the organizing committee of Boston Pride in 2003 because I wanted to help make Pride happen. Actually, I wanted to make friends and feel like I was helping, but I didn’t want any responsibility. I agreed to co-chair their smallest event at the time, Pride Day @ Faneuil Hall, because I have trouble saying no. That should be fine, I thought. I’ll provide moral support while the other person does the work. Then my co-chair bailed, and I was left solely in charge of organizing the event. Uh-oh! You must understand that I am supremely incapable of event planning. I’d rather do yoga with tarantulas than pick up the phone and call someone I’ve never met before. For the record, yoga is the
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scarier part of that scenario, presuming the tarantulas are heavily sedated. Even with the guidance and handholding of people on the Committee who’d done the job before me, I was more stressed about this event than the people in charge of the Parade. I think I have rainbow balloon trauma. Pride Day @ Faneuil Hall went off without a hitch, and I white-knuckled my way through planning it the following year. Then the gods showed mercy, and I was able to switch to something in my comfort zone: managing Boston Pride’s website. Why would I put myself through such an excruciating experience? The answer lies in my excruciating childhood. Cue the music for the dark part of this Lifetime movie. When I was 12, we had a creative writing assignment in which one of my classmates wrote about an “opposite world” where I was the coolest kid in school. He was right. That was the opposite of the world I lived in. I didn’t understand why the kids at school were so cruel to me, but I accepted early on that no matter what I did, I couldn’t change how they viewed me. I would never be one of the cool kids. I was born and raised in Bermuda before I left the island in 1997
