Lee McKay's, the Chair of Second Pride, speech at the opening of the Second Pride Festival yesterday.
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The Second Pride board, Lee McKay, Bock McMillan & Tootsie Nootan
(missing in the picture is i0n, who is currently on sick-leave.)
Photo by JJ Goodman |
"I promise I won’t interrupt the party for
long! I want to thank everyone for coming out today for the opening of Second
Pride 2019, and the debut of our newly redesigned Second Pride region. We hope
you’re ready to have some fun and celebrate Pride!
We’re doing something different this year
in that we now consider our region to be a permanent build that will remain in
place for the foreseeable future. We are also a Second Life Gateway region and
will soon have new people entering Second Life right through our own Gateway in
the northeast corner of the region. I hope you’ll go check out the progress on
that. It will be opening in the near future.
If you’re curious about how this build came
to be, I was watching a video of Diana Ross performing in Central Park in 1983,
and the shots of the park and the buildings in the background just looked and
felt inspiring. I showed a really simple mockup of the idea to Bock and to his
husband, Tomais, and within days, the building started, spurred on by a very
generous donation of all these buildings in the Old NYC collection from Schultz
Bros. We thank them for their generosity! This is a build that we want you to
explore and enjoy. There are all sort of places to wander, stroll, sit, watch,
meditate, reminisce, play, and just be. It’s a walking space, a place to take
photos, bring friends, hang out, play games, and more. We will no longer be one
or two events per year. We expect to have parties on a regular basis, starting
soon.
This year, we are celebrating the 50-year
anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, considered to be the catalyzing moment in
the push for Gay Rights. With the current political climate and with our rights
being slowly but methodically eroded from us once again, there is no better
time for us to reflect on the events of that night and the nights that
followed, and to consider the battles fought then, and the battles that are to
come, because they are coming. We need to draw from the strength of the heroes
of that night…Marsha P. Johnson, Sylvia Rivera, Storme DeLarverie (Stormy
Delahveay), Danny Garvin, and so many others. We honor them for the stand they
took that night, and we pledge to continue their fight.