Jim Carruthers, as told to Jeff Smith.

With this first-person account, we begin a series in which we honor equity holidays throughout the year with personal testimonies. Here, to honor the beginning of Pride Month, former Traverse City mayor Jim Carruthers reflects on local events and changes he’s witnessed as a gay man over the past 30-some years. This is an edited version of an interview, as told to Jeff Smith.

I moved to Traverse City back in 1989 to help my grandmother, who was legally blind at our family summer home. I had been living in Boston and was four years out of college and thinking I’d help my grandma for a while and then move on to a mountain town in the West, but I never did. It’s the goo of Traverse City that people talk about—you get stuck here in a good way, and stay here, and I’m glad I did.

But I almost didn’t last a year. I grew up around NYC, and I’m not a big bar person, and back then the only place to meet gay people was SideTraxx. So I eventually got involved with a group called Friends North. They had a quarterly newsletter that put out social and political information along with HIV info, and other stuff. At that time, fear of HIV made our community like lepers. One time I took a friend with HIV to the hospital, and they were freaking out. A doctor said, “I moved away from the city because I didn’t want to deal with this stuff.”

Back then, when Friends North would do social events in public and in people’s homes—men and women—people would tape paper up over the windows so nobody could see who was at the party. People wanted privacy because they didn’t want people to know they were gay. School teachers, nurses, business owners … they were terrified they would be fired from their jobs just for being themselves, or lose their businesses.

Through Friends North we had a community. We hosted social events like a bike tour and went to a campground in Leelanau County that attracted people from all over the state, and we had group dinners. We had a gay running group, Front Runners. A lot of people are like me, not big bar people or alcohol-focused, and Friends North was our outlet.

We slowly began getting local community leaders and politicians together, and things began to change. One of our first efforts was to include protection of LGB communities in city hiring policies. We wanted Traverse City to be progressive and say, “We will not discriminate in our hiring policies based on sexual orientation.” That was around when Fred Phelps, that horrible anti-gay guy from Westboro Baptist Church came to town because of the rainbow stickers on city vehicles. A nonviolent protest was organized by the Unitarian fellowship, and he was chased from town.

This was also when people were dying of AIDS, and their families rejected them, and some churches would not allow funerals of gays to be in the church, or not openly admitted.

It was not an easy time. It was a constant battle for acceptance. But when leaders would support us, it made a difference. Eventually, business leaders began to come out, and when they did a Christian group began to publish a list of gay-owned businesses with the message, “Don’t do business with them.” There used to be a bus of seniors sponsored by an area church that would park outside SideTraxx and heckle the customers. Once it even got violent.

We began to work with counselors in the high schools and asked them if they’d put a pink triangle or rainbow flag on their office door so LGBTQ kids would know it was a safe place, that this was a safe person. We organized pflag and other LGBTQ support groups as well. We also tried to get schools to do HIV education, and we were sometimes not invited back because we talked about sex and condom use. If you are not going to get sex education from parents or schools, where are you going to get education? There are so many STD’s out there, it’s not just a queer thing … everybody needs to be safe.

So, yes, TC was an interesting place. Not super accepting at first, but a lot of good people are here. We helped them organize and realize that queer people are everywhere. And though HIV did make some people treat our community like lepers, over time, as more and more HIV stories came out, it did lead to more acceptance.

Times have changed hugely in 30 years. We now have rainbow flags flying everywhere, and we have Up North Pride Day with thousands of people walking down the street during Pride. We’ve gone from taping paper over the windows to a monthlong festival. Traverse City has embraced it and has done a good job with acceptance and tolerance. I even became mayor of the city.

You know, we have a huge population of gays here. Queers know a good thing when they see it and will make it fabulous. We understand what’s good and beautiful and fair. And we’ve come a long way at supporting tolerance and acceptance and getting people to support everyone here.

Looking ahead … we have got good LBG support from our community, but we still need to work on the T and the Q [trans and queer] and the nonbinary. I have plenty of trans friends and that’s the big issue of acceptance we need to tackle now. And we really need to support young people and who they are and who they want to be. We need to support them. Back in the day, kids were killing themselves and people didn’t know why, and it was because they were gay and they had nobody to turn to and people around them didn’t know they were gay.

I hope for a world in the future where we can all live peacefully. Where you can feel comfortable in your neighborhood, being who you are. Diversity is important. Jesus said, “Love thy neighbor.” We need to bury our differences and support people more. it’s just the right thing to do.