Above: Jonny Cameron. Photo by Michael Poehlman.

As part of Groundwork’s ongoing series of equity interviews, today, on National Pride Day 2025, we hear from Jonny Cameron, an early organizer of Pride events in Traverse City and stalwart advocate for LGBTQ+ rights, acceptance, and support. [As told to Jeff Smith.]

Jonny Cameron I just finished my master’s in social work from the University of Michigan during this really interesting season of dismantling DEI and social welfare and international aid programs. Even at U of M, where they have one of the best social work schools in the country, they’ve closed the DEI office. It’s wild.

Since the start of Up North Pride in 2014, our community has been more visible publicly. We’ve been telling our stories of queer resilience.

In the first years, as our events drew exponentially larger numbers of people, we had support from wonderful friends—our mayor at the time, Jim Carruthers, Police Chief O’Brien, and city employees. And we had amazing advocates, like Holly T. Bird, who recently passed. I was in the room at her memorial service and my heart swells remembering her big smile and steely optimism and wisdom and her creativity in supporting our community and this work of Pride.

I am trans and I transitioned very publicly in this community. And it was during the first Trump administration, and it was fraught for me because I was transitioning during this time of rising hyper-masculinity and violence and rhetoric and name-calling. I wondered how I would be treated.

But I’ve never lived anywhere longer than Traverse City. When I was transitioning, I was thinking of moving away to a larger city. I thought, The people here can’t handle this, and I need more resources. But instead, people here showed so much love for me and support. And it’s because of that feeling of being held and being surprised again and again by the support I’ve had here. I feel a strong sense of belonging in this community, despite feeling pretty kicked around by the geopolitical rhetoric.

I’m speaking as someone who’s been out and queer since I was 20 in Texas, as a former freaking debutante, from a small town recovering from the Southern Baptist thing. Now I’m hearing those guys rearing their heads again and attacking my legal marriage with Elon, who I’ve married a couple of times, illegally at first and then legally.

I have a long-time friend who I grew up with in Texas, who still lives there. She’s a teacher. Recently, we spoke about her trans students who are either looking to move out of state or are in in-patient treatment somewhere out of state. This political rhetoric and all of the anti-trans legislation is literally harming our well-being and our ability to see ourselves in this world.

There’s so much negative reactivity going on right now in so many places across the country and we’re all sort of micro-traumatizing ourselves by looking at our screens and not having a coordinated way to process and get in a good place. I have not been out in public as much as I used to, and I know that that’s just a condition of protecting myself and my nervous system.

I’m grateful that I went to school to be a social worker, and one reason is that I can be better about caring for myself, because we all need to know how to do that. The coordinated attacks on trans people are malicious, and thankfully, I have the strength of my mom and my long time partner who have been essential protective factors in my life. For a trans person, every positive protective force in your life is truly suicide prevention.

To bring it back to Holly again, one of the last times I saw her was at a protest of a local business that was excluding services to trans people, and it made national news. Holly was there, and her sign was, “Pronouns are suicide prevention.”

Holly said to me, you know, in our Indigenous tradition, the transition you are walking through is a sacred time. Her generosity in sharing this wisdom with me was a gift and something I think of often.

For some people, I wonder if the “danger” that we pose as trans people is that we’re able to just be a little more. The only word I think of is “interstitiality.” We know what it is to be in-between, to be perceived differently, and we know what it is to be outwardly persecuted. And those of us who are able to survive enough and hopefully thrive enough and get to gender euphoria, or somewhere near, we are able to ask questions and give pause, rather than ramping up and attacking one another over some perceived difference.

As for Pride day itself, I think of my first pride church service in Chicago. I was at Broadway United Methodist church led by the late Greg Dell who had been suspended for officiating gay marriages well before it was legal in any state. The window behind the pulpit was a full view of the parade route on Broadway. I remember seeing some protesters with their “Homosexuality is a sin” signs while I was in this church full of loving people from all walks of life. And, I’m watching this protestors as the backdrop to the pulpit, and I kid you not, right behind these folks there were City of Chicago street sweepers—literally sweeping them away before the parade began. It’s an image that I use like a mental mantra—just sweeping their mess away.

When I moved to Traverse City in 2010, the city commission held public hearings on whether or not to update the non-discrimination ordinance to include sexual orientation and gender identity. We attended the public hearings and, while there were detractors, there was overwhelmingly good turnout in favor. This was how I began to “find my people” which was my way of gauging whether this would be a safe home for me and my family. The commissioners voted unanimously in favor of the update—and I think the vitriol of the detractors kind of proved the point of why we needed a non-discrimination ordinance. So, a few years later, when a new arrival to Traverse City asked me if there were any Pride events, I said that, aside from drag shows at the local gay bar, the answer was no. So, we gathered around a picnic table at The Little Fleet and planned our first visibility stroll in June 2014, and it’s been growing ever since. I’m grateful that the organization lives on and is now doing year-round programming to build and resource our community.

One of the highlights for me from across the years came with the first Indigenous land acknowledgement that we did. It was in a park right across the street from the house where my partner grew up. And it was that moment when we were in that park and hearing that message that we realized that, OK, we can really stay here. That this community will hold us, and I can quiet that desire to flee that so many trans people in this country feel, especially now.