As a capstone to Pride Month, today in the equity series we share thoughts from M’Lynn Hartwell, of Traverse City. M’Lynn is a longtime advocate for environmental, human, and civil rights, and here she discusses how a simple bumper sticker played an important role in moving civil rights forward in Traverse City and beyond. (Check out other interviews in the equity series here.)—J.S.

M’Lynn Hartwell: When I think back on Traverse City’s journey for more just treatment of people in the LGBTQ community, one of the things that stands out is when we created the “We Are Traverse City” rainbow bumper sticker.

At the time … this was in the early 2000’s … we were trying to get the civil rights protections that Traverse City municipal employees enjoy extended to all Traverse City workers.

I remember sitting around in Margaret Dodd’s house with her and Jim Carruthers. When discussing this challenge to the policy protecting city employees, Margaret said, “Somebody should do something.” I replied, “We are somebody.” Margaret wondered if we could maybe do something with the rainbow icon popularly used as a symbol in the LGBTQ+ community. We added the words, “We Are Traverse City,” and the rest is history.

At the time, Traverse City was in the midst of a rash of hate crimes, ranging from cross burning incidents to the vandalism of mailboxes belonging to Jewish people. One of the worst was when skinheads assaulted a bartender at SideTraxx, the only bar in the city that catered to the LGBTQ+ population. As I recall, the bartender was taking out the trash when he was confronted by three neo-Nazi skinheads brandishing clubs. Charlie, the bartender, ran track in high school, and he outran the skinheads, re-entered SideTraxx through the front door, locked the doors, and called the police. 

So Jim, Margaret, and I all thought the bumper sticker was a great idea. I met over lunch with a designer I knew, Richard Curtis, and just sat together and designed the bumper sticker on his computer over lunch. I still have the original “We Are Traverse City” bumper sticker design file preserved on an old hard-drive.

Margaret took it to the City Commission and they approved the design, and we had the bumper stickers printed in December. And the city had the bumper stickers put on city vehicles. That was the beginning of the firestorm. A policeman, Dennis Leach, complained that he did not feel right driving around with the bumper sticker on his car and didn’t feel he should have to do so. Then the American Family Association got involved along with the Ava Maria Law School. So the city caved without a fight and stopped the stickers from being put on city vehicles. My neighbor invited Gary Glenn, the state president of American Family Association, to his house and then invited me to have a debate with him while sitting in the front yard. I told my neighbor, “There is nothing to debate. Gary Glenn is just plain wrong.” At one point, someone shot my house with a rifle. The bullet is still in a wall stud.

But despite removing the bumper stickers from the city vehicles, the bumper sticker became the beginning of the human rights campaign that eventually put the measure extending non-discrimination protection to all Traverse City people on the city ballot. On November 8, 2011, the voters approved it with 63% of the vote—so basically it passed by a margin of nearly two to one.

Here’s what the ordinance says: No person shall adopt, enforce, or employ any policy or requirement which has the effect of creating unequal opportunities according to actual or perceived race, color, religion, national origin, sex, age, height, weight, family status, sexual orientation, marital status, physical or mental disability, or gender identity for a person to obtain housing, employment, or public accommodation.

[M’Lynn recommends this article from the time: https://pridesource.com/article/we-are-still-t-c ]

So yes, the bumper sticker became a powerful message carrier! I was contacted by a number of communities around the United States and people in other countries asking me to create a bumper sticker for them, Germany, Italy, Canada, Wisconsin, communities on the East and West Coasts. Which I did. I’d just change Traverse City to their city, county, or country, as they requested. The bumper sticker got us national and international coverage for Northwest Lower Michigan.

As I think back on the evolution of Traverse City’s more open welcome of the LGBTQ community, I remember gatherings the community used to have in the basement of the bowling alley and some other locations. They would paper the windows, and it wasn’t advertised. They had admission lists at the door, and security was often present. But at the time, Traverse City had probably one of the highest population percentages of gays of any community that I knew of. It was one of the largest minority groups up here, but it was invisible. The community existed in an environment of fear and paranoia. But after the bumper sticker came out and the ballot passed almost a decade later, acceptance opened up. Businesses on Front Street posted the bumper sticker in their windows. It became a symbol that all were welcome here. Now you see gay and lesbian couples holding hands, feeling that it is safe to walk down the street.

It really does take a village. “We are Traverse City” was preceded by “Hate Free TC.” There was a lot of positive energy in Traverse City in the late 1990s and early 2000s being directed at combating ignorance, intolerance, divisions, and racism. There were so many co-collaborators at the time working for human rights and social justice, including but not limited to Rabbi Stacey Fine (Bahle), Dottie Kye of Hate-Free TC, Unity Fest Concert organizers Tim Hall and Tom Emmott, and so many more. Our community felt alive, dynamic and so full of hope for a better future.

That prevailed until the first Trump administration. To me, I now see a movement to be more biased against minority groups in the United States, be they brown or black or gay or lesbian or what have you. I definitely feel we are now living in an environment of increasing intolerance toward minorities. I hear people talk about going back in the closet. But of course, our BIPOC friends can’t do that because of the color of their skin. We can just pretend we are straight.

We’ve seen people push back. But we’ve also seen some businesses pull back on openly supporting diversity. As for Traverse City, I’d say it’s still more accepting than most other places in Michigan. But am I optimistic that the pendulum will swing back our way soon? Frankly I’m not that optimistic. It might take a generation.

You know it just doesn’t make any sense to me. We are all stranded on this giant rock floating in space, and to create all these artificial constructs, and geographic, religious, and racial barriers to coexisting … It seems really ridiculous, absurd, you know? It should be so easy for us to live collaboratively and end divisions and human suffering. Why don’t we? Why don’t we help, instead of making other people’s lives difficult, or in some cases impossible. Gay and lesbian individuals are significantly more likely to attempt suicide compared to their heterosexual peers, and it’s not because they’re gay or lesbian or trans. It’s because of institutional intolerances in church, family, and society. So, I guess that’s the thing that confuses me the most, is the choices that we as a society make. We could make healthier choices, we could live collaboratively, we could coexist. We could and should support and build up one another. I just don’t get it.

M’Lynn Hartwell is Director of Possibilities for Freshwater Events and has dedicated 50 years to advertising, marketing, and public relations. She made a career out of creating campaigns, and We Are Traverse City was much more than a bumper sticker, and it was even more than a campaign. It was a movement, creating positive change in the Grand Traverse area. mlynn@freshwaterevents.com