Love, Family Hosts Pride Month Pool Party

By VERNON ROBISON

The Progress

A clear, pale rainbow in the clouds above the Virgin Mountain Range set its accent to the second annual all-community family night and pool party held at the outdoor pool at the Mesquite Rec Center on Saturday evening. The second annual Pride Month celebration was hosted by the local LGBTQ support organization Love, Family.

A crowd of about 200 people showed up for the event which featured swimming, free food, vendors, information booths and a host of other fun activities for kids and adults alike.

June is set aside as Pride Month, to show support for the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans-sexual, Queer (LGBTQ) community.

But the Mesquite event was not only focused on LGBTQ participants, though there were many of this group in attendance. Rather Friday’s celebration was organized to be all-inclusive; gearing towards embracing the entire community with plenty of fun for the whole family.

Love, Family organizer Dana Long, explained the reason why this annual event is so carefully focused on being family-oriented.
“Our main goal as an organization is to help at-risk youth,” Long said. “If kids are struggling with identity issues and aren’t protected or don’t have a support system we want to welcome them and their families and build them up. We want to give them a space to feel valued and accepted.”

Long said that Love, Family is working with The Center, an LGBTQ community center in downtown Las Vegas, to bring a program called PIVOT to the Mesquite community.

According to Holly Reese, Director of Advocacy at The Center, Pivot is a support program that works with families that are navigating their way through LGBTQ issues to help them be more accepting of one another and to stay together as a stronger family with healthy, positive outcomes.
PIVOT had its start recently at The Center with some marked success, Reese said.

“Now we want to set up pilot programs to show that PIVOT can work in other locations and with other facilitators,” Reese said. “Dana (Long) contacted us and asked for support in the Mesquite community. So we want to use Mesuqite as a pilot program to see if it can be effective here.”

Other community groups and vendors were also in attendance with booths at the event.
Serving up delicious street tacos to the crowd was local food truck Tan Bueno. These were a favorite among attendees.

The Virgin Valley Artists Association had a space where attendees could draw their own self portraits and enter them into a contest. The four top drawings will be exhibited throughout July in the Mesa Gallery at the Mesquite Fine Arts Gallery.

The Friends of Gold Butte organization had a booth where kids could try their hands at painting pictographs on rocks like the ancients did.

Mesquite residents David Slater and Jeff Chastain had a booth to get the word out about a new LGBT Social Club at Sun City Mesquite. The couple moved to Mesquite two years ago from northern Washington State. Last September they started the social club to bring the LGBT community at Sun City together for social interaction. Since that time the group has grown to about two dozen members.

For more information about the group email MesquiteLGBT@gmail.com.