Roughly 100 people packed an upstairs room at No Mas! Cantina Thursday night to honor Atlanta’s LGBT trailblazers. The inaugural event, Our Founding Valentines: Celebrating Our Pioneers, was organized by Atlanta Pride and Touching Up Our Roots and allowed a light to shine on the six honorees, who entertained guests throughout the night with stories from the early days of the city’s LGBT rights movement.
The first group of elders honored at the event were Franklin Abbott, Berl Boykin, Mary Louise Covington, Diamond Lil, Maria Helena Dolan and Reverend Erin Swenson.
“This is really a way for us as Atlanta Pride, as the LGBTQ community in this city, to say thank you for the work that you did,” Atlanta Pride executive director Buck Cooke told the honorees during an awards presentation. “You were doing work when it was not hip or trendy or cool. You were doing work when it was frankly unsafe and unpopular and really came with a cost for the things that you were doing—fighting for your beliefs, fighting for your rights and fighting for the rights of other people.”
Organizers hope this is one of many such events in the years to come and they included a sheet for people to write down suggestions for honorees for 2016.
Check out a photo gallery from the event below and click here for more information about each of the honorees.
