A Letter From The President
In PFLAG, We Tell Our Stories
Bob Dorr, PFLAG Omaha
Posted on September 25, 2006
What we do best in PFLAG is to tell our stories. Parents relate their experiences after hearing their son tell them he is gay or their daughter saying she is lesbian. Others tell their stories of growing up as closeted gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender young people.
We tell those stories, and uncounted others, as panelists in our Safe Schools appearances in college classrooms and other places.
You will have the opportunity to hear some of those stories at our meeting on Oct. 12. A panel of PFLAG members and supporters will tell about their lives and their GLBT-related experiences. We will do this as a National Coming Out Day event, as we have done in past years. The meeting will be at our normal time and place, 7 p.m. at First United Methodist Church ’s Mead Hall. Come and bring a friend who might like to know more about PFLAG, and about our stories.
PRIDE PLAYERS: This group of talented Omaha-area high school students directed by Brian Guehring and Tracy Iwersen once again will tell their stories through songs, skits, poems and monologues. The theater troupe will do a four-day run of performances at the upstairs Hitchcock Theater at the Rose Performing Arts Center downtown. The performance at 7 p.m. on Oct. 13 is a benefit for PFLAG, GLSEN and Proud Horizons, the PFLAG-sponsored youth support group.
Recently Pride Players received a national human rights award. The National Education Association gave the Omaha group its SuAnne Big Crow Memorial Award, given each year to a student or group whose achievements enhance students’ sense of worth and dignity.
You should have received an invitation through the mail or by email to attend this $15-a-ticket benefit. If not, and you would like to come please let us know.
NEW BOARD MEMBERS: At the Sept. 14 meeting, PFLAG members re-elected board members Carrie Spencer and Barbara Johnson. They also elected Lauren Jansen and Gay Biga as new board members. Hap Rohwer is leaving the board although he remains active in PFLAG as a telephone Help Line volunteer and as co-editor of this monthly newsletter.
Gay Biga is married with two daughters and a 20-year-old son who is gay. All three children are in college. Her husband is a high school teacher. She is one of the owners of Fun Services of Nebraska & Iowa and Arizona Fun Services, which are party-planning services.
Gay became involved in PFLAG shortly after learning her son is gay. “The lack of civil rights afforded to GLBT people is unacceptable. We need to embrace diversity. It is my desire to make a positive change in the world in which my son lives,” she says.
Lauren Jansen is a male-to-female transsexual. As a member of our Safe Schools panels, she has told her story often the past two years. She has known she is transgender her entire life but struggled to suppress her feelings for her first 50 years. She lost her former job of 25 years as a construction company manager in northwest Iowa due to her gender-change plans.
Lauren moved to Omaha last year, and now works at Caribou Coffee, 72nd and Pacific Sts. She joined PFLAG’s panels because she is “a strong believer in educating the public at the grass-roots level. I have also found that PFLAG is one of the very few GLBT organizations that truly is transgender inclusive.”
UNITED WAY OF THE MIDLANDS honors the requests of donors who want some or all of their annual pledge to go to Omaha PFLAG. We are not among the organizations that are designated to receive money through United Way ’s regular budget. But Omaha PFLAG is a nonprofit group that qualifies for gifts that are designated by donors.
You can request a 2006 Campaign Designation Form from your work place United Way coordinator. Designated United Way gifts pay about 20 percent of our annual budget.
IT’S NOT TOO LATE to register for the PFLAG Midwest Tri-Regional Conference in Chicago on Nov. 3 and 4. For more information, go to: www.pflag.org
HUGE SUCCESS: Some 35 people attended our Sept. 16 training session for Safe Schools presenters and panelists. Many were people who came to our training for the first time. They will bolster our ranks and give us better assurance of being able to fill panels and supply presenters when college instructors request them for their classes. Thanks to all who came.
ALETA FENCEROY: As many of you know, Aleta died on Sept. 23 after battling cancer for three months. She was 57. She raised two children on her own, working part-time and going to college. In Omaha , she worked as an analyst/programmer and software writer for First Data Resources during the day, and then for eight years she went home to spend hours on the computer at night finding GLBT-related stories and sending them to the Fenceberry list of readers. Most of the news service stories for this newsletter came from Fenceberry.
As her spouse, Jean Mayberry, wrote: “Hour after hour and day upon day were spent on the home computer. Aleta was determined to hunt down the story; to get the news out, to defend her community and to right the wrongs to the best of her ability. And she did it with love, wit, dignity and charm.”
Aleta died at home in a hospital bed that Jean had set up in the dining room next to a big window so that she could look out at the garden
Bob Dorr, president
A Letter From The President
Openly Gay Public Official To Speak at PFLAG Meeting
Bob Dorr, PFLAG Omaha
Posted on September 5, 2006
Lincoln School Board Member Barbara Baier, the first openly gay person elected to public office in Nebraska , will speak at Omaha PFLAG’s Sept. 14 meeting.
We will reverse the normal order of our meeting. Barbara and her partner, Lin Quenzer, will speak at 7 p.m. so they can get back to Lincoln earlier. They have a six-year-old son, and our meeting is on a school night. Support time will begin at 8 p.m.
Barbara and Lin have had a committed relationship for 17 years. Both women work for the City of Lincoln , Barbara as a grant writer and Lin as the ombudsman. Barbara will talk about her Lincoln School Board experiences, and Lin will focus on their work with the Stonewall Democrats, an organization of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender Democrats.
OMAHA PFLAG’S ANNUAL BUSINESS MEETING will take place as part of our Sept. 14 meeting. For most of the year, our board of directors takes care of PFLAG business. However, once a year we hold a general meeting. We will elect members of the board of directors for the coming year and conduct any other business brought up by PFLAG members.
TRAINING REMINDER: If you have any interest in becoming a Safe Schools presenter or a panelist or you want to know what our Safe Schools presentations are all about, please attend our training from 9 a.m. until noon on Saturday, Sept. 16, with coffee and donuts at 8:30 a.m. The training will be in Mead Hall at First United Methodist Church , where we hold our monthly meetings.
We also are urging current presenters and panelists to attend to upgrade their skills and to discuss typical questions that our audiences ask of panelists. If you can attend, and have not yet notified us you are coming, please email Betty Dorr at: bobcdorr@cox.net
THE PFLAG BOARD voted to add $100 to our annual budget to buy books for our library at our meeting place. If you have any suggestions for appropriate books that would be excellent additions, please make them to Mary Spurgeon, our librarian. Email them to info@pflag-omaha.org and we’ll relay them to Mary.
THANK YOU: As many of you know, Betty and I lost our youngest son, Michael, at the age of 41, on Aug. 12. Michael was tremendously gifted in many ways. In 1993, shortly after he told us he was gay, we joined Omaha PFLAG. Over the last few years, he has struggled against a triple whammy onslaught of mental illness, alcoholism and drug abuse.
Since his death, we have been stunned at the outpouring of compassion and support by so many people—far beyond anything we ever imagined. We have appreciated all of it.
Bob Dorr,
Omaha PFLAG president
