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The 2013 Power List

The 2013 Power List

Daneya Esgar, Sandhya Luther, Sen. Pat Steadman

Stories by Matt Pizzuti and Nic Garcia

Photos by Evan Semon

The cliché goes: with great power comes great responsibility. And while each of the individuals on our 2013 Power List live up to that mantra, they’ve also created one themselves: great power is responsible for great change.


The 2013 Power List
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Andy Szekeres
Daneya Esgar
Shalom Cares
Imperial Court of the Rocky Mountain Empire
State Sen. Pat Steadman
Donaciano Martinez
Fran, Anna and Jeremy Simon
Sandhya Luther
The Mathis Family


Szekeres helps youth start businesses


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Andy Szekeres has a self-proclaimed “long and storied” past in the LGBT community, especially for someone who is only 30.

Better known for his political fundraising for progressive candidates and LGBT causes — and Change.org petitions — Szekeres has raised almost $22 million in Colorado, Maine and Florida. But in 2012, Szekeres, a rebel-rouser at heart, sold his political consulting business and left politics to become the development director for Denver nonprofit YouthBiz.

The Five Points organization strives to advance the social and economic prosperity of youth through the study and practice of entrepreneurship. “We’ve had a long 20 year history. And in the last year, we’ve re-launched our programs in the last year to help young people start their own businesses and utilize some of the assets they can earn themselves in stead of doing a low income job.”

“The organization, when I started, like many organizations was going through a life cycle. And the board really determined we wanted to grow. So, myself and the new executive director, who came in about the same time, were able to take an organization that had lost money year-after-year and turn a net positive within eight months — which is hard to do in Colorado’s economy.”

Under Szekeres leadership, the organization also finished eighth in the nation in the Job Raising Challenge sponsored by the Huffington Post and Skoll Foundation. “They challenged nonprofits to find innovative solutions to solve the jobs crisis,” Szekeres said.

The money Szekeres raises for YouthBiz goes to pay its youth stipends to imagine, develop and sell products. Take DeeJay for example: “she came into the company not knowing anything about being an entrepreneur. Within a couple of months, she figured out an idea for a (purse) company, and within a couple of months she had bags walking down the red carpet at the Grammys. We were able to take her from complete concept, to production and now she’s in the process of scaling up.”

Not everyone YouthBiz works with has had such wild success. But Szekeres said the lessons learned at YouthBiz help students be self-sufficient and problem solvers.

—Nic Garcia

 

For Pueblo leader, patience is not a virtue


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After back-to-back defeats at the state legislature, Daneya Esgar couldn’t wait for some of the legal protections the Colorado Civil Union Act would afford her and her friends to become law — Pueblo, the community she was born and raised in, had to take matters into its own collective hands.

So after the legislation’s historic death in the 2012 General Assembly, Esgar put together a plan to see same-gender domestic partnership benefits for the city employees in Pueblo.

“We started with the county commissioners, but we kept hitting road block after road block,” she said. “So, we decided to try the city. And we started talking with city council members and we had a lot of them on board, but none of them really wanted to dig in and do the work.”

She used resources at her day job, the Colorado Progressive Coalition, and worked with a member to write the ordinance themselves.

When the document was complete, “we started organizing. We started calling all of our friends and all of our family members asking them to call city council members.”

The document was introduced by a friendly council member and passed all the procedural hurdles to reach a final vote in September of 2012. But on its final reading a series of missteps led the policy to be tabled “indefinitely.”

Esgar and her coalition were shocked. “No one told us what ‘tabled indefinitely’ meant. I don’t even think some of the city council members understood what that meant.”

After the surprising vote, LGBT Puebloans “came together and questioned city council members, why they did what they did, and pushed for it to be on the very next agenda.”

It was, and this time, the votes were there.

So, before the Colorado Civil Union Act passed in 2013, Pueblo city employees had the ability to claim their domestic partnerships.

A year later, Esgar is the president of the Southern Colorado Equality Alliance. The organization produces an annual Pride celebration and queer prom, a weekly youth group and a monthly adult social group for LGBT people and their families.

“If you have not made it to Pueblo — come and check us out,” Esgar said. “There’s a lot of great things going on and a lot of great people. Come meet us, give me a call. I’ll treat you to a slopper and a red beer and have some fun.”

Nic Garcia

 

Aging service provider embedded themselves in community


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A couple of years ago the leadership team of Shalom Cares, an umbrella nonprofit organization that provides services to the aging community, including hospice care, started to hear feedback from the aging LGBT community they were fearful of getting health care services for many reasons.

“Many people felt it was like going back into the closet,” said Milissa Barres, executive director of Shalom Hospice and Palliative and Home Health Care. “The feedback that we were getting was that there was fear of discrimination. There was a fear of their important relationships not being honored or event acknowledged.”

Since then, the team sought education from the LGBT community itself, developed an annual inclusivity training, redeveloped all of its documentation to be inclusive of same-sex relationships and gender variance, and developed partnerships with community organizations like The GLBT Community Center of Colorado and One Colorado.

“You just don’t go out into the community and say ‘we’re here to serve you’ and then not be a part of that community,” Barres said. “We’ve really worked toward building a community.”

Shalom Cares has stepped up just as the community needs it. This is the first time in the modern LGBT rights movement that there has been a visible aging community.

The journey toward true inclusivity has been eye opening, said Lori Carter, executive director and nursing home administrator at Shalom Park.

“We’re fortunate, because we’re carrying on what our founding fathers stated which was ‘caring for all.’ And we say that and we actually want to do that,” Carter said. “The whole education piece — we thought we were being open to all, but really embraced that and expanded our knowledge.”

—Nic Garcia

 

The Court, 40 years of being responsible for its own


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Something from nothing. That’s the story of how LGBT Denver came to be. For sure, this is the same story for all communities. But few can share their nothing became something — extraordinary — due in large part to drag queens.

It was 1973, fewer than five years after the Stonewall Riots in New York City. Denver’s gays and lesbians were on the verge of stepping out politically for the first time. There were four city ordnances that explicitly targeted the LGBT community — including for wearing gender non-conforming clothing anywhere other than a stage.

If a female impersonator didn’t have a restroom in her dressing room, he’d have to remove his dress and wig, put on a pair of trousers and make his way to the lavatory, explained Scottie Carlyle, Empress 2 of the Imperial Court of the Rocky Mountain Empire.

In the context of police brutality, the threat of being banned to a mental institution if you came out and the threat of being fired or evicted if your sexual orientation was discovered, the aforementioned was small potatoes.

Yet, the sum of the parts galvanized a community tired of being considered less than.

“We decided as a group, that we were not going to let people tell us we were not good people,” said Christi Layne, Empress 6, “Because we knew better. And we were going to change things so they understood who we were and where we were going.”

And change they did. The Imperial Court of the Rocky Mountains, in its infancy was  a fundraising apparatus for organizations like the Gay Coalition of Denver, Unity and The GLBT Community Center of Colorado, and later the Colorado Anti-Violence Program and The Colorado AIDS Project.

Now, in its 40th year, The Court has given thousands of dollars — countless, really — to nonprofits to build community — $1 at a time.

Besides raising money for our community’s legacy organizations, The Court played a central role in organizing a phone tree for emergencies and political actions; The Court was also instrumental for obtaining the first official Pride march permit for the city, and when it was taken away, sought protection from the state’s governor.

“There was no focal point for the community, we had a microphone and a stage, and we could talk to people everynight, we could motivate them, move them, make them feel better about themselves,” Layne said. “We saw to make sure we were responsible for our own.”

— Nic Garcia

 

For Steadman, civil unions are just a halfway point in life and policy


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State Sen. Pat Steadman is known best as the original sponsor of Colorado’s civil unions bill, signed into law this Spring after three years of battle in the state legislature and finally allowing same-sex couples to form civil unions this May. But for Steadman, the achievement was only a step in a long and tumultuous struggle for equality he’s been on throughout his adult life.

“Three years to get a bill through was only the final chapter of a longer story,” Steadman said. “And in reality, that story isn’t finished being written. Civil unions aren’t full equality — they’re a way station on our way to equality, and we’ve got more work to do.”

Steadman stepped into Colorado LGBT politics in 1991, when the City and County of Denver had just passed an equal rights ordinance and an opposing group petitioned a question on the local ballot to reject the new law.

“I knew that was something I wanted to work on, now that I was just finished with a law degree and had ‘grown up,’” Steadman said. “We won that election, but as soon as it was over, a group from Colorado Springs started a petition drive to overturn all equal rights ordinances across the state.”

That statewide initiative became Colorado’s Amendment 2, which was passed by voters and subsequently battled in courts until the U.S. Supreme Court, in 1996, struck the amendment as unconstitutional.

“I was a spokesperson for the lawsuit explaining why Amendment 2 violated the Constitution, and met some women who ended up being my businesses partners in the lobbying business,” Steadman said.

From there, he became a lobbyist for progressive issues for more than a decade.

“They were all things I was proud to work on and convinced me there’s a lot that can be accomplished in the political arena,” Steadman said. “My career as a lobbyist led me to a seat in the state Senate in 2009. A vacancy opened up in the Senate and decided that was my calling.”

Steadman first introduced the Colorado Civil Union Act as a state Senator in 2011, vowing to see it passed for Colorado same-sex couples, and be able to form a union with his own partner, Dave Misner. Tragically, Misner died of pancreatic cancer in 2012.

“When I think about all those people that struggle, that just renews my commitment to make sure our relationships are respected and recognized and given the dignity and legal rights they deserve,” Steadman said, “because you never know what’s going to happen to people, and when a legally-recognized relationship is going to matter. People don’t usually prepare or plan for accidents or disasters or illnesses or death, and yet sooner or later life has most or all those things in store for us.

The ability of the people you care about most — your loved ones, your legally-recognized partner — to be there through whatever it is that life throws at you, that’s worth fighting for.”

—Matt Pizzuti

 

Catholic teaching spurred Martinez’s social justice advocacy 


Donanciano

Donaciano Martinez has had his sights set on justice since 1964.

Growing up Chicano in a racially-segregated Colorado Springs, it was what might seem as an unlikely inspiration today — Roman Catholic social teaching — that turned Martinez into an activist.

“Like a lot of Chicanos and Chicanas I grew up in the Catholic Church, so my inspiration to get involved in the peace movement was a lot of the nuns, and the monks, and the priests in Colorado Springs,” Martinez said. “They were right out there in the forefront of advocacy — my sheroes and heroes. That’s who I looked up to when I talked about who inspired me to get involved.”

It started with the anti-war movement, and a cultural turn toward seeking revolutionary change that set up Martinez and a generation of gay activists to envision a better world for LGBT people.

“The founding of the Gay Liberation Front needs to be viewed in the context of activism that was going on in the 1960s in general,” he said. “We worked heavily to elect President Johnson” — because of a shared opposition to the war in Vietnam — “and the first thing he did, when he got elected, was he escalated the war. So by 1965, we were in the streets. We began to expand our activism into the Chicano movement, and into the anti-poverty program, and we began to raise gay issues.”

Martinez said other activist groups initially resisted lesbian and gay rights. “They were saying, ‘All that gay and lesbian stuff needs to be put off until we have a revolution, then we’ll get around to you people.’ But we said ‘No, we need to be included along the whole path.’ A lot of us who lived in the gay underground in the 1950s, we were tired of being secret, so by 1969 with the Stonewall riots in New York City, we were inspired to start the Gay Liberation Front in Colorado Springs.”

Meanwhile, the small group of gay activists was dealing with a community “concerned we were going to bring down the wrath of straight society,” Martinez said. “Our first leaflet was ‘do you think gays are revolting?’ and down at the bottom it said ‘you bet your sweet ass we are.’”

Martinez described decades of fighting to unite minority communities that sometimes resisted each others’ concerns. In the late ’70s and early ’80s Martinez moved to Denver and was protesting outside three Denver gay bars accused of racism.

“I remember Phil Price was the editor of Out Front at the time and he was terrified that we were out there raising hell because these were his three biggest advertisers,” Martinez said. “So he didn’t want to get involved in reporting on the protests and I had a talk with him and he said when it comes to his pocketbook versus telling the truth, he has to go with his pocketbook. I understood. A lot of us understood the position he was in.”

But for Martinez, there was no ambiguity about the right thing to do.

“We were radicals — I do not mean extremists, I mean people who go to the root of the problem,” he said. “We came from a generation of radicals, and we were proud to be radicals.”

—Matt Pizzuti

 

For Simon family, activism is a moral obligation


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Fran and Anna Simon became familiar faces at Colorado’s State Capitol hearings three years in a row when Colorado’s Civil Union Act, a bill to establish relationship recognition for same-sex couples, was debated, died three times, and on its fourth incarnation in 2013 finally passed into law.

The Simons’ son Jeremy, now 6, got plenty of camera time of his own when he appeared at the microphone at the bill’s hearings in 2013, and at a rally outside the building waved a sign he’d made depicting a drawing of himself and his moms with the handwritten words “please vote yes for my family.”

“Putting ourselves in the public eye that way, especially as parents, is not something that you do lightly,” Anna said, “and it does bring with it some risks. But we feel that standing up for what we believe in, fighting for what’s right, is the most important thing that we can teach our son, and that he got to play even a small role in what has been a monumental change in this country is something he can be proud of for the rest of his life.”

For the family, standing up for civil unions was a moral obligation.

“At our (religious) wedding, eight years ago, we committed ourselves to justice and dedicated ourselves to righteousness and equality for all, and this is just a manifestation of that,” Fran said. “It was important to us as a family to do the work known as ‘tikkun olam,’ to heal the world. We believe that visibility of LGBT people is the primary agent of change in our society, so we did the work of getting ourselves to the Capitol time and time again, to be there for rallies, speak at rallies, and to do interviews for radio, television and newspaper.”

It’s important, Anna said, to participate in what many other families didn’t have the resources to do.

“So many people can’t do that work. They have fear of repercussions for being out, or they don’t have flexibility in their work, or they live far away from Denver. Because we were in a unique position to be able to do the work, we felt obligated to do it. We’ve also been very grateful for this opportunity for our community for our community to show their support, that Jeremy knows that he can be proud of his family, and proud of who he is.”

Jeremy himself is shy — taking his time warming up to cameras or crowds, fascinated by nature and trees. “All I got to say was, ‘Hi my name is Jeremy, and I’m 6,’” Jeremy said of his testimony, seemingly unaware of the outsized role he played humanizing LGBT families to audiences throughout Colorado.

It’s a perfect example of his mothers’ philosophy, that small things can make a big difference.

“If there’s something you can do,” Anna said, “even if you think it’s really small — and what we’ve done is really small in the context of everything everyone has done — but all those small parts put together is what makes change happen. So be yourself, be out there, do that even seemingly small thing, because you never know what it might lead to.”

“What I want the community know is we thank them,” Fran said, “every person in the LGBT community and allies who attended a hearing, testified, emailed or called a legislator, volunteered time, donated money or just voiced support for the civil unions bill, we just want to say thank you.”

— Matt Pizzuti

 

Luther, shining light on the invisible


Photo by Evan Semon

Sandhya Luther, Director of Advocacy at Colorado Anti-Violence Program, isn’t one to seek the limelight. Humbly, she said “I think there are other people at CAVP who have done much more work and much longer than I have, who should be honored with me.”

It’s a recurring theme in Luther’s telling of her life, including before her three years at CAVP: shining whatever light she can on others left invisible to the world. CAVP works with and on behalf of victims of violence — providing referrals and support to survivors and raising awareness about violence against members of the LGBT community, which Luther said is far more common than openly discussed. With clients she assists with filing police reports, connecting them to shelter and resources when needed, and most importantly hearing their stories.

“We’ve seen that the more intersections there are — if you’re a woman of color or a trans woman of color and experiencing poverty — the systemic exclusions you face are more, the violence you face can be more,” Luther said. “There’s a skepticism and a shaming that’s prevalent in many cases. People ask (victims of violence) if they were drinking or why they were in a certain part of town. Just having someone believe them, hear them and advocate for them is a great step in the process of healing — people in turmoil remember their own resources when you talk to them.”

Luther said it can be emotionally formidable work, but she ties it to her own life’s healing and growth. “There’s a concept of the wounded healer — you experience something and there’s a desire to share healing with others,” she said. “Growing up lesbian or queer in most parts of the world, there’s wounding that happens, and if you’re lucky you can see gifts from that.”

From India, Luther moved to Colorado in 1999 to study for a Masters in Divinity in Buddhism from Naropa University.

“We were at a very different stage in India,” where the LGBT movement is new, she said. “It was carving out spaces within the women’s movement, or the human rights movement. I lived in Delhi, and we could meet in my house, a safe place if someone found out there were other queer people in the city. Coming here, I kind of leapt into the future — what the future for India might be.”

On the other hand, they don’t have to follow the exact footsteps of the queer movement in the U.S., Luther said.

Soon to retire from CAVP, Luther plans to take time for writing, traveling back in India and pursuing a PhD. “I’ve always been drawn to understanding human nature at a deeper level, understanding how to live more fully in the world, and how I can live as myself and not somebody else’s version of me.” She said she’s inspired by the ability of individuals to change themselves, change where they live and change their communities with the strength to contribute.

“LGBTQ people may be alienated from their families of origin,” she said, “and it’s very fulfilling to be there for that person who feels marginalized by the mainstream.”

—Matt Pizzuti

 

An act of family sets statewide precedent


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When Kathryn Mathis first learned Out Front had selected her family to be honored at the Power Party, she thanked the staff and coolly replied, the family just wanted to do whatever it took to make Coy’s life better.

Coy Mathis was assigned a male gender at birth, but by time she was 5 years old, it was evident to the her parents Kathryn and Jeremy Mathis that Coy was in fact female.

“We had been trying to keep her transition mostly at home,” Kathryn said in an earlier interview with Out Front. But, after a few months in school, “we found that it just really wasn’t working out. It was just causing her a lot of anxiety and stress not having the people in her school know who she really was.”

The loving, outgoing and joyful child was miserable. So, the family scheduled a meeting with Eagleside Elementary School in Fountain to discuss their daughter’s transition. At first, the reception was “wonderful,” but it was short lived.

Last December the school told the Mathis family Coy could no longer use the girls’ restroom and she would need to use a private one reserved for faculty and staff. The family met with the school’s administration, but they were unwavering. The family immediately withdrew Coy and began home schooling her.

They also filed a complaint with the Colorado Civil Rights Division, the organization that enforces the state’s nondiscrimination policies.

Earlier this summer, the state ruled in favor of Coy. A landmark ruling: the school created a hostile environment for the 6-year-old and actively discriminated against her. And now the rest of the state’s schools are on notice.

“Colorado has shown, once again, it supports equal rights for the transgender community,” Krista Whipple, the president of the Gender Identity Center of Colorado said at a press conference announcing the ruling. “Now we can tell all of our children they don’t have to be afraid of who they are.”

—Nic Garcia


Correction: This article has been updated to reflect the correct spelling of DeeJay, a youth Andy Szekeres works with at YouthBiz. Additionally, Andy Szekeres sold his business in 2012, not 2011 as an earlier version of this article reported.

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