Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: My Controversial Presidential Election

The World Traveller Series ~ Episode 18

by Brett Hayhoe

The journey to New York — en route to the InterPride AGM and World Conference in Pittsburgh — was mentally occupied with a considerable degree of angst. There had been unrest amongst fellow InterPride members. There had been calls and emails. There had been, in short, a groundswell of opinion that something needed to change at the top of the organisation, and a fairly pointed suggestion that the person best placed to change it was the one currently sitting in seat 32C somewhere over the Pacific.

Landing at JFK, I consulted Alan. He was his typical diplomatic self — which is to say, he offered precisely the kind of measured, carefully worded counsel that told you everything you needed to know without saying anything that could later be repeated. Then came the email from the co-president I would depose. Barking orders. That sealed it.

I wasn’t sure I had the numbers. I decided to take my chances.

The Wyndham Grand and the Golden Triangle

The conference was held at the Wyndham Grand Pittsburgh Downtown — a 712-room tower that has stood at the tip of the Golden Triangle since 1959, when Conrad Hilton himself attended the opening gala. It sits directly adjacent to Point State Park, a 36-acre green space marking the precise confluence of the Allegheny, Monongahela, and Ohio rivers — one of those geographical facts that sounds impressive and, in person, actually is.

The hotel is the sort of establishment that wears its history with varying degrees of grace. It is large, it is central, and it offers the kind of conference facilities that make it an obvious choice for an organisation gathering delegates from across the world. Whether it entirely lives up to its grand ambitions is a question best left to the individual guest. For the purposes of a World Conference beset by organisational difficulties, it served.

Pittsburgh — The City Itself

Pittsburgh is, to its credit, a city that wears its industrial past with a degree of self-awareness. The steel mills are long gone — the industry that once made this the forge of a nation has left behind a landscape of bridges, rust-belt neighbourhoods, and a working-class identity that gives the place a gritty authenticity that no amount of urban renewal has managed to sand away entirely.

For the visitor inclined to venture beyond the conference rooms, there is more to Pittsburgh than first impressions suggest.

The Duquesne Incline is the obvious starting point — a Victorian-era funicular that has been hauling passengers up the face of Mount Washington since 1877. The views from the top are genuinely arresting: the entire downtown skyline laid out below, the three rivers threading away in different directions, bridges everywhere you look (Pittsburgh has more of them than any other city in the world, a fact its residents mention with unmistakable pride). It is the kind of view that makes a city make sense.

The Andy Warhol Museum — seven floors dedicated to the pop art legend who grew up in Pittsburgh’s working-class Polish Hill neighbourhood — is worth an afternoon. The breadth of the collection surprises even those who think they know the work. That Warhol came from here, from this particular city of mills and immigrants and industrial ambition, makes considerably more sense once you have spent a day in Pittsburgh than it does in the abstract.

The Carnegie Museums of Art and Natural History, occupying a single grand building in the Oakland neighbourhood, offer the kind of combined cultural offering that smaller cities can only envy. The Phipps Conservatory and Botanical Gardens — a Victorian glasshouse of some beauty — sits nearby.

For those for whom the natural landscape holds appeal, the rivers themselves provide it. Three waterways, countless bridges, a park at the point where they all meet. Pittsburgh is, on reflection, a more handsome city than its reputation suggests.

As a destination, however, it remained rather lacklustre. The sum of its parts is more impressive than the whole. There is something about the place that doesn’t quite cohere — a city still working out what it wants to be now that the thing it was built to do no longer needs doing.

The gay bars, scattered through the Shadyside neighbourhood and along Liberty Avenue downtown, were an emphatic exception. Exceptional, in fact. Welcoming, unpretentious, and utterly unaware that they were hosting a visiting InterPride delegation in the middle of one of the more politically fraught AGMs the organisation had ever assembled.

The Conference — Organisational Disaster and Political Opportunity

The 32nd InterPride Annual General Meeting, held under the theme Reflections of Pride — Stonewall 45, proceeded in a manner that can only be described as organisationally disastrous. The details are perhaps best left to the imagination, but it was the kind of conference that makes a challenge to the incumbent leadership feel less like an audacious move and more like a fait accompli.

The rules of InterPride are very strict: membership is not individual but organisational. This became relevant in an unexpected way. My departure from Pride March Victoria had coincided with the trip, and someone on the new board of that organisation — unbeknownst to me — took it upon themselves to send a communication to InterPride stating that Pride March Victoria did not endorse my presidential nomination.

This was taken up with some enthusiasm by the female co-president, who was not among my greatest admirers, and who decided to mount a formal challenge to my nomination. It was a calculated move. It was also, as it turned out, a miscalculation.

What she did not know — and what became rapidly apparent — was the breadth of support I had already secured. Fierté Montréal was among the first to step forward, offering their endorsement immediately and unequivocally. Several other large organisations followed. With a couple of well-placed communications I also arranged endorsement from the Goulburn Valley Pride, for whom I regularly volunteered. They would remain my sponsoring organisation for the entirety of my tenure.

It was probably one of the most stressful AGMs I had ever attended — although somewhat reminiscent of the first one in Zurich. Yelling. Emotion-filled meetings. Daggers being virtually lodged in my back from one sector; back-slapping from the other.

I was elected Co-President in what can only be described as a landslide, leaving both my opponent and the female co-president with a considerable amount of egg on their faces. It also made the following two years serving beside the female counterpart rather uncomfortable. C’est la vie.

The Whatiferies

There are a lot of whatiferies surrounding that World Conference.

What if the then co-president had been less bombastic in that email? What if the conference had been run more smoothly? What if the female co-president had been more co-presidential rather than confrontational?

Any one of those variables, adjusted, might have produced a different outcome entirely. The path to the presidency was not planned. It was provoked.

Back to New York — Alan’s Verdict

Upon returning to New York for a week or so prior to the long journey home, I happened to enter Alan’s room and mentioned, with perhaps more casualness than the situation warranted, that I thought I might go for a run.

He looked up. “I think you’ve done enough running,” he said.

It was also the beginning of Alan and I working very closely on the executive. He was reinstated as Secretary.

Conclusion

Pittsburgh will not be remembered as a favourite destination. It is a city of genuine character and intermittent beauty, of exceptional gay bars and a skyline that earns its views, of history worn honestly and a cultural life that punches above its weight. It is also a city that, as a backdrop to the most politically charged week of my InterPride career, will remain rather more vivid in memory than it might otherwise have been.

The conference was a disaster. The election was a landslide. The female co-president was displeased. Alan was dry. The gay bars were, as noted, exceptional.

Pittsburgh made its mark. It just made it in ways that had very little to do with Pittsburgh.

The World Traveller Series is written and produced by Brett Hayhoe — publisher, editor and administrator of Q Magazine. Read more at Ask Brett plus Podcasts — Ask Brett and YouTube

Next: Boston, Massachusetts