Podcast Episode: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: My Controversial Presidential Election

Pip: There's a particular kind of email that doesn't just close a door — it opens a whole other one, usually to a room you weren't planning to enter. Brett Hayhoe knows the one.

Mara: This episode follows brett through Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania — the city, the conference, and the organisational crisis that turned a transatlantic flight into a campaign trail.

Pip: Let's start with the election nobody saw coming.

—

Pittsburgh: City, Conference, and a Landslide Nobody Planned

Mara: The post is Episode 18 of the World Traveller Series, and it opens mid-crisis — brett is somewhere over the Pacific, already fielding calls and emails from InterPride members who think leadership needs to change, and who have a candidate in mind.

Pip: The email from the co-president he'd be deposing arrived at JFK and did the rest of the persuading. As he puts it: "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."

Mara: And the upshot is that a decision most people would agonise over for months got made in an airport. He adds, plainly: "I wasn't sure I had the numbers. I decided to take my chances."

Pip: What followed at the 32nd InterPride AGM — themed Reflections of Pride: Stonewall 45 — was, by his own description, organisationally disastrous. A formal challenge was mounted against his nomination, rooted in a communication sent to InterPride by someone on the new board of Pride March Victoria, without his knowledge.

Mara: The female co-president took that up enthusiastically. But the challenge backfired. Fierté Montréal endorsed him immediately. Several large organisations followed. Goulburn Valley Pride, where he regularly volunteered, became his sponsoring organisation for the entirety of his tenure.

Pip: He calls it "yelling, emotion-filled meetings, daggers being virtually lodged in my back from one sector, back-slapping from the other." The kind of conference that sounds exhausting and, reading it, absolutely is.

Mara: The result was a landslide. He was elected Co-President, and the post reflects honestly on what followed — two years working alongside the female co-president he'd just defeated, which he summarises with a brisk "C'est la vie."

Pip: He also runs a section he calls "The Whatiferies" — what if the co-president's email had been less bombastic, what if the conference had run smoothly. His conclusion: "The path to the presidency was not planned. It was provoked."

Mara: Pittsburgh itself gets a full accounting too. The conference was at the Wyndham Grand Pittsburgh Downtown, a 712-room tower at the tip of the Golden Triangle, adjacent to Point State Park where the Allegheny, Monongahela, and Ohio rivers meet.

Pip: The city earns a measured verdict — the Duquesne Incline, the Andy Warhol Museum, the Carnegie Museums, the Phipps Conservatory. Impressive parts that don't quite cohere into a whole.

Mara: He's direct about it: Pittsburgh is "a city still working out what it wants to be now that the thing it was built to do no longer needs doing." One emphatic exception — the gay bars in Shadyside and along Liberty Avenue, which he calls "exceptional" without qualification.

Pip: Alan, reinstated as Secretary, got the last word on the whole affair. Brett mentioned he might go for a run. Alan looked up and said: "I think you've done enough running."

Mara: Pittsburgh made its mark — just mostly in ways that had very little to do with Pittsburgh.

Pip: An election won by landslide, a city that doesn't quite cohere, and a friend with impeccable timing.

Mara: Next stop is Boston, Massachusetts — and given the pattern, it's worth wondering what the city will be backdrop to this time.