June is Pride Month in many countries around the world. It’s a time to celebrate and honor the LGBTQIA+ community’s long-standing impact and ongoing movement toward equal rights. This year, Seismic Pride Alliance – our LGBTQIA+ Community of Belonging (CoB) – celebrated Pride through a variety of activities aimed at educating, building community, and allyship.
Throughout the month, Seismic Pride Alliance hosted pride lunches which were catered by LGBTQIA+ businesses. The CoB also hosted a fundraiser for Give OUT Day, a month-long fundraising campaign hosted by Horizons Foundation that is intended to raise awareness of LGBTQIA+ non-profits.
Other Pride 2023 events included drag bingo and a workshop on practicing sustainable allyship that were planned in part by Seismic Pride Alliance’s co-chairs Kat Smith and Sergio Toranzo. I did a brief question and answer session with them to learn more about how they planned this month’s Pride celebrations and what they hope their colleagues learned this month. Check it out below!
Tony: Why did you join the Seismic Pride Alliance?
Sergio: I initially joined to get a sense of community. I had been here four or five months before the Communities of Belonging started, and I didn’t know anyone because everyone was remote due to the pandemic.
At my last job, I felt like I did a really bad job of putting myself out there and making friends, so when I heard that we had these communities, I almost cynically decided to join and see if I’d find any friends. Before I knew it, I was meeting people from other departments and talking about things that were important to me, or that I thought were unique to my experience. I think I needed some human connection at the time and I definitely got it in spades. I met Kat through the community, and I’ve talked with so many people who I don’t work with or who have moved on, and I’m still friends with them. So even though I didn’t believe that I would, I’ve found a really good sense of community here.
Kat: When I joined, we were just founding Communities of Belonging and I raised my hand to be a leader. Sergio raised his hand shortly after and that’s how we became co-chairs. I wanted to get involved because when I was in college, I was heavily involved in our Pride group and I wanted to bring that experience here and make sure we got off to a good start. And I think it’s been pretty fantastic so far.
Tony: How important is it to have an LGBTQIA+ community of belonging?
Kat: I think it’s really important because in order to be fulfilled at work, you need to be able to be yourself. If you want somebody to stay long-term, they have to feel like they can fit in and belong, and it’s hard to do that if they’re pretending to be something they’re not. So, I think having this makes people feel like they do belong, and there’s a sense of community there. And you get to know other people at work. I get to relate to other people and meet people outside of my core team.
Sergio: The last 6 to 8 years have been so tumultuous politically, I think, for everyone. But especially for women, people of color and LGBTQIA+ people, the last 3 or 4 years have been pretty bad in terms of legislation going backward. What I appreciate about this group is that I can have conversations with my coworkers about external factors outside of work that contribute to me being angry, depressed, or anxious. These are things that traditionally, we would only be able to talk about with really close friends. After I joined the group, I realized that there are other people here who are willing to talk about what’s happening, give their opinion and share their stories. It empowered me to do the same and find ways to engage the community.
Tony: How did you plan the events that your team hosted this month?
Kat: The first event we did was drag bingo and that was my event. I actually had a friend who went to a lot of drag bingo events online during the pandemic. We were trying to find somebody who ran their event themselves so we could pay the LGBTQIA+ performer directly and try to cut out the middleman. Through this referral, we were connected to Charlie Hides, who was on Season 9 of RuPaul’s Drag Race, and I was like, wow! I was not expecting a celebrity. And, so we figured out the logistics with Charlie and got it set up, and it turned out to be super amazing and super popular. Everybody was talking about it for days afterward.
Sergio: This year we wanted to be really conscious about having a more active hand in selecting the types of events and speakers that we hired so we could be intentional about the ideas behind these events, and why we thought they were important. When we were planning, we had almost too many good ideas and didn’t really know where to start without outsourcing to an events company. In one of our meetings with our Exec Sponsor, Cary Heaton, he gave us the idea to leverage our own network. That was a game-changer. We all have LGBTQIA+ friends with inspiring stories. We wanted the ability to work directly with members of the community, so we weren’t giving money to a third party who would only cut them a piece of the profits. The idea was to employ queer and trans people and give them the spotlight they deserve to tell their own stories and share their talents.
In addition to Drag Bingo, we also had two other major events. Seismic Pride Alliance started an A/V Club that meets every month to discuss a movie or book by a queer or trans person. We started this because we wanted to make a conscious effort to introduce each other to more LGBTQIA+ media. I happen to be friends with Adam Sass, a fantastic YA author who wrote a thriller about a group of queer and trans kids escaping a conversion therapy camp. We picked the novel for our June edition of the club and invited Adam to speak to our group about the struggles LGBTQIA+ authors face in the space today and how the novel came to be. Kat and I also both belong to Out In Tech and secured an incredible DEI Speaker, Chris Angel Murphy, to lead a powerful presentation about sustainable and intersectional allyship.
Tony: What do you hope our colleagues learned this month?
Kat: We’re having Chris Angel present their workshop on Practicing Sustainable Allyship, and that’s geared towards the allies in our community. It’s going to be really informative and explain how you can take small actions every day to be good allies and go through situations where, for example, if you mess up somebody’s pronouns, it’s not a huge deal. You just correct yourself and move on instead of apologizing and focusing the conversation on you. I think it’ll just provide more examples and scenarios for people to learn and grow and become better allies.
Sergio: For me, visibility, representation, and allyship are the three things I wish people would take away from this because intersectionality is huge at Seismic. We have so many different people who work here from all sides of the world – all races, ethnic groups, and minorities. Obviously, there are queer people who are part of Seismic, and my message to them is to feel empowered to be themselves and to be visible, that’s what the world needs right now, especially the younger people in the community.
The other piece, I think, is the allyship. As Kat said, we’re not really afforded the luxury of being visible and being represented without good allies who are there to push us along and pick us up when others try to push us down. They may not be part of the community officially, but they believe in who we are and what we stand for. Those are the big themes of the events that we’ve planned. We want people to recognize that there’s value in being visible, as well as being a strong and committed ally.
How to get involved
Pride doesn’t end on June 30. We plan to celebrate Pride in the months to come. If you’d also like to help honor Pride, we encourage you to also donate to Give OUT Day. You can also visit Seismic’s swag store, AfterShock, to purchase a Seismic Pride t-shirt – all proceeds will benefit the Trevor Project.
