We just got back from another wonderful event, The OUTRaleigh Festival, and it was truly amazing. There were all types of families, couples, friends & strangers that came together and had a great time. We love OUTRaleigh because of how it is meant to bring all types of people together, but in actuality, that’s the way it’s supposed to be. No one judging anybody, no one looking down on anyone, nothing but LOVE.
Events such as this lets us enjoy our clients outside the office, it gives us a chance to meet new people from our community, and it stands for acceptance amongst everyone. OutRaleigh is all about making a difference and giving people a place to go where they don’t have to worry about being laughed at or judged. After a long, hard week, this is an event that was well anticipated and appreciated.
We also invited our marketing assistant, Brittany, to attend the event for the first time and meet some of our clients. By the time the event was almost done, she was smiling, laughing and more comfortable then we had ever seen her before. After finding out how special it was to her, we thought it would be great if she shared her first experience at OUTRaleigh with you!!
Brittany: So my husband and I are a multiracial couple, and to be honest, I hate categorizing our relationship, because he is my best friend, when I see him I don’t see color, I see the love of my life. From our experiences, we have come to expect that, where ever we go, people are going to look at us with weird and hateful looks, but for this one day out of our whole relationship(other than our wedding), everything was different. People were smiling at us, asking us relationship questions, including us in their conversations, etc.
Now, on a normal day, we’ll have people go out of their way just to let us know how much they disapprove of our relationship. Whenever we go out to eat, our waiter (No matter what restaurant) will ask us “Will this be together or separate?” I’ve also seen a mother covering up her child’s eyes as we walked passed them because we were holding hands, and honestly, we try not to let it affect us but at the end of the day, it hurts. From that, it’s made us very conscious of our relationship in public, to the point where we stopped holding hands and showing affection just to minimize the reactions we get from strangers. But despite that, when we were at OUTRaleigh we were reminded that it was ok to show affection because there was love and equality everywhere we went. It was like taking a breath of fresh air, being around nothing but supportive people that just wanted to feel like they belonged, as much as we did.
So by the end of the event I felt sad because it was over but happy to know that we don’t need to hide our relationship from the world. The world needs to accept the fact that everybody’s different or get over it!
Thank you for all that you do OUTRaleigh, and we can’t wait until 2015!
