Yay, You!: An Interview with Rose Marie Pink
A weekly celebration of good people doing amazing things.
It was an especially stormy night in Nashville when Rose Marie Pink sat down to answer some questions for this week’s installment of Yay, You!. Between telling me about her dog Marmalade and her annual body-positive pool parties, she also had to deal with unusual chaos at Launch Pad, the drop-in shelter for homeless LGBTQ youth between the ages of 18-24, where she’s both president and executive director.
The power went out and somehow a baby raccoon managed to get into the building.
“I wore him for a good half hour like furry little cuddly brooch,” she says.
LOOK AT THIS BABY:
Launch Pad has been providing Nashville’s youth with a meals, necessities including clean clothes and toiletries and a safe place to sleep since 2014, and just last week their important work was recognized to the tune of $100,000, when Launch Pad was awarded the 2019 A Community Thrives grant from the Gannett Foundation.
Rose Marie also hosts an annual pride-weekend pool party, an all-inclusive pool party where hundreds of folks are invited to come as they are — it’s the real life version of that already historic episode of Shrill. She’s warm, funny and welcoming, the kind of person you want to sit next to at group dinners where you don’t know anyone else (I know this from experience) and yes, she has one of the cutest dogs on the planet, a dachshund named Marmalade.
So first things first. I have to ask you about your dog, Marmalade. She is a tiny nugget, a dachshund, and sometimes she wears the best outfits. Tell me more about her, I need to know everything.
Marmalade, the myth, the legend. So, she’s turning 13 this weekend (her made-up birthday I chose a couple years back because I was pretty sure she viewed the pride pool party as her birthday party), and we’ve been together since she was seven. Her family was having a baby and I think they realized she would not want to share the spotlight. I don’t know. I feel they made the wrong choice — I would totally return a baby for Marmalade, but it brought us together, so, that worked out.
Does she have a favorite snack?
She feels strongly that chicken and sweet potato wraps are the Best Thing, but honestly, she’s fairly undiscerning in the way dogs are. [She’s] pretty much interested in whatever the humans are eating, as she’s relatively certain she’s a person, and, as such, resents other dogs as interlopers most of the time. She has a pug friend, Penelope, who we go visit but she’s still mildly suspicious of dogs as concept.
Launch Pad just received a $100,000 grant from the Gannett Foundation. That is amazing! To me, it seems to be a good example of how the South, and Nashville in particular, is continuing to progress culturally and politically. A lot of people think the South isn’t a welcoming place for LGBTQ people, especially youth (and to a degree they are right), but there are great people ensuring things continue to move forward. Like you! Have you noticed a change in community support — maybe it’s even gotten better — in recent years?
Well, Launch Pad was initially formed out of the LGBTQ and supportive community, starting with people who cared about this age group and making sure people weren’t on the streets — it’s such a big scary time already at 18-24 without any of the stress of not knowing where you’ll be sleeping! So when Pam Sheffer called that first meeting at OutCentral, it was a really great collection of people with a range of skillsets and we all got together to work on starting this thing to make sure youth had supportive people in their lives and a place to crash.
I think there’s a lot of very meaningful LGBTQ activism that goes on in the South — orgs like SONG and Soulforce — that I think strike me as very uniquely Southern. And I also think things change both slowly and incredibly fast. Like, for the youth we see, for a majority of them, even non-LGBTQ youth, being LGBTQ is so not an issue in terms of conflict with themselves. They love people and are open about it and their peers are not usually bothered. Every now and again, we’ll have to talk about some homophobic or transphobic language that sneaks in, but sometimes they don’t even experience it that way — the concept of these identities is so divorced from being a negative thing for them, that the use of language around it that refers to it as something negative isn’t a thing that they parse as related, even when using that language. So it’s really strange to be trying to have that discussion about the language, because it’s just this totally separate thing for them.
And sometimes we’ll have people who have religious feelings they think LGBTQ folks conflict with — and obviously, people can believe whatever they want, but we try to make sure that isn’t a thing up for discussion. That’s the deal of staying with us. We accept people as they identify and embrace them as they are and that’s the core of being able to welcome everyone.
So I’m always hopeful that things are improving because I can see how different it is from when I came out (age 13/14, just before Ellen) and now — I see how amazingly fast a new generation adapts.
What are a couple ways folks can jump in and help if they want to keep what progress Nashville (or their own city) has made moving forward?
I think finding out what’s going on and what’s needed is always tricky — there are so many groups in the area doing such amazing work, SONG, BLM, Workers’ Dignity, Music City Riders United. It’s hard to do as much as is needed, but finding what you can do and taking that to orgs that you care about it always useful — I’ve definitely done some printing projects for groups I don’t get to volunteer with too often because of time constraints, because that’s a thing I can do occasionally that’s helpful to them, and it helps get their message across.
There’s an episode of the Hulu show Shrill (“Pool,” written by the very great Samantha Irby) where the main character, Annie, goes to a body-positive pool party. People of all sizes were there wearing all kinds of swim suits and eventually Annie, who has always been very uncomfortable with wearing a bathing suit in public (same, Annie), strips down to her suit and jumps in the pool. It got a lot of folks talking about how they wanted a pool party like that to be real. But it is real! You’ve been hosting your annual Pride Pool Party in Nashville for years, where EVERYONE is welcome. How did your pride pool party start?
I feel a lot of that post-riot-grrrl era 'zines and music and culture was sort of what I came of age with, so both fat positivity and body positivity were things I was immersed in by the time I moved back to Nashville. I wanted to have a slightly less overwhelming thing that was a space where people could feel comfortable and chill out a little, even be awkward together. I think people have a lot of anxiety about bodies and not only in the shape/size arena — there’s a lot of gender policing as well that can make it harder for trans or nonbinary folks to feel comfortable in a pool setting, so I wanted to make a space where people knew that wasn’t going to be an issue, where people could be who they were without negative feedback about it.
I definitely had experienced that style of pool party because of NOLOSE — which was the National Organization for Lesbians of Size, but may just be a stand alone acronym now because they went with a more open gender policy a while back. Their conferences out on the West Coast in Oakland and Portland were so exciting and a really fascinating space to be in. It really clarified the value of group spaces to me, places where you didn’t have to explain things for a general crowd, where you could just be. I can see how amazing that can be for other groups, too, just from seeing friends participating in the local LGBTQ POC group Bliss [Cortez] has run for the last couple of years.
Does Marmalade get in the pool? Or at least wear a cute suit for the party?
She had a bad first encounter with the pool, where I had put her in a life jacket and she fell in nose first/upside down — the combo of dachshund bodies and dog life jackets are not really compatible. So she isn’t a big swimmer in and of herself, but she will hop down to the first step and encounters it as an immersive water bowl experience. Legit the summer is the time I try to tone down my dog dressing tendencies because it’s life threateningly hot out there, so alas, no swimsuit (which I’m sure she would rock — though admittedly, I have always placed her gender performance in the soft butch category so I feel she would be trunks oriented, and that’s just never going to work for dachshund legs) for her comfort. She’s definitely excited about getting to see all the people, though, and dreaming of all the laps she’ll get to be in.
To learn more about Launch Pad, including volunteer opportunities, visit nashvillelaunchpad.com. You can also make monetary donations here or send them something from their wish list here.