Steve Arrington tells the story of a transgender person he spoke to months ago at the Baynard Rustin LGBTQ+ Resource Center. The guest had taken offense at the way they felt they were treated by staff members.
Seeing no issues, Arrington apologized anyway before adding he didn’t know what else to tell them. Still irate, the person said next time, they would pull out a gun. They also said in graphic terms what they would do with it before being escorted out of the building.
Others have shown up at the center exhibiting unruly behavior only to return weeks or months later to blessed greetings. Arrington, the organization’s executive director, said he rarely bans anybody. He’s said he’s old now — he turns 74 in December — but he had his own days of expressive behavior.
So he tells them to get themselves together and then come back. Because once he serves them, he’s not going to let them go that easily.
“The leaves may fall off,” Arrington said from his office on West Exchange Street in Akron’s West Hill neighborhood. “You may blow the wind. But you’ll be back.
“The spring is coming; you’ll blossom again.”
To get here, Arrington and the center, named after a civil rights activist and adviser to Martin Luther King Jr., have endured more than the AIDS epidemic.
Silence and stigma around HIV/AIDS in Akron’s Black community. Operating an organization with scant financial resources. Homelessness and other instabilities among LGBTQ+ youth and adults they serve.
Racism and inequity within LGBTQ+ institutions themselves, including disparities in the AIDS response, being left out of funding opportunities and being too Black for Akron Pride contemporaries.
Yet continuous, growing demand.
Suggested Reading
Reaching into his own pocket to support clients
The resource center first opened in 2022. This year, it has helped more than 800 people, with services including:
- Food bank
- Clothing pantry
- HIV testing (on site and mobile) — a service offered since 2000
- Referral-based counseling services
- Payee services — the center receives Social Security benefits on behalf of clients who need help managing money and uses the funds to pay their bills and cover other basic needs.
A fundraiser scheduled for Friday, Oct. 9, aims to cover the costs of completing renovation of a space where guests can use a washer, dryer and shower.
Some of what happens here doesn’t fit neatly into program descriptions or the organization’s annual budget of approximately $500,000. Arrington said the center sometimes pays for emergency housing when people have nowhere else to go, even when there isn’t a grant specifically covering the expense.
Sometimes, he reaches into his own pocket.
Pick one: a condom or a casket?
In the 1990s, Westword, a Denver media outlet, wrote about him:
“Love him or hate him, stormy Steve Arrington is generally credited with forcing Denver’s black community to recognize and deal with the AIDS epidemic.”
There, his confrontational style attracted both attention and criticism. He rhetorically asked a medical provider if Black people weren’t immune to HIV/AIDS, how come he never saw anybody that looked like him when he showed up for his HIV treatment (he was first diagnosed in the mid-1980s). He also stood in front of a Denver church’s Black congregation and told them to stop pretending some of their members were dying from cancer.
By the time Arrington, a native of Massillon and graduate of Bowling Green State University, resettled in Akron, he experienced a city he felt was years behind in facing challenges he had already faced as a Black gay man in Colorado — or, as he prefers to call it, same-gender loving.
So Arrington got together with Courtney Calhoun, a pioneering Black LGBTQ+ and HIV/AIDS advocate, and other gay men to support the Akron Brother Circle, later known as the Akron AIDS Collaborative. The support group, 50 strong at one point, met monthly. Members attended community events and even gay clubs, where they convinced DJs to stop the music for impromptu public service announcements. (Queens would get mad, Arrington half-joked.)
They carried out a funeral casket filled with condoms and placed a mirror inside.
People walked up and saw themselves and the sign:
“A‑Tisket, A‑Tasket. Condom or casket.”
It made people think, Arrington said. Think about questions that transcended Akron’s gay community — then and now. Think about life decisions.
Do you know who you’re having sex with? Do you know their sexual history?
Do they know your sexual history?
Do they know theirs?
Was it provocative? Yes.
Proactive? That too.
Akron’s many meanings of ‘pride‘
For some of his peers a decade ago in Akron Pride meetings, gay pride was tight leather jeans and cut-up attire. For others, drag queens represented the movement.
For Arrington? Gay pride meant his family knew he was gay. It meant celebrating the Lord in song. “Music is a part of who we are,” he explained years later.
He met resistance. He kept bringing it up. Let’s be open, he said. If it’s Akron Pride, let’s celebrate from a multicultural perspective.
At the next committee meeting, Arrington said he and Calhoun were stopped at the door.
“We want you guys to step down off the committee because you bring too much Blackness to the committee,” he said he was told. “‘And pride is pride. Ain’t about race.’”
Judi Hill, the president of the Akron chapter of the NAACP, remembers discussing the confrontation with Arrington.
“Steve has a big heart, and he’s worked for years here in Akron to make space for the Black community in the LGBTQ+ movement,” Hill said. Arrington co-chairs the Akron NAACP chapter’s LGBTQ+ subcommittee.
In August, the Akron Pride Festival celebrated 10 years. The organization looks a lot different than it did a decade ago; it has new leadership. Only three board members remain from those early days, including Phil Montgomery.
Montgomery said this week he did not recall the incident where Arrington and Calhoun were asked to resign from Akron Pride, but he did acknowledge that the organization has had to “mend some relationships” over the years. “Regardless of what may have been said in the past by former members,” Montgomery said, “that is not how we operate or ever intended to.”
Arrington has made amends with some of the people in the room.
“We’ve come a long way,” he said. “Now we break bread together. We have meetings together. We do a lot of stuff together. They even give us our free space at Pride. … But these are the roads, the bumpiness to get where we are today.”
Trying to help an old, unfamiliar face
Arrington is bothered by those he may not be able to help in time. Like the guy who walked into the resource center not long ago for walk-in services.
“How y’all doing? I ain’t seen you in a long time.”
Arrington knew him. But he didn’t recognize him. His face was sucked in, his teeth grainy. He had lesions on his neck.
He told them his name. Arrington gave him a big hug. Tears flowed.
He was hungry. They fed him.
“You need some clean clothes?”
Yes. They gave him plenty.
“I don’t know why I got all this stuff; I ain’t got no home to take it to.”
Arrington told him he could find him an apartment or shared living space, but he would have to commit to getting some level of treatment.
“When’s the last time you saw a HIV doctor?”
“Oh, three or four years ago.”
When helping hurts
Arrington’s philosophy of not giving up on the people he serves has sometimes come at a personal cost.
He said a client with a history at the center recently caused a scene at Equitas Health, located next door.
They made their way to Arrington’s facility. Hungry. Exhausted. Nowhere to sleep. Later, the encounter turned violent, Arrington said, and the person assaulted him. Arrington has since banned the person from the center — something he rarely does.
The confrontation forced Arrington to reckon with the limits of how much he can absorb. He knows he won’t be the person answering the door forever.
He’s already outlived most of the Denver friends he partied with in the 1980s and many he met after returning to Ohio. His partner died of AIDS in 2019. He says he’s living on borrowed time.
For now, he keeps answering, because it’s not a job. It’s his calling.
