I’m going to do something really vulnerable today, and I imagine you can hear my heart pounding through the keyboard. I’m going to write a Pride post, and share it without editing out the parts of my story that I wish were untrue or hadn’t happened. As a person whose career has centred around brand storytelling, this is hard work for me: in many ways, I’ve become a virtuoso at helping folks shine bright in their own stories but– as the saying goes– the shoe-cobblers children have the dirtiest feet. So, please take a moment to open your heart to mine; I’d love to share with you what Pride means to me.
In the late-eighties, I was born with a high arched palate into a crowded suburban family. If you use your tongue to touch the roof of your mouth, you likely have some hard bones up there that you use to make all sorts of speech sounds. For me, those bones were ascended so high that the roof of my mouth was just a pillowy expanse of soft-tissue. As a baby, this meant I couldn’t feed in the typical ways other infants do, and later on meant I was unable to produce most of the speech sounds associated with palatal contact.
Growing up in a religiously conservative, sports-obsessed context up the Fraser River, there wasn’t much acceptance for difference among my boyhood peers. My voice, with its errant S-sounds and slippery J’s, was challenging enough, but my sensitive, lightfooted personality made me a target for relentless bullying that followed me well into teenhood. When I’m feeling strong and have capacity to look back, I can still hear one of my older family members imitating gay people with an insidious lisp and mock flippancy. As a coping mechanism, I began to deny who I really was to my family, to my friends, and– most heartbreaking– to myself.
When I was fifteen, my mother and step-dad moved our family to the Pacific coast, where I registered at my own high-school, free from any sibling interference. For the first time in my life, I was potentiated to truly go my own way. In the years preceding, my mouth had been surgically corrected and I’d studiously applied myself to speech therapy and phonology, going further than expected and learning various languages’ phonemes including Greek, French, and German. On arriving at my new school, I felt unconquerable and ready to start down a higher, more self-assured path.
Sure, the bullying continued from the sharp-nosed teenage boys in my class, but I’d grown accustomed to turning the other cheek and befriending all their girlfriends, so I survived and eventually thrived. I auditioned for the high-school musical, joined several different musical ensembles, and won the Drama award in two consecutive years. In my senior year, I should have been proud to claim that I was top of my class in Math, Physics, Geography and Chemisty, but I had hidden my true self so deeply out-of-view that my accomplishments didn’t actually feel like my own. I had a girlfriend with a poetically masculine name, and just before graduating I starred in the school’s production of “Cabaret” as Cliff, a closeted man in a homophobic context but was so numb to my own experience that the symmetry was lost on me.
After graduating, I moved out on my own at seventeen and began studying Geography and Linguistics at UBC. I fruitlessly continued to date women, hoping beyond hope that my heart would awaken and I’d then be able to accept myself. A deeper yearning won out, however, and early into my second year of studies, I kissed a boy (and liked it).
If you’ve seen “The Wizard of Oz,” you know how baffled Dorothy is when she finally experiences the world around her in Technicolor, and that’s exactly what meeting a man’s gaze felt like that first time. All at once, I realized I wasn’t in Kansas anymore, and that the road ahead would be worth its challenges. Over the course of my twenties, I grew to learn who I was and what it meant to love. I met my incredible partner, Jarren MacDougall, at a house-party when I was twenty-three and fell deeply in love with what a man’s care and support could bring into my life.
On the career side of things, progress was a lot slower. I took several different jobs working in dominantly male environments, over and over recreating the familiar-but-constricting conditions of my early life. I thought, ‘if I wasn’t bent-out-of-shape and striving to be somebody different, was I even working?’ Eventually I realized I was meant to be an entrepreneur, and co-founded an agency with– you guessed it– a strong-headed and mostly mean-spirited straight man. Of course, as you can probably already discern, I hadn’t yet accepted my story or gifts as my own. After paying out that initial business partner, I oscillated between half-heartedly running my one-person “agency” and trying hard to reshape myself into in-house designer roles when I got too tired to keep going as an entrepreneur. I was miserable.
And then COVID-19 happened, and the whole world shifted. Exhausted by the ways I’d been working and looking to reignite my passion, I took a parental leave role as graphic designer at YVR Airport. During the pandemic, the airport was like high-school after dark: a huge facility working with barebones staff to support a fraction of its typical passengers in getting to their few-and-far-between flights. Because the major advertisers had paused their contracts with the airport in the face of global shutdown, I was tasked with backfilling every single ad space airport-wide with whatever I could imagine. Ignited by the scope and scale of the project, I jumped in heart-first. Renowned for its beautiful design and serene views, I was moved to learn of the aiport’s deeper beauty: its non-profit structure and meaningful community partnerships. Strategizing, writing, and designing ads that told a human-centred story had just rekindled my love for my craft when fate stepped in.
After years at Vancity putting values-based banking on the map in BC, Tamara Vrooman took the pilot’s seat at YVR as its new CEO, and immediately worked to revitalize the connective spirit of its thousands of employees. Among her first initiatives was an organization-wide values exercise, which encouraged each of us staff to identify our single core value from a placemat-sized printout of suggested values. I’d quickly circled “Creativity” and didn’t give it a second thought. The next Monday, my boss’s boss Jenny Duncan came by my desk to check in on how I’d done with the exercise. “Interesting you chose Creativity,” she said. “I see you here,” pointing at ‘Hope’. “Your belief that a meaningfully told story could touch peoples’ hearts sets you apart,” she said. I don’t know if she knew she was talking me into rebooting my creative agency, but I suspect she knew that my fire was already growing.
With crystal-clear clarity, I resigned from YVR the next Monday and joined Jarren at home to begin dreaming up a different kind of creative agency– one that put our hope and our love for the world around us in the centre. Working together with my husband within the context of a business felt vulnerable at first, but over the last three-and-a-half years it’s been that vulnerability that have set us apart and made our most impactful work possible. By working side-by-side as a proud gay couple, there’s truly nowhere to hide and that availability and authenticity empower our client-partners to bring their full selves to the table too.
Harc isn’t a word we use very often in today’s society, but it means to listen attentively, and I’m consistently moved by the stories we help make space for through our work at Harc Creative. By now, we’ve helped over eighty organizations connect to tell their stories with confidence, including a 2SLGBTQ-affirming church, a SOGI education resource producer, a gay men’s spiritual conference, and so many inspiring others.
I’m not sure if I ever could have imagined what a self-empowered, spiritually healthy gay adulthood could have looked like when I was clammed up in childhood. I don’t know if I would have believed that true love and joy could be mine, but here I am at thirty-six, smiling ear-to-ear with tears flowing down my cheeks as I claim my spot among you all.This is me, sensitive and kind-hearted, passionate and playful. I’m Parker Green McLean, as gay as ruby slippers and proud of it.
