Mardi Moore

Making sure all of Boulder County’s LGBT community is served

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Since taking the helm at Out Boulder in October 2013, Mardi Moore has made Boulder’s LGBT-uniting organization more… well, inclusive. She’s placed great focus on the transgender community, ensuring it has the programming, resources and organizational support it needs, and she’s endeavored to make Out Boulder an organization that serves all of Boulder County, not just the city of Boulder.

But growing up in the rural ranching community of Las Animas, Colo., her parents both veterinarians with their own practice, Moore never envisioned a career as an advocate for the LGBT community — in fact, she didn’t know she was a lesbian.

“At that time, Las Animas was about 25,000 people. I had never met a lesbian, never met a gay person,” Moore says. “I thought there was something different about me, but I ascribed it to a problem and not to being a lesbian. I had some concerns about myself. I knew I was different. I knew I didn’t really like boys that much, but you’re supposed to date boys. It was a very binary existence growing up.”

She emphasizes that it was a good existence. Moore thrived socially (“I was homecoming queen — I have the pictures to prove it.”) and says she thought she had decided on a career path.

“My father started a racetrack practice [when I was a child], and I spent most of my summers around Colorado at racetracks,” Moore says. “My real love is horses. I thought I was going to be a racehorse trainer but my mother said, ‘No way. You’re going to college.’ That was quite a fight.”

A fight Moore was soon thankful she lost. 

Begrudgingly, Moore headed to the University of Denver to study political science in 1980. She had no idea how much her world was about to change.

“At DU, within the first couple months, I met lesbians and the light came on: This is what’s different about me,” she says.

This was just the first step in a long process of self-discovery and revelation. Moore says she spent six or seven years lying to her parents about whom she was dating, making up stories — leading something of a double life.

So when Moore was offered a job in Houston, Texas, after graduating, she jumped at the opportunity.

“After being gone for a couple of years and becoming honest with myself, and mentors working with me on how to tell my parents, on one of [my parents’] visits I told them I was a lesbian,” Moore says. “It didn’t go that smoothly — it didn’t go as badly as some people’s stories, but it didn’t go that well. And we didn’t talk about it for a long time, but I felt better because I was being honest.”

Living in Houston, “of all places,” Moore says, made her the activist she is today. It was 1985 when she got there, and Louie Welch was once again running for mayor — Louie Welch who gained national notoriety by candidly suggesting that one way to slow the spread of HIV would be to “shoot the queers.”

“It was very clear that being a lesbian put me at risk of physical harm,” Moore says. “In addition to that, it was the onset of the AIDS epidemic and I lost many friends. I spent many a day in clinics or the general hospital, where you didn’t have to have insurance, with friends dying — nurses were afraid to change their sheets or take their Ensure cans away.”

Still, Moore didn’t see her career moving toward activism — in fact, she was barely just getting by. The oil industry had taken a tumble, and along with it went Moore’s job selling gasoline to businesses over the phone. Moore worked for Coca-Cola selling cases of soda over the phone, and then American Express, setting up a national system for their financial planners.

But eventually, an ill-fated romance would take Moore to Seattle where her real work began.

“I got this harebrained idea to start my own business,” Moore says. Her idea came after a couple of years working for the University of Washington’s alumni fundraising program and Pike Place Market, gaining experience in fundraising, grant writing, newsletter writing and corporate in-giving.

“I’ve got enough drive, I’ve got enough vision — I’ve got to figure out what this is,” Moore said of developing her own business. “And because the world works in mysterious ways, somebody reached out to me and said, ‘We have this gig raising money for the children’s museum and we don’t want to do it — would you do it?’” 

So Moore rounded up some former colleagues with experience in fundraising, and they got to work.

“We did a great job at that and they referred us to Intiman Theatre, which is probably the best theatre group in Seattle still. And we did that job and it went pretty well and we got another one, and so I quit my job without having another [job],” Moore says.

The result was MJM & Associates, a nonprofit telefunding firm that operated from 1992 to 2008, raising funds for AIDS service organizations, cancer research organizations, food banks, work programs and more.

“I employed people who others wouldn’t want to employ necessarily because they were older or because they were artists without a certain set of ‘skills,’ or because they were selfdescribed gutter punks,” Moore says.

The Island of Misfit Toys, they called themselves.

During this time Moore also raised two kids with her ex-partner, and in Oregon, Moore was able to adopt them. Moore says when her daughter was around 11 years old, she told her parents she wanted them to get married “so our family is like everybody’s else’s.”

The stars were well aligned — San Franciscan mayor Gavin Newsom had just directed the city’s county clerk to begin issuing same-sex marriage licenses, and Multnomah County, Ore., was soon to follow suit. So in the spring of 2004, Moore and her partner drove from Seattle to Portland and waited in line with droves of others seeking marriage equality for the first time.

“There were people lined up around the block, this huge city block, and we were standing in line with people who’d been together 30 years and people who’d been together for six months,” Moore says. “People were driving by in cars and honking and waving and so excited it was happening.

“It was a great day. We had friends who stood up with us. But about two months later the state sent us our $60 back and said, ‘Your license is nullified.’ And that radicalized me further. … I have tears in my eyes as I tell you I can still see [my daughter’s] face the day her moms came home married. It was a big deal, and then to have that taken away from your family… ” 

The nullification of Moore’s marriage was trying on multiple levels. When she and her partner decided to separate a few years down the road, there were no rules in place to help guide them through the troubled terrain many divorcing couples travel, such as dividing assets and handling custody of their children.

“We need marriage protection for a variety of reasons,” Moore says.

The dissolution of her relationship took Moore down new paths as she left Seattle, first back home to Las Animas, then to the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force in New York City, and finally to the foothills of Boulder.

In her year back in Colorado, Moore’s made sure that Boulder County’s transgender community has Out Boulder’s full support, adequate funding and a forum to address their needs.

“I think that the organizations that serve [LGBT] communities have been a little late in the game in embracing and programming for the gender piece,” Moore says. “So we’re trying to make up that ground and get resources assigned to all the alphabet.”

Out Boulder’s headquarters on 14th Street in Boulder has expanded its hours with an influx of volunteers. There’s a new program for trans and gender nonconforming youth in the works, the county’s first coming-out group, a writing group for 18 to 25-year-olds, and self-defense and yoga classes in the pipeline.

Moore notes that in January, LGBT news source The Advocate named Boulder the 10th queerest city in America.

“There are pockets of great queerness going on here,” Moore says. “And how do you take those pockets of queerness and make it OK to walk down the street holding your lovers’ hand? And how do you make it OK walking into a place and the bathrooms are gender neutral? And how do you really queer it up? And I think that’s what Out Boulder is doing, based on input from the community. We’re making some changes like that. I’m hopeful that we’ll continue to stay on that list and we’ll improve on that list.”

Respond: letters@boulderweekly.com

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