Julia Music on Ferndale Pride, a Life of Activism, and Setting Butterflies Free
(Ellen Shanna Knoppow, May 20, 2024)
Ferndale, MI – If you see Julia Music (she/they) in downtown Ferndale with a notebook staring at the pavement while talking to herself, not to worry— it’s all in the service of making the next Ferndale Pride even better than the last. For Music, who owns a measuring wheel, attention to detail is an essential ingredient in chairing the largest free-to-the-public LGBTQAI+ Pride festival in the state of Michigan.
“My close friends know this,” Music said, “but I think no matter how good Pride is, I will come back with a very intense list. Last year, we had six pages of improvements for this year. And that’s everything from the most minor detail that really just affected a few people, but affected them so much, to major details.”
New this year is the hydration station, which will provide individuals with free water refills. Sponsored by the brewery Ferndale Project and located at the Rainbow Walkway, the initiative aims to reduce waste and save event goers money. “You can’t drink beer on the street in Ferndale, but you can drink as much water as you need,” Music notes. And don’t miss Reading with Royalty; the hours have been expanded to 1 p.m. to 7 p.m. and readers will be accompanied by aerial acrobatic performers.
With so many moving parts, Ferndale Pride and its many fundraisers require the kind of attention to detail and organization that likely served Music well during their career as a middle school English teacher. In a digital world, Music still prefers paper to-do lists. “It’s my favorite way of doing everything,” she said. “The most analog way possible.”
Five years ago, Music became full-time chair of Ferndale Pride following a decision made with the three other founders. In 2011, Music, Craig Covey, Monica Mills and Greg Pawlica had just four months to plan the inaugural Ferndale Pride. It’s a year-round endeavor today; Music and an assistant are the only paid employees, aided by scores or volunteers. While Ferndale Pride has grown and changed with the times, Music believes the values that Pride celebrated 14 years ago have remained in focus.
“The first goal was always just like, let’s do something, let’s get it going,” Music said, “and let’s try to make something that gives back to charity, highlights Ferndale, and celebrates our gay community. And those were the main things.”
“As long as we kept those principles, I’ve been able to set new goals for the organization and really for the event itself,” they continued. “And as long as we kept the principles, it seems to have worked to continue our organization forward.”
Music said she feels most proud the day after Pride, wearing a baseball cap, in line at brunch. It’s in the stories they overhear about the volunteers who offer hugs or help older folks unload their cars. And she’s extremely proud of the $350,000 donated to charity over the duration.
“That is a very big point of pride for us,” Music said. “Some really cool things have happened in Ferndale as a result of those donations. Ferndale has really just become this representation of what it could be like to live in a place where you can be embraced for who you are.”
As an individual, too, Music has improved the city she’s called home for 22 years. At their first full meeting as a councilperson in 2019, Music introduced an ordinance to ban conversion therapy in the city as practiced on minors by health care providers. With its unanimous passage, conversion therapy became a misdemeanor in Ferndale four years before it was banned statewide.
But Music’s activism began well before she became chair or even became a Ferndalian. As a queer teenager in high school, Music discovered the Michigan Jewish AIDS Coalition, where she learned to teach others how to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS.
“I went to the meeting, and sat around a table with a bunch of Jewish grandmothers who were teaching people to put condoms on,” Music recalled. “And I was like, ‘Well, this is really cool. I want to be like these ladies. These ladies are helping people. And they’re fun to hang out with.’”
First as a volunteer and later as a staff member, Music became involved in furthering MJAC’s mission. “And then I just kept going,” they said. That included volunteering with AIDS Walk Detroit and other queer or queer-adjacent causes over the years. Even as a kid Music explored the programs at Affirmations LGBTQ+ community center and was a frequent visitor to Ferndale.
Asked recently about her priorities as a queer activist, Music said she’d like to see “job and housing protection across the United States, not just cherry-picked state-by-state. I think that would be a really big step for the LGBT community.”
Most who know Music know them as chair of Ferndale Pride, yet Music’s teaching career spanned 19 years before transitioning to full-time executive director of the nonprofit. At the time she entered college, Music had been developing curriculum for MJAC and teaching seemed like the logical next step. After earning a degree at Oakland University, they taught at a charter school for a year before spending the majority of their career at a middle school in West Bloomfield. She chose middle school for a reason. “There’s definitely a personality for that,” Music said. “I think I have it.”
“It definitely had its ups and downs,” she continued. “I do sometimes miss the kids and the discovery of learning, but I don’t miss a lot of the structure. I don’t miss that.” Music prefers the lifestyle they live today, but it wasn’t an easy decision. Circumstances in Music’s life were different. She did what was best for Pride and for her family.
“We got to a point where I was teaching all day, sleeping for about seven to 10 minutes in my car, and then staying up to work on pride till 1 a.m.,” Music said. “And it was for like 100 days straight, and it just was too much. I’m in my mid-forties now. My body was like, ‘You can’t keep working this much. If you’re going to do this right and you’re going to really make this the event it needs to be, you need to do this all the time.’”
The year Music made the shift, the festival was a third smaller than it is today. Since then, Ferndale Pride has grown to maximum street capacity and will feature 220 vendors this year.
Music also tries to carve out time for pursuits unrelated to work, like tending to the caterpillars they started raising as a hobby a few years ago. She joined a group of like-minded residents called Ferndale’s Crazy Caterpillar people who help each other and release their butterflies together. “I’ve always been a rock-flipping kid,” said Music, who enjoys the many ways caterpillars transform, calling them “the Pokémon of real life.”
The day of this interview, in the hectic time leading up to Ferndale Pride, Music was busy checking items off their lists. The sponsors were registered, placement of vendors was underway and there were plenty of boxes to pack. “It’s a lot,” she said. But it’s worth it, as they and countless festival goers can attest.
“I forget sometimes that for some people, this is their first time being in community, or this is their one time a year being in community, or this is the first time their parents have acknowledged their queerness, or something really monumental,” Music said.
“I think for me, that’s the best part. Because sometimes I get bogged down and I’m throwing a party, and that’s not really the whole meaning of Pride. I have to walk out of my own brain for a second and say, ‘Yes, it was a party that allowed people to progress in their life.’ So that, I think, is the most important thing.”
Ferndale Pride takes place June 1, 2024. Learn more at https://ferndalepride.com/.
