PRIDE IS MORE THAN A MONTH A Naropa love story three-decades strong By Halley Hadfield
psychotherapy to recover from the trauma he endured. He saw an ad for Naropa, and at the time it was actively recruiting what was then the only ‘LGB’ for the psychotherapy department.
Photos courtesy of Perkins and Kirkendall
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ove didn’t always win, but it has always had the power to transform. For Jonathan Kirkendall (MA Counseling Psychology, '94) and Scott Perkins (MA Buddhist Studies, '92), it did just that. “We were at Naropa when Amendment 2 was passed,” recalls Kirkendall. “All of our friends told us that there’s no way it would, and then it did, overwhelmingly. And that was eye-opening for me about just sort of the bubble that Boulder was in. ” In the early ‘90s, Aspen, Boulder, and Denver announced citywide policies that prohibited discrimination based on sexual orientation. This did not sit well with the socially conservative group Colorado for Family Values (CFV). CFV drafted and supported a statewide constitutional initiative, called Amendment 2, that would prohibit cities and institutions in Colorado from establishing antidiscrimination language for sexual orientation. In the 1992 election, Colorado voters approved the amendment by a 53–47 percent margin. This passage meant “homosexuals living in Colorado were not protected from discrimination based on their sexual orientation.” Prior to Naropa, Kirkendall had been working with Catholic workers for social teachings in Washington D.C. when he was brutally attacked. He discovered
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Meanwhile, after studying Buddhism in India, Perkins returned home to Michigan where he struggled to find a Buddhist community. Committed to his desire to help people deal with suffering, he chose Naropa because it recognized the value of contemplative practice, which was rare in the '90s. After thirty years together, Kirkendall and Perkins’ love story has many chapters. They reflect fondly on the chapter of how they navigated the challenges of being in Naropa graduate programs during a time where they were under the constant worry and stress of the uncertainty around them. Over time, the two would come to share their true feelings, including Perkins who boldly navigated coming out amidst all the uncertainty of his personal rights. Kirkendall invited Perkins to go to Washington, D.C., with a group of their friends to join the March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay, and Bi Equal Rights and Liberation. On April 25, 1993, an estimated one million attended the march, making it one of the largest protests in American history. “I was a student rep for the Presidential Search Committee for Naropa, and we were reporting to the board on our progress,” Perkins says “I managed to force an interjection in front of the board and with a shaky voice mentioned Amendment 2, and I said basically that I couldn't imagine attending a school that wouldn’t speak out against this. Had Jonathan
