Heidi Stevens: Spreading love and humanity to the LGBTQ+ community one holiday card at a time

If you need a little reminder about humanity — its strength in the face of adversity, its unmatched power to heal, its refusal to go into hiding because of oh, say, an election result — how’s this:

In 2022, I wrote a column about a campaign to send holiday cards to LGBTQ+ folks who’ve been shunned by their families — who aren’t invited home, who’ve been cut off from the warmth of tradition — because of who they are or who they love.

That campaign was launched by Carolyn Pinta, co-creator of the Pinta Pride Project, an organization that raises awareness and support for the LGBTQ+ community. Pinta Pride Project was born in 2019 after then-seventh-grader Molly Pinta, Carolyn’s daughter, organized the first-ever Pride parade in Buffalo Grove — now an annual event for the Chicago suburb. (Molly is a freshman in college now, studying to be a veterinarian.)

Pinta’s card campaign was inspired by Home for the Holidays, a Facebook group that provides a safe space for LGBTQ+ people who can’t, actually, go home for the holidays. In November 2022, Pinta started a spreadsheet with addresses of members from the group who wanted to receive holiday cards, set up card-writing parties and added information to the Pinta Pride Project website for anyone who wanted to take part.

When I checked in with her 10 days before Christmas that year, she had collected 2,134 cards to send out.

Pinta repeated the campaign in 2023, and the response was overwhelming — in a good way. In the best way. Workplaces contacted her to say they were organizing employee gatherings to write cards. People who received cards in the past were paying it forward with card-writing campaigns of their own. Cards rolled in — and out — from across the country. By the end of the holiday season, they had sent out close to 10,000 cards.

Ten. Thousand. Cards. That’s 10,000 times that someone opened up their wounds and their world to strangers. Admitted rejection. Acknowledged pain. Asked for help. Hoped it would arrive. And that’s 10,000 times that they were met, in return, with love. With healing. With humanity.

Pinta is continuing the campaign this year. Of course she is.

“Sending love into the world when you have no idea what else to do is powerful,” Pinta told me. “Being able to write a card to somebody that needs it is powerful.”

In early November, Pinta sent an email to 160 people who wrote cards in the past, inviting them to do so again this year and encouraging them not to necessarily confine the timing — or the messages — to the holidays.

“In my opinion,” she wrote, “the holiday season is not even necessary to mention. Folks just need to know that they are loved, thought of and affirmed.”

Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for a Republican presidency, aims to gut protections for the LGBTQ+ community. Transgender individuals were villainized and scapegoated in campaign commercials for months leading up to Election Day — punctuating everything from Monday Night Football to “Golden Bachelorette” with a sprinkle of derision.

Hearts are battered and homes are divided and it’s all a lot.

“There’s a gentleman from Texas who sent us a photo last year,” Pinta said. “He set up all of the cards he received on his table and took a photo and made sure we could see the tears in his eyes. Happy tears in his eyes.”

That’s also a lot.

If you want to be part of the card-writing campaign — as a card writer or a card recipient — the best thing to do is visit buffalogrovepride.com, where you’ll find sign-up sheets and instructions. If the cost of postage or cards is prohibitive, Pinta has a budget set aside to help.

“Throughout the day,” Pinta said, “I go to my computer and I see new writers have signed up and someone new has signed up that we can write to and it’s a spot of joy.”

I found the work of a poet named Hannah Rosenberg on Instagram a few years ago, and her words have been such a balm during all sorts of storms — personal and global. The day before I was scheduled to call Pinta for a card campaign update, Rosenberg posted this, titled, “When things feel hard”:

“I like to remember that some people write stories so that strangers can escape to an imaginary world. Some spend hours baking pretty cakes even though they will just be eaten. I like to remember that road races always have bystanders just waiting to cheer for runners they’ll never know. That every day, humans say things feel hard and still find ways to make beautiful things happen. “

Like sending cards to strangers who had an empty space in their mailbox, at their table, in their heart, where family should be. Reminding them that their family is bigger and bolder than maybe they thought. That their family is humanity. And humanity isn’t going anywhere.

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Twitter @heidistevens13