Susan MacNeal

On Oct. 9, Bellows Falls Pride unfurled the historic 14 ft. × 25 ft. Sacred Cloth (section 93 of the original Key West Sea-to-Sea Rainbow Flag) to recognize National Coming Out Day. The flag draped the Windham Hotel, the building where the Andrews Inn provided a safe destination for gay people in the 1970s and 1980s.

True colors

With LGBTQ+ Constitutional rights at stake, coming out and recognizing and revealing one’s authentic self is an act of of bravery


Susan MacNeil, the executive director of AIDS Services for the Monadnock Region from 2000 to 2014, was a founding board member of Keene Pride and served on the Bellows Falls Pride Committee. This piece was written to mark National Coming Out Day on Oct. 11 and LGBTQIA+ History Month in October.

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Two contagions, two responses

A vaccine for COVID-19 was developed in less than a year. For those with HIV and AIDS, it took a decade.

Americans are fixated on numbers. Infrastructure plan: $3.5 trillion. Votes cast in the 2020 presidential election: 100 million. Confirmed cases of COVID-19: 47,619,573 - and 769,310 deaths. Each of these numbers is hard to wrap your head around, linked inextricably to the human condition. But when the enormity of...

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