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GLBT Expo Highlights Social Outlets and Support Services

By DNAinfo Staff on March 13, 2011 10:56am  | Updated on March 13, 2011 10:54am

By Tara Kyle

DNAinfo Reporter/Producer

HELL'S KITCHEN — LGBT New Yorkers may be splintered throughout countless neighborhoods, professions and leisure interests, but thousands gathered under one roof Saturday and Sunday at the Javits Center.

Travel companies, wedding planners, social service agencies, cheerleaders and a mechanical bull (representing the International Gay Rodeo Association) were among Saturday's slate of attendees at the 18th annual GLBT Expo.

One local institution manning a booth Saturday was Hell's Kitchen's Metropolitan Community Church of New York, which provides religious services as well as charitable services.

MCCNY's fiscal manager, Mike Easterling, said he valued the face time with LGBT New Yorkers who might have drifted away from Christianity because of discrimination they had faced in their pasts.

"It's helpful to let people know that we exist," said Mike Easterling, 30, MCCNY's fiscal manager. "God can still be a dirty word within the gay community, because there are so many churches that use God as a reason to condemn people."

Other exhibitors shared forms of solidarity more focused on fun.

Steve Moreau, 29, came to spread word about the three-year-old Big Apple Dodgeball and Big Apple Bowling gay sports leagues, of which he is a board member.

Opportunities like the GLBT Expo are important, Moreau said, because they allow LGBT New Yorkers to get a better sense of the wide range of social and support communities available to them.

"If you don't want to go to a bar every night," Moreau said, "it's important to show people that there's an alternative to every option."