Strange Ways Is Ready For Pride

New Haven has a way to celebrate Pride Month for all of June, thanks to a series of events organized by Val Ruby-Omen and Alex Dakoulas of Strange Ways in Pitkin Plaza. 

It begins with a vendor fair and queer beer unveiling this weekend at Armada Brewing in Fair Haven and continues at the 151 Orange St. shop all month, including mixers, a pop-up market, a chance to draw a drag queen, and an open mic night.

In organizing its June events, Strange Ways is aligning its Pride celebrations with those that happen all over the country. New Haven Pride Center’s festivities are something of an outlier; they’re held in September because ​“it caters to the college kids coming back. Everybody’s back in September,” said Val Ruby-Omen, assistant manager and events coordinator at Strange Ways, who used to work at the Pride Center. ​“Pride should be all year,” she added. But ​“there is something really special about doing it in June.”

Ruby-Omen joined the staff of Strange Ways last fall and is ​“hugely talented at putting on events,” Dakoulas, Strange Ways’s owner and founder, said. In the past few months, Strange Ways has hosted several events, from a queer mixer, to music shows and pop-up markets, to an all-ages drag show and a Flair Fair as part of the Ninth Square’s Night Market. This year, he and Ruby-Omen also decided, ​“why don’t we blow up Pride?”

Celebrating Pride in June establishes a stronger connection to its historic roots — ​“I think society as a whole has forgotten that the first Pride was a riot,” Ruby-Omen said — seemed especially important this year, as anti-gay, anti-drag, and anti-trans laws come into effect in other parts of the country. ​“Everyone that works here is within the LGBTQ spectrum,” Dakoulas said. ​“This is literally our lives. If you’re against Pride, you’re against us.… That is the store. That is us.” Hosting Pride events might also foster understanding. ​“I think people are afraid of what they don’t know, but we do know, so let us put on some events that will maybe open people’s eyes.” 

For Ruby-Omen, organizing Pride events was also a way to decouple it from corporate sponsorship, as happens elsewhere, and bring out the protest inside the celebration. ​“I don’t know if you can call it a march if Bank of America is sponsoring it,” she said of larger Pride events in other cities. ​“I think the real change and the real impact happens at a very local and grassroots level, within the community.” 

They ended up planning something for every week — starting with a Pride party on Saturday, June 3, in collaboration with Armada Brewing. The event runs from 12 to 5 p.m. at Armada Brewing, at 190 River St., and features an LGBTQ+ vendor market of 17 vendors, as well as the unveiling of a new beer, Queer Occult. That’s followed by a queer mixer on Thursday, June 8, 7 to 9 p.m., at Strange Ways, which will include entertainment from Ambrosia Black and catering from Blue Orchid, which will also host an afterparty. June 17 will see a pop-up market of queer crafters of color from 1 to 5 p.m., featuring seven local artisans. On June 24, from 2 to 4 p.m., Strange Ways will host Drag and Draw with ​“Susan?” a figure drawing class in which a drag queen (whose name must be pronounced with a questioning voice at the end to be done correctly) is the subject. Finally, June 29 will be the Quiet Queer Open Mic Night from 6 to 8 p.m., which invites participants to ​“celebrate the conclusion of Pride Month with a sober event for the introspective and introverted.”

Two of the events have come about because of people wanting to work with Strange Ways. First, John Kraszewski, Armada Brewing’s founder, reached out to Strange Ways in February about collaborating on a Pride beer, aiming for a June release. Dakoulas was already a fan of Armada Brewing. ​“It was very natural. He loved the store, and I loved going to Armada.… We actually kind of know each other.”

As they talked more, Dakoulas emphasized that he wanted to make sure the collaboration was based on Strange Ways’s own mission and identity. ​“We’re for the underdog. It’s for strangers, or weirdos, people who don’t feel like they necessarily fit in. We’re very queer-centric, and we’re about artists.… can we represent that in a beer somehow?” 

Kraszewki was ​“all for it.” They talked about what kind of beer to brew (a fruited sour). Ruby-Omen designed the label. ​“All the imagery is poking fun at all the things they say about our community, about being freaks and weirdos and devil worshippers,” Dakoulas said. Ruby-Omen drew from her interest in the occult and Dakoulas’s love of horror movies. She added gay aliens as a nod to Kraszewski’s interest in extraterrestrials.

“The whole thing tells a story,” Ruby-Omen said of the label, and ​“it’s reclaiming a lot of the crappy things people say about us.” Dakoulas brought Kraszewski the design as a representation of what Pride means for Strange Ways. ​“He was so for it,” Ruby-Owen said. They are grateful for the support — especially in light of Target’s recent pulling of queer artists from its line. Armada’s attitude, they said, ​“is what allyship looks like.”

Similarly, the queer crafters of color event came about after Meredith Clark of Beacon Craft Studio approached Strange Ways to collaborate in ​“putting out this market,” Ruby-Omen said. Ruby-Omen and Dakoulas were into the idea, and Clark ​“got all their contacts together” to bring in seven different crafters. ​“I was really happy that I could help facilitate that,” Ruby-Omen said. ​“I’m here to support in any way I can.”

For Dakoulas, that event was also a way to dig deeper, beyond the surface-level message of ​“love is love, and everything’s great,” he said, that has sometimes come to be associated with Pride. ​“That’s not enough sometimes, and we got to do more.… Can we focus on people of color?” he asked. Ruby-Omen agreed. ​“There is so much more to the queer community than commercial Pride happenings want you to think,” Ruby-Omen said. 

Meanwhile, Drag and Draw was Ruby-Omen’s and Dakoulas’s own brainchild. ​“I used to work at a paint and sip studio,” Ruby-Omen said, a ​“classic” one that was sort of ​“bougie,” in which people painted sunsets while sipping wine. But it gave Ruby-Omen a chance to teach; ​“I am an artist, first and foremost,” she said. To give it a Strange Ways angle, Dakoulas suggested changing the materials from paints to pencils — and the subject from a sunset to a drag queen. 

“I want it to take off,” Dakoulas said. ​“I want to see it in other cities.”

For all the seriousness of their intentions, of course, neither Ruby-Omen nor Dakoulas have forgotten that Pride is also supposed to be fun — ​“celebratory, but coming from the community, on our terms,” Dakoulas said. 

It’s also part of the broader mission of Strange Ways in being both a business and a community space. ​“I personally think the community aspect and the retail aspect work really well together,” Ruby-Omen said, ​“especially because we do have a lot of artists here. The people who come here to shop are really into art. Many of them are artists.” Running a business while supporting the community ​“lends so well to the ethos of the store.” The spirit of collaboration that animated setting up the Pride events pervades the way Strange Ways runs all the time. As Dakoulas said about the artists pop ups the store regularly hosts, ​“let’s make this work for both of us.” For Pride Month, they can make it work for everyone.

“It’s an experience,” Ruby-Omen said. ​“You don’t just come here to buy stuff.”