Yelpers Celebrate PRIDE All Year Round

One silver lining from our virtual world is how quickly we can connect with each other!  Just because we all now work from our respective homes, doesn’t mean Yelp’s LGBTQ+ community can’t come together to educate each other, celebrate with each other, and discuss our unique experience.

Here are some of the events that OutBurst hosted this year. 

Panel Discussion – Celebrating Transgender Day of Visibility: We talked to employees that identify as trans or non-binary about what TDOV means to them and how we can be allies to the trans community. If you want to learn more about how Yelp lives up to its “Best Place to Work for LGBT Equality” title, we invite you to read this blog post.  

Gayly Strong: Barre/Pilates Fusion Extravaganza: We invited Teresa Ellis, owner of Pilates Barre and Jams, to get our bodies moving. Pilates Barre and Jams is a Queer/Black-owned pilates studio centering on serving the BIPOC, Queer, Fat identifying, Trans, and Sex Worker communities, based out of Oakland, CA.

Fireside Chat with Danny Ramadan: Ahmad Danny Ramadan, a Syrian-Canadian author, public speaker, storyteller, and LGBTQ-refugee activist, joined us to tell more about his involvement in coordinating online and on-the-ground efforts to support queer and trans identifying refugees from Syria to immigrate to Canada. 

Book Reading: Determined To Be Dad: Author Steve Disselhorst joined us for a live reading of his new book Determined To Be Dad. In this book, Steve chronicles his trials and tribulations of self-discovery, to acceptance, to building a new reality, and finally, to the joys of creating his own family through adoption.

OutBurst Connect: The End Of National Coming Out Day? We celebrated National Coming Out Day with a discussion among OutBurst members from different parts of Yelp. To prepare for the talk, we encouraged everyone to read the article “It’s time to end National Coming Out Day,” and listen to the BBC podcast, “The End of Coming OUT.”

The Queer Advantage: We invited author Andrew Gelwicks to tell us more about his new book The Queer Advantage. Andrew interviewed the world’s most successful leaders in business, entertainment, sports, and politics on how their queer identity positively impacted their careers. 

Virtual Pride Bazaar: Although we couldn’t host our annual Pride Bazaar at Yelp’s headquarters this year, we curated a list of 20 out-and-proud businesses that ship their wares across the continent: Yelp’s Virtual Pride Bazar.