Before Kaelyn Bear came out as transgender in 2020, she searched for a place in Lake County where she could socialize with those who understood what she was going through. She didn’t find much, she said.
Then she found the LGBTQ+ Center of Lake County. The nonprofit was incorporated last year by Nikki Michele, who lives with her four children and fiance, Tracy Sorensen, in Waukegan.
Bear said the center offers optimism to those in the LGBTQ community. “It gives them some positive direction that things are going to get better,” said Bear, who helps with a Monday night support group in Waukegan.
“We had a new member come to our support group … who is not out with their family or friends,” Bear said. “They said we were the first real people they had come out to as trans. They said they were about to cry. I’m so happy to help them and give them a place to come.”
That’s exactly what Michele intended when she started the center. She, too, came to Waukegan with Sorensen, hoping to find a group similar to one they had been involved with when living in southeastern Wisconsin.
While living in Wisconsin, Michele and Sorensen’s pride flag was ripped off their house several times.
“My kids saw a pickup truck to take a picture of it. We’ve been followed out and about in town, and stalked in grocery stores,” Michele said.
For various reasons, they decided to move.
When they were house hunting in Waukegan, they drove down Genesee Street.
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“It was lined with rainbow flags. We took that as a sign,” Michele said.
The Center, which Michele runs out of her home, provides the LGBTQ community resources and a support group. It also provides training for those who want to better understand the LGBTQ community.
Michele has a meeting with the Waukegan mayor in a few weeks, and will provide an educational workshop on the LGBTQ community to the Lake County Board. She’s working on legislative issues — and has arranged online chats during the pandemic, and now an in-person support group.
The center also helped organize the Pride Drive held in Waukegan on June 5 at the beginning of Pride Month. Some of the members hope to attend the Chicago Pride in the Park on June 26 and 27, or the Chicago Pride Parade on Oct. 3.
Michele said she has an email list of about 400 members.
Michele and Sorensen refer to each other as their wives. They got engaged a few months ago, and jokingly bantered about who asked whom first, and about their dog, Ziggy Stardust.
“Stop chewing on my toe,” Michele said while at home with her family. “It’s hard not to love Ziggy,” Michele said. “She’s like a Muppet.”
By marrying Michele, Sorensen will become a mom to four stepchildren, Charis, 11, Ryan, 9, Lucy, 7, and Thea, 5, all with the last name of Rauwerda.
“It keeps life interesting,” said Sorensen. “It’s something I did not expect to happen to me. Life throws things unexpectedly. I love them. I think they love me.”
“They do,” Michele said. She added Charis is nonbinary, meaning someone who doesn’t identify as only a male or female. Michele said her other three children are girls. Ryan has told her mother she is a girl and wants to remain a girl. When asked who her favorite hero was, Ryan quickly replied, “You,” referring to her mother.
Michele said she and Sorensen are open and honest with the children. “We’re very supportive of whoever they want to be, whoever they want to love,” she said.
Michele has shared her story with Sorensen of growing up in an ultraconservative family, not liking boys and believing something was wrong with her.
By age 17, Michele had joined a cult, she said. The cult practiced conversion therapy, to dissuade people from becoming gay, she said. “I was put in an arranged marriage through the cult,” she said.
She had four children. Six years ago, she left the cult and got divorced. “I had a newborn, no job, no car, no money, no savings, not a bank account. Women weren’t allowed to have money in the cult. I started over from scratch,” she said.
Michele said she dated women, and eventually found Sorensen as her life’s partner. “She was actually everything I wanted in the universe,” Michele said.
Sorensen said, “I have the utmost respect for Nikki because of everything she’s been through, and as far as she’s come. I am not as vocal or as involved with the center. I help her with whatever she’s working on. I’ll DJ events and help decorate. But Nikki is the mastermind.”
Michele said she supports other groups in the region that share similar values. For example, PFLAG is a group of parents and friends based in central Lake County that supports the LGBTQ community.
Bear said that group benefits parents of those who are in the LGBTQ community, but Michele’s group was one that better fit her needs. She found out about the center when Michele posted online asking for volunteers and seeking members.
“I was super excited. I was thinking, it’s about time, we need it,” said Bear who works in Waukegan and has lived in Gurnee and Libertyville.
“I was going through a really rough patch at that point, separating from my partner, looking for a new place to live. At the time, I was feeling so lost and alone — just needing people to talk to. Now I’m doing really well,” she said.
She helped Michele arrange online support groups until they could do them in person as the pandemic subsided.
“I’ve been fairly aimless in my life, not knowing what I want to do. I finally found something I think I’m passionate about,” Bear said, referring to the center.
“We’d like to be able to offer more support groups, she added. “The trans community has so many obstacles, and difficulties and unique challenges, so it would be good to have their own support group.”
Michele said statistics show trans people have a higher incidence of being victims of violent crime compared with other society members. The Human Rights Campaign recently reported that more than half of transgender male teens, and nearly 30 % of transgender female teens who participated in a survey attempted suicide in their lifetime.
As Michele grows the nonprofit, she said, her net keeps getting cast wider and wider.
“I have a goal of establishing law-enforcement liaisons throughout Lake County,” she said. “I have talked with the county sheriff department about training with the department of corrections.” The training would establish protocols on working with transgender inmates, she said.
She said her goal is to provide a feeling of safety and family to the LGBTQ community.
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The Pride Drive in Waukegan and other events like it help, she said.
“Pride Drive was a wonderful day filled with so much love and joy,” Michele said.
Sorensen served as an MC and as a DJ for a drag queen show at the event. “It was a good time,” she said.
Michele said she also will work with the LGBTQ community to make their voices heard, to self-advocate.
“I feel like a lot of our allies have become complacent since 2106, when marriage equality was granted. There’s a misconception that we have equal rights already, and we don’t have to fight anymore,” Michele said. “But 2021 has had the most anti-LGBTQ legislation of all time.” Those statistics come from the Human Rights Campaign.
Sorensen said she’d like people who aren’t in the LGBTQ community to understand that her love for Michele is the same as any other. “Love is love,” she said.