The Brooklyn Community Pride Center hosts a swim night on the first Friday of every month.
Specifically, it’s a trans and gender non-conforming swim night, held at the pool in the Major R. Owens Health & Wellness Community Center.
Early in June, about 40 people were crowded into the shallow end of the indoor pool, blasting music and playing with pool toys, while others swam laps a few lanes over.
The monthly event sprang from a simple idea the community proposed in 2022: a safe space where trans and nonbinary folks, who aren’t always readily accepted at public pools and beaches, can enjoy swimming, according to Director of Development and Communications Omari Scott.
The swim night was founded in August 2022 and has since grown into a monthly event that regularly draws around 40 people.
“Swimming is an intimate thing. It can be a hard subject for queer people who are maybe changing the way their body looks,” said Sam Grasland, a data scientist who moved to New York from Florida about six months ago and was attending their second swim night.
“This is a nice place for people who are gender divergent to get to enjoy one of life’s beauties in a safe area where they know they won’t be called out for the way they look,” Grasland said.
Jessica Grace grew up in Queens, where she loved the beach and her local pools. She spent more than 30 years trying to live as a man before transitioning in 2019.
Since then, Grace has only swum in friends’ pools and at Jacob Riis Park’s famously queer-friendly beach. She recently moved from Brooklyn to the Upper East Side and hasn’t yet found a pool in the area.
Grace said she has experienced transphobia in both her new and old neighborhoods and said she valued the Crown Heights event’s inclusiveness.
“When I was living in Brooklyn, it was a lot more aggressive; they’d yell at you, they’d threaten you,” Grace said. “Now it’s all these like, uptight WASP-y people who just look you up and down and give you a scoff.”
Grasland has a pool two minutes from their Midtown apartment. But they plan on becoming a regular at the Pride Center’s event, which is more of a friendly community vibe than the swim-cap-and-laps situation at their local pool. They said they’ve even encountered people they knew from back in Florida at the swim night.
Before this month’s event, people were milling about at the Price Center downstairs, making small talk before heading up to the pool to change.
Rain Valentine, who found out about the swim night from a queer WhatsApp group, was attending for the first time. He found the crowd a little awkward, in a cute way.
“It’s like the awkward stage of puberty,” Valentine said, laughing.
He says there aren’t many spaces specifically geared toward trans or nonbinary people.
“It’s either lesbian or gay, mostly gay bars,” Valentine said. “And now those spaces are trying to be more open to anyone who identified under the queer umbrella. But some of the spaces still feel very binary.”
“People new on their journeys and how they’re viewing their bodies, this gives them a better way to help with this dysmorphia a little bit,” Valentine said. “It’s putting people a bit more at ease.”
