Just two weeks after Donald Trump crossed the threshold of electoral votes to become the 47th president of the United States, the Savannah Pride Center held an event at The Sentient Bean in downtown Savannah.

“A Way Forward” it was called, a post-election resource-gathering and support-offering for Savannah’s queer community, “in preparation of policy shifts that will affect the rights and healthcare of our queer community” according to an Instagram post. Representatives from the Human Rights Campaign, Georgia Equality, SPC support groups and more came to speak at the hour-long event.

“The goal of this event is to bring up state and local leadership and other resources around Savannah to help connect you with any local resources that you will need in the near future,” said Savannah Pride Center Director Michael Bell to the 60+ people gathered at the event. “We will have more of these events, don’t you worry.”

Bell said he knew after the election, that they were going to have to construct a series of events to help the community understand what they had access to locally. Before the election, anti-transgender politicians spent more than $215 million on ads targeting trans people, promoting agendas to punish people for departing from “gender roles”, according to the ACLU.

Those initiatives were poised to come to fruition with the election of Trump, and have and will seemingly continue to. Since the ‘A Way Forward’ event, Trump has signed executive orders rolling back protections for transgender people, including cutting support for gender-affirming care for those under 19.

Bell came to the SPC in March 2024 from New Jersey knowing he wanted to focus on, above all, building up the organization to becoming a hub for holistic queer healthcare for the region — providing connections to hormone replacement therapy and mental health services — , and working quickly towards that goal.

The election sped that up.

“It’s becoming a medical hub,” Bell said in an interview in November. “Now I think that’s far more accelerated — we have people from all throughout the Deep South that gravitate towards Savannah, and there’s no medical plan in place.”

Focused on bridging the gap on queer healthcare services and the surrounding region, SPC, one of only two LGBTQIA centers in Georgia will hold the first Savannah LGBTQIA+ Health Summit, on March 1-2 at the Savannah Civic Center.

“People are asking a lot of questions about what they need to do medically,” Bell said. “They’re scared, asking if they need to stockpile on their medication. What needs to be done before it’s taken away, and what can actually be done. So we’re trying to answer those calls by giving people facetime with the medical providers in their community.”

Why a health summit?

The goal of the summit is two-fold and expands on SPC’s mission statement: give access to quality, affirming medical care in the Deep South and to provide training for businesses, individuals and medical providers.

Topics covered during the health summit will include “Navigating Trans and Gender Diverse Care in Savannah,” “Displacement and the LGBTQIA+ Community,” and “HIV Prevention and Care,” as well as discussions on affirming mental health practices and creating safe medical spaces.

“It’s very hard to get providers in the same room at the same time, office to office, to get people to take this training,” Bell said. “This summit gives us an opportunity to get everyone on the same page. This is a very significant, large population in the Deep South that need healthcare, and right now it’s very few people and providers that are actually providing to the community.”

The only medical practice in the region, Starland Family Practice, that focuses on the queer community has a nine-month waitlist according to Bell. SPC sees the overflow of that. The summit, he said, is also to let the city and the county know that SPC and the queer population needs support.

“You have a population on the rise that needs to be taken care of,” Bell said. “If we don’t do trans care right now, people who are couch surfing will become displaced, displacement becomes homelessness. Homelessness is food scarcity, now we’re having a much larger issue down the line. The issues will just keep growing.”

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‘What we do here sends a message to the country’

Amari Brown, who grew up in Savannah and has been a volunteer at SPC for the last year and half, said he was up all night when Trump got elected.

“I remember feeling a bit nervous,” Brown said. “I was very concerned about my own goals with my transition. I remember I was trying to hold myself together. I remember feeling very, very fearful for the future, afraid of losing my rights as a queer person. I went to Michael’s house that evening, and we just kind of like were there for each other and tried to be positive.”

Brown jumped into a similar mode as Bell, and many others, and immediatley began planning for the future: making sure his insurance was in order, trying to schedule appointments.

“I’m hearing rumors that Trump is doing away with Medicare, so I’m like, let me get everything I need, because in the future, I may not be able to,” Brown said.

He’s been a recipient of some of the services SPC has provided, including Equal Health, which is a service that can provide hormone replacement therapy at an affordable price and relatively quickly.

“It’s a very difficult process to try to start to transition, especially in the south,” Brown said. “So I think that a lot of people utilize that service from us. There’s a lot of people who need resources from us, whether that’s HRT or just talk therapy, access to HIV treatment and prevention. Sometimes even access to a place to sleep at night or where to find food. A place like this is vitally important.”

Bell said people travel hours to come to SPC for care or zoom into support group meetings to find community. He estimated in November that around 40% of people they treat are out-of-towners, and the importance of being a beacon in the south drives SPC’s initiatives.

“What we do here sends a message to the country,” Bell said. “It’s different here than doing my job in New York or any other place. If we can get something done here, it makes a huge difference.”

Destini Ambus is the general assignment reporter for the Savannah Morning News, covering the municipalities, and community and cultural programs. You can reach her atDAmbus@gannett.com