20 Gay City News Impact Awards 2020
HONOREE
ETHEL A. FELIX
CO-FOUNDER, PRESIDENT, CARIBBEAN AMERICAN PRIDE
Ethel A. Felix, a co-founder and the president of Caribbean American
Pride who works professionally for the nonprofi t community health plan
Amida Care, was born in Belize City into a politically active family.
At the age of three, she accompanied her mother Florine to her fi rst
protest march against the Guatemalan presence in their native land.
In 1978, her family relocated to New York, settling in the BedStuy
section of Brooklyn. There, a junior high school teacher reinforced Ethel’s interest in politics and working to improve the
lives of others by teaching her about Shirley Chisholm, Stokely Carmichael, Malcolm X, Marcus Garvey, and other great
Black political activists who had Caribbean roots.
Ethel’s family later moved to the Bronx’s Fordham section, and in high school there she was active in groups like
the Model City Council and became treasurer of her high school’s chapter of Arista, the National Honor Society. At
Binghamton University, she majored in Literature and Rhetoric and minored in Latin American and Caribbean Area
Studies. She was active also in the anti-apartheid movement sweeping college campuses in the 1980s, participating in
sit-ins among other forms of protests.
After college, Ethel volunteered in advocacy organizations both in the Bronx and in her Belize homeland, once traveling
there to work on her cousin’s re-election campaign for the Belizean Parliament. Back home, she became a member of her
church board at St. James Episcopal Church and joined the Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition formed
to give a voice to that section of the borough. With that group, she lobbied elected offi cials in Washington on issues
including HIV/ AIDS, housing, and immigration reform.
In 2000, Ethel fi rst attended a meeting of S.I.S.T.A.H. (Sisters in Search of Truth, Alliance, and Harmony), where she met
a group of Black women who remain some of her closest friends. Through S.I.S.T.A.H., in turn, she met the late Candace
Boyce, a co-founder of AALUSC (African Ancestral Lesbians United for Societal Change). Ethel soon became an active
member there, as well, representing the group at community events as a proud African-Caribbean woman.
It was when she went to work for Amida Care that Ethel met her spiritual life partner, Chantal Bonhomme, whom she
married at St. James Episcopal Church in Fordham.
While marching with her wife and friends in Brooklyn’s Labor Day West Indian Day Parade in the early 2010s, Ethel
saw one of her friends get injured. It was then that she and others recognized the need to raise the visibility of LGBTQ
people of Caribbean descent. Ethel, along with Chantal and friends Bajan Sandy King, Cluny Levanche, Eda Francois,
Omar Ifi ll, Naquan Ross, and Jason Weeks co-founded Caribbean American Pride. As the group’s president, Ethel and
vice president Michelle Lopez have hosted forums on HIV/ AIDS in Brooklyn’s Caribbean community.
Ethel and Chantal and their children now live in Jackson Heights.