Maya Green, MD, didn’t expect the call saying she’d been chosen as a grand marshal for the 2025 Chicago Pride Parade.
“I found myself shocked. I mean I was kind of overwhelmed that they thought about me,” said Green, who recently opened Onyx Medical Wellness, a clinic focused on serving LGBTQ+ Chicagoans in historically neglected Black communities on the South Shore. “There are a lot of people doing this work—certainly in all kinds of avenues— who certainly deserve some notoriety.”
Green joins Howard Brown Health Medical Director of Clinical Research and Infectious Diseases Cathy Creticos, MD, as a grand marshal for the parade; both were chosen through a community nomination process. The Pride Parade kicks off Sunday, June 29, at 11 a.m. at the corner of Sheridan and Broadway.
Having grown up on the South Side, it took Green until she was into her twenties before she connected with the idea of the queer community. Most of the conversation surrounding LGBTQ+ people hadn’t been about people that looked like those around her.
“They’re talking about me,” she recalled thinking. “Like, I never made that jump because it was not visible in my community, right?”
Green became a physician because she always found herself to be a healer. In her mind, someone meant to be a healer is always doing the work of one. “The rest is just paperwork,” she said.
Green said everyone has a reason for going into the work they do. For her it was her uncle, Robert Bolden, who she remembers as a “beautiful, brilliant, black, gay man who lived life on his terms.”
Bolden was diagnosed with HIV. Green remembers her mother coming home from the hospital crying the day they got the news. But Green also remembers her uncle overcoming the damaging perceptions of HIV in the ’80s with “a smile and encouragement”—despite all of the things other people were saying about him.
Nobody wanted to touch Green’s uncle. A lesson that Green’s parents had taught eventually kicked in for her: If you know a better way to take care of someone, then do it—even when others won’t. She signed up to care for HIV patients in 2002, when many others still wouldn’t sign up to volunteer because of stigma, at the Chicago School of Massage Therapy.
“People living with HIV literally cried when I touched them,” she said. It was at that moment that she thought, “Okay, I need to go to medical school, and I need to do whatever I need to do to make an impact.”
Creticos was similarly shocked when she received the call that she’d been chosen. After all, she doesn’t identify as LGBTQ+. She’s an ally, the first to be selected as a grand marshal for the Chicago Pride Parade. Nonetheless she was honored.
“It’s one of those things where you just plug away every single day of your career, trying to do the best job you can, and then to get the recognition is just a wonderful experience,” she said.
Creticos credits her patients with making her career trajectory possible; they’re the ones that make her a better doctor.
“They’re constantly challenging me to help figure out better ways to take care of them, to meet the challenge of what they need in their lives,” she said.
Creticos’s path to the doctor’s office wasn’t always so clear. Her father and mother’s brother had been physicians. In school though, she excelled in language, music and literature. She didn’t find a calling to medicine until one day in her third year of college when she “heard a voice.”
After that, she shifted gears and never looked back. She would follow in the steps of her uncle James Majarakis—a physician who served in France during World War II—and read medical journals he kept of his patients at that time.
A few years after completing her residency she’d face a war of her own.
Creticos considers herself lucky to be involved in the first treatment trial for HIV. This was during a time she describes as “having nothing,” when patients would fly in to Chicago, which was the only treatment site between the coasts, knowing they were at risk for receiving a placebo.
At Illinois Masonic, she recalled, “They had a 35 bed inpatient unit just for people with HIV. It was always full—we would have 100 patients spill over into other units because we didn’t have enough room.”
She described people fighting; patients were courageous and strong and “didn’t want to give up yet.”
While COVID-19 brought the memories of the AIDS epidemic back to her, she said the stigma and shame patients faced in the ’90s still carries on to this day.
A few years back, she said a “smart man,” a 40-year-old molecular biology professor, came into her hospital. He had never tested for HIV; the patient didn’t think his community could contract the disease. He died in two months.
“Stigma killed that patient,” she said.
For Creticos, the time for remaining silent is over. To her, Pride is all about “standing up” so LGBTQ+ people can live an authentic life outside the closet.
She’s been too busy at Howard Brown most years to make it to the Pride Parade, but come June 29 she’ll be leading the parade—the first she has been to in 10 years— with Green.
“I’m 70 years old, so I don’t need to work weekends anymore,” she said. “I’ve paid my dues.”
Green’s notion of Pride is about being present, especially for the trans community. With “so many things going on” she said people are tempted to take off all the things that make them beautiful and “hang it up back in the closet.”
Green said she was planning on wearing something simple this Sunday. Her brother was not having it.
“Oh no, you are the grand marshal of the Pride Parade. We’re gonna need more glitz. We’re gonna need more glamour,” he said to her.
Family has indeed always been a point of encouragement for Green.
“Maya, I never cared whether you were gay,” she said her mother once told her. “I just don’t want you to be mediocre. So if you’re going to be gay, be gay and great.”
Green added, “And of course, you have to do what Mama says.”