There has been professional progress, too. “Today she’s a PFLAG mom, and she lives with me and my wife,” says a proud Morataya-Pilkington, who celebrates her two-year wedding anniversary in September. And she asked me, ‘How do you think I feel knowing both my daughters are going to burn in hell for all eternity?’” Morataya-Pilkington’s sister is also gay.Īnd yet, she bet on the hope that things would change. “She said something about ‘Ellen Degenerate.’ She told me the rainbow flag stood for perversity, not diversity. “It was terrible,” she recalls of the day she came out to her mother on a canyon hike. “He just told his family, ‘She’s a dyke and she left me,’” she says. After her divorce, her ex-husband abandoned her and the children emotionally and financially.

“Like a lot of people, I was in a hurry to get over everything that was going on in my head,” she says. Raised in Las Vegas, she married young and had three children with her then-husband. Offering comfort to the community is important to Morataya-Pilkington, who has faced her own difficulties and discriminations. Now they’re here two or three times a year.” “When I met them, they put their arms around me. “She did all this espionage to find out their favorite things, favorite colors, and decorated the whole room in a way personal to them,” explains Morataya-Pilkington with a smile. She points to people like her head concierge, who took great steps to welcome back an older lesbian couple that had once heard rude remarks from a homophobic patron. But she’s also leading by example, using policy and personality to enhance the resort’s pro-LGBT culture - something she sees embodied by her hundred-plus employees. An out and married lesbian and mom of three, she’s the woman running a four-diamond hotel at America’s largest casino. “I think I’ve been able to show my team a different side of what a family is,” says Morataya-Pilkington. But as the hotel manager of MGM Grand at Foxwoods Resort Casino, Stacy Morataya-Pilkington understands that in an oft-intolerant world, it can be extra important to make LGBT guests feel VIP. When you work in hospitality, the goal is to make every guest feel special.

Foxwoods hotel casino boston