The Pride Parade has for years drawn people from Chicago area and elsewhere to the city’s Boystown neighborhood each June, but one North Shore organization is hoping a smaller event will draw attention to the LGBT community in the suburbs.

Northfield-based Links — North Shore Youth Health Service will host “Out in the Suburbs” June 21 at the Northbrook Public Library, a panel discussion designed to address the experiences of gay residents of suburban communities.

“There’s always all these events in the city, and there are never any in the suburbs,” said Amy Skalinder, executive director of Links. “The idea was just to raise awareness that there is an LGBT population in the suburbs.”

Panelists will include a recent New Trier High School graduate, same-sex parents and experts in LGBT legal issues. With a large, concentrated gay population and a wealth of LGBT resources, the city proper has good reason to host the lion’s share of Pride Month events, Skalinder said. But, she said, the panelists in Northbrook will hoepfully put a face on the suburban LGBT community.

“Nobody thinks about gay people in the suburbs,” she said. “I think there’s just a societal assumption that they’re in the city.”

What people may learn by attending the event at the library, though, is that gay people live in the suburbs for the same reasons as straight people, Skalinder said: They want to raise children away from the congestion and hustle and bustle of the city and live in houses with spacious yards.

Others have less choice of where to live. Many are children growing up in suburbia–  navigating the typical pitfalls of being young, but also dealing with issues that come with being gay, Skalinder said.

“There are more of us in the suburbs than you think,” she said. “I personally know several LGBT folks who live in the suburbs. I live in Skokie with my partner.”

One of those folks is Amy Olson, a Morton Grove resident who will be one of the panelists at “Out in the Suburbs.” She grew up in Morton Grove and still lives there — about four blocks away from her mother, she said — where she and her partner of 14 years, Vicki Ungar, have raised three girls.

Although she said she don’t know what to expect form the panel discussion, she said she would likely cover the parenting angle. While her children were young, they didn’t think anything of the fact that their parents were lesbians — until high school.

“Then it’s like, ‘Oh my God, what are my friends going to think,’” Olson said. Their oldest “kind of kept us at bay, in the closet, until her friends came along.”

After that, it became easier for the children to bring their friends around the house, Olson said. The children adopted a philosophy: “These are my parents, that’s how it is,” she said.

“If there are people in the suburbs coming to ask questions, I hope we answer those questions and we squelch those fears,” Olson said.

But, she said, the event also is for the benefit of young people in the suburbs. Olson echoed Skalinder’s comments about the dearth of resources for the LGBT community in the suburbs versus the abundance in the city. Unless someone is familiar with an organization like Links, which offers LGBT programs and health services for adolescents, they might not know where to look, she said.

“My hope is that it will be a mixed group,” Skalinder said. “I hope it will draw beyond the obvious LGBT rights supporters.”

“Out in the Suburbs” is free and scheduled for 7 to 8 p.m. June 21 in the Ryan Auditorium of the Northbrook Public Library, 1201 Cedar Lane. For more information, go to www.linksyouth.org.