A few rural Pride Month events marred by threats of violence

Photo by Kristyna Wentz-Graff, OPB

Entertainment, community building and a degree of fear have marked some Pride Month events. "Festivities have been tempered by a crisis of hate and discrimination that is unfolding nationally: an alarming rise in demeaning rhetoric and threats of violence, according to a sobering new briefing by the Department of Homeland Security," Jason Kyle Howard writes for The New Republic. "The situation is especially dire for members of the community living in rural America."

Logan Casey, a senior policy researcher at the Movement Advancement Project, an LGBTQ think tank, told Howard: "The threat is extreme. LGBTQ people in rural areas were already effectively at a disadvantage when it came to legal equality and policy protections. . . . It's not that rural life experiences are uniquely homophobic or transphobic. . . . But the structural conditions that make rural life unique really amplify experiences of discrimination. . . and now with this dramatic escalation of legislative attacks, [those] disparities are just getting worse and worse."

Rural Pride Fest events "have seen a spate of threats. . . including attempted arson using Molotov cocktails during a drag show at an affirming church in Chesterland, Ohio (pop. 7,400) and a pepper-spray assault at a Pride event in Bozeman, Montana (population 55,000)," Howard writes. "Organizers of an all-ages drag show . . . to support transgender youth in Pikeville, Kentucky, (pop. 8,000), in the heart of Appalachian coal country, were forced to cancel the event due to numerous threats of gun violence."

Many rural Pride celebrations had no trouble. Fests in Oregon and Louisiana highlighted a sense of community and acceptance with activities, performances, education and medical care opportunities.

In Dalles, Oregon, pop. 16,000, "celebrations range from marches and festivals to clothing swaps and boat rides," reports Rolando Hernandez of Oregon Public Broadcasting. "While Pride events can range from drag shows and arts and crafts, one resource. . . groups are offering de-escalation training." Laura Erceg, director of Southern Oregon Coast Pride, told Hernandez, "The unfortunate reality is that safety is a conversation that all of us have at all of our events." Hernandez reports, "Erceg is aware there may be people who want to protest, detract and scare others from attending Pride events, but believes that training like this can help educate the community and allow attendees to continue celebrating."

Calcasieu Lake is also known
as "Big Lake." (Wikipedia map)

Pride of Southwest Louisiana's third annual Pride Fest was held in a "remote corner of Calcasieu Parish. . . in the small unincorporated community of Big Lake. . . an unlikely setting for an LGBTQ+ celebration." Yet, hundreds came, reports Natalie McLendon of the Louisiana Illuminator. "A Pride flag with the slogan 'Abide No Hatred' marked the entrance. Outside, attendees shared conversation while waiting on the next drag queen to perform. . . . Vendors and organizations welcomed attendees under the shade of tailgate tents."

SWLA's Pride Fest also offered an area for attendees to receive medical care. "Nonprofits such as SWLA Harm Reduction, Comprehensive Care Center, and Big Brothers Big Sisters of Southwest Louisiana were also present," McLendon writes. "SWLA Harm Reduction program coordinator Peyton Boozer told McLendon: "There are so many barriers to access to care in our rural community, so our mobile unit allows us to meet people where they are. I think people are reticent to enter a clinical setting, so we offer a different type of environment to talk about wellness and check your status."

Big Brothers Big Sisters board member Alex Richard "said he wants young LGBTQ+ people to know there are safe places for them in southwest Louisiana," reports McLendon. Richard told her: "Some people are brave enough to be out in public and can be a light for young people. In this region, when you feel like you're the only one like you, that's a lonely place. So it's important to be out and yourself if possible. Pride isn't always just one day or one weekend out of the year."

Gay rodeos in Texas include gay and straight competitors and are a somewhat confidential comfort in polarized times

The calf-roping competitors pose for a portrait.
(Photo by Dawn Bottoms, The New Yorker)

Gay rodeos in Texas offer marginalized groups a place for competition and open-minded hospitality. "The urban-rural divide is as politically polarized as it's ever been; fans of gay rodeo have come to appreciate it as a place where rural signifiers—big hats, big trucks, George Strait songs—have a different valence," reports Rachel Monroe for The New Yorker from the Texas Tradition Rodeo in Denton: "The parking lot slowly filled with trucks bearing bumper stickers that said things like 'Been doing cowboy &$#! all day.' A tractor circled the arena, raking the dirt. . . . After everyone stood for the national anthem, an announcer came over the crackly PA system and offered a prayer, asking God to bless that day's competitors, 'the cowboys, cowgirls, and those in between.'"

Mac McMillan, who has been involved with the Texas Gay Rodeo Association for decades, told Monroe, "It started as a social club, and then AIDS came along. . . We did this to raise money, to take care of people. The medications were astronomically expensive, plus food, housing. We had to do what we had to do." Monroe reports, "Mac grew up in rural Texas. He realized at a young age that he was attracted to men, but he didn't see a way to reconcile his sexuality with the country lifestyle he preferred. . . . For Mac, the gay-rodeo world was a revelation. The scene was vibrant and defiant, a place he could feel fully himself. Daytimes were devoted to competition, and in the evening, everyone would gather for some sort of entertainment. . . . At the 1982, Joan Rivers served as grand marshal, ten thousand people packed the stands."

In Texas, political sentiment toward differences in sexual identity can be tense. "Conservative politicians in the state have increasingly turned their attention to controlling the public expression of gender and sexuality," Shaw writes. "This year, the state legislature is considering bills that would prohibit gender-affirming care for trans youth, impose fines on establishments that host 'sexually oriented' drag performances when children are present, and ban classroom teaching about sexual orientation or gender identity. . . . Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, the Denton rodeo had a clandestine air. . . . . Nearly everyone I spoke with in Denton had no idea that the rodeo was happening, or even that there was such a thing as a gay rodeo. . . . Partly a response to the unsettling political atmosphere in Texas, where drag events regularly meet with belligerent protesters."

The rodeo is open to all walks of life. "Wade Earp, a longtime TGRA participant (and a direct descendant of Wyatt Earp's brother Virgil), said that he's been happy to see the growing number of allies who come to gay rodeos as participants and spectators," Shaw adds. "In part, that's due to Wade's recruitment efforts. . . . A few years ago, he met some straight female bull riders at the Fort Worth stockyards, who told him, 'The men won't let us ride,' and Wade responded by saying, 'Come to the gay rodeo!'. . . . A half-dozen showed up at the next event, and soon they started bringing friends."

Opinion: Legislators in Iowa [and other states] deny human nature with bills aimed at children who aren't like others

By Art Cullen
Storm Lake (Iowa) Times Pilot

If there were one thing Iowa could agree on, you would hope it would be compassion for everyone. This life is complicated and confusing. Some boys like to play with GI Joe. Some like to play with Barbie. The discerning parent or teacher leaves them be and makes certain they do their arithmetic homework. They advise the boys with the GI Joes to be nice to the boys playing with the Barbies. Don’t bully them. People are different.

Art Cullen

Iowa Republicans controlling the legislature are in a mood to hassle people who may be different from them. All sorts of bills float around. This week, a legislator had to tell parents of transgender children that he doesn’t agree that this is right. Queer has no place in the classroom, the committee voted.

Under this law, a teacher would not be able to tell the boys that the boy in the corner is different, it is not his choice or the choice of his parents, and that people have been different from each other for time immemorial. The art teacher might remind the legislature to look up those Italian sculptors and their heroic nude males — hello in there! Or, the art teacher might remind us that the greatest artist in Iowa history, Grant Wood, hung out with other great artists and writers whose sexuality would draw rebuke from the morality police then and now. That’s why they hung out in Stone City. The bankers in Cedar Rapids looked the other way, thank goodness.

The reality is, and always has been, that human beings are not strictly heterosexual. Some people view reality through a moral prism predicated on the shame of St. Augustine or some other tortured soul. Recall that Augustine lived a playboy’s life of debauchery, saw the shallowness of it, and went on to saddle Catholic moral theology with an obsessive sexual predilection. Unfortunately, it finds its way into the legislature, where people forget the New Commandment: to love your neighbor as yourself.

If you loathe yourself, in a Calvinist sort of way, you are compelled to heap it on your neighbor. A little bit of that is going on in Des Moines. Iowa should be a place where we can approach each other with an attempt at understanding — especially in the classroom, where children need every bit of support as they sort out a confusing and mean world. Don’t lock Grant Wood in the closet. Don’t rebuke the goodwill that writer Tennessee Williams brought to the University of Iowa. Don’t shun that boy to the corner and deny his reality. It is possible to take a different point of view without being a heretic against God.

Too bad that this is how we have to learn. A lot of innocent children take the lumps. A lot of lives get traumatized. Eventually, we will appreciate the reality of a reckoning for cruelty. That’s a sin in anybody’s book.

Retired Vanderbilt dean, now a farmer, lauded for helping the LGBTQ community at the Nashville university

K. C. Potter

K.C. Potter lives on a farm in rural Tennessee these days, but the 80-year-old retired college professor and administrator has been seeing some excitement lately. Potter, the dean emeritus for residential and judicial affairs at Vanderbilt University, was recently declared a Trailblazer by the college for his longtime efforts to help LGBTQ students, Brad Martin reports for The Hickman County Times.

Potter, who is gay, created a policy at the school that protects LGBTQ students from harassment and mentored gay students. In 2008, the college established the K.C. Potter Center, which houses the university's Office of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer and Intersex Life, Martin reports.

"I was humbled," Potter told Martin. "And I felt maybe it should have been named for somebody else, or a group. . . . There were a lot of courageous students that I dealt with over the years." He was featured in the 2015 documentary "A Secret Only God Knows", which chronicled the lives of LGBTQ residents who reflect on life in Middle Tennessee before 1970.

A native of Eastern Kentucky who attended Berea College, Potter said he began advocating for LGBTQ students' rights because he saw how homophobic the culture was during much of his 33-year career, which began in 1965. It was so toxic that Potter didn't come out of the closet for years. But after a string of suicides from gay students, he began holding weekly support meetings for LGBTQ students in the late 1970s and from that, the drive to create a policy protecting them was born. After several years of dogged pursuit, Potter convinced the faculty senate to approve the policy in 1993.

Potter says he continues to mentor those who need support. "There is no greater reward in the world, as far as I'm concerned, than to help somebody grow," Potter told Martin.

As a resident of rural Hickman County, southwest of Nashville, Potter also told Martin that all  LGBTQ residents in the county, not just students, need more support. Many fear they'll lose their jobs if they come out of the closet, which Potter attributes partly to religious beliefs and unfounded fears that gay people are pedophiles. It's important for LGBTQ people to find acceptance and support in their community, Potter said, noting that the "overwhelming majority" of people who attempt but fail to complete suicide are gay.

Montana journalism school project and Canadian inquiry put spotlight on violence against Native American women

University of Montana School of Journalism graphic illustration for this year's Native News reporting package

In the past three years, 671 Native American women have gone missing and/or been murdered in the U.S., according to an impressive news package from the University of Montana School of Journalism. The real number is likely much higher, since the data is often poorly collected by federal, state and tribal governments.

The disappearances and deaths "are not just numbers or data to be formed into graph lines, but women’s lives ended or hanging in the limbo of disappearance. The 2019 Montana Native News Project investigates the complex crisis of Native American women disappearing in Montana, who they leave behind and how communities are trying to address the issue," write the project editors and advisers. The school covers the Native communities in the state and produces an annual report.

Women, especially women of color, continue to suffer worldwide because of trauma and inequality, but Native American women are on the forefront of confronting the issue, the editors write. The Sovereign Bodies Institute, which worked with the journalism students on the project, began raising awareness about it by creating a database of missing and murdered indigenous women.

The issue is receiving increasing attention in Canada, too. Human rights abuses against indigenous women and girls have led to violence that amounts to genocide, according to a years-long government inquiry that released its findings Monday. The report of more than 1,000 pages also highlights violence against LGBT+ indigenous people, is "the conclusion of more than two years of research involving at least 2,380 people who shared their stories or artwork with the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls," Merrit Kennedy reports for NPR.

The report recommends many actions to end the violence. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who ordered the inquiry, promised to develop a plan for meaningful action, Kennedy reports.

Rural Texas newspaper publisher deletes reference to same-sex partner in obituary, citing religious reasons

Olton, Texas (Wikipedia map)

A rural Texas newspaper is under fire after the publisher omitted a man's husband from an obituary because of religious convictions, KDFW-TV in Dallas reports.

Barry Giles and John Gambill have been together for 31 years, and both had a close relationship with Giles' mother, Brenda Light. When Light passed away in February, the Dallas couple bought an obituary in her hometown paper, the Olton Enterprise. The submitted obit said "Those left to cherish her memory include her son, Barry Giles and his husband, John Gambill of Dallas." But when the obit came out, Gambill wasn't in it, KDFW reports.

Gambill said that when he called Publisher Phillip Hamilton and asked why, Hamilton said only, "Because I wanted to." Hamilton is also a Baptist pastor, and though he declined an interview with KDFW, he issued a statement saying: "It is my religious conviction that a male cannot have a husband. It is also my belief that to publish anything contrary to God's Word on this issue would be to publish something in the newspaper that is not true."

The statement went on: "The newspaper respects the First Amendment rights of those who express such opinions. The newspaper’s decision to edit the obituary is both ethical and lawful. It would be unethical to publish a news item that is known by the editor to be false. Based on the truth found in the Word of God, I could not in good conscience identify Mr. Gambill as the husband of Mr. Giles."

The couple is considering legal action, but an appellate attorney not involved with the case told KDFW Hamilton has a stronger legal footing: "A newspaper cannot knowingly or recklessly publish false information," said Chad Ruback. "Other than that, the First Amendment grants the newspaper extremely broad rights in deciding what information to publish and what information not to publish."

Syphilis spreading in rural U.S. because of intravenous drug use, stigma, lack of funding, and other factors

Rural counties across the Midwest and West are seeing a spike in syphilis. While the disease "is still concentrated in cities such as San Francisco, Atlanta and Las Vegas, its continued spread into places like Missouri, Iowa, Kansas and Oklahoma creates a new set of challenges," Lauren Weber reports for Kaiser Health News. "Compared with urban hubs, rural populations tend to have less access to public health resources, less experience with syphilis and less willingness to address it because of socially conservative views toward homosexuality and nonmarital sex."

How bad is the problem? In 1999 around 35,000 cases were reported, but by 2017 that number grew to 101,500, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Weber reports.

Syphilis is easily treatable and curable with antibiotics, but can cause permanent brain damage, blindness, birth defects and/or death if left untreated. It's making a comeback partly because of increasing drug use, which often leads to risky sexual behavior. In rural areas, that's compounded by the stigma of seeking help for a sexually transmitted disease or reluctance to reveal homosexual activity. Another problem: Syphilis has been so rare until recent years that many health-care providers have never seen it in patients, and don't easily recognize it, Weber reports.

In 1999 the CDC had a plan to eradicate the disease in the U.S. by focusing on hotspots in the South, California, and major urban areas, "but health officials are losing the fight because of a combination of cuts in national and state health funding and crumbling public-health infrastructure," Weber reports. "Federal funding for STD prevention has stayed relatively flat since 2003, with $157.3 million allocated for fiscal year 2018. But that amounts to a nearly 40% decrease in purchasing power over that time, according to the National Coalition of STD Directors."

Stigma, limited privacy, lack of sex education, shortage of health insurance hamper rural efforts to fight HIV and AIDS

President Trump said in his State of the Union address that he wants to stop the spread of HIV in the U.S. within 10 years. "In addition to sending extra money to 48 mainly urban counties, Washington, D.C., and San Juan, Puerto Rico, Trump's plan targets seven states where rural transmission of HIV is especially high," Jackie Fortier reports for NPR. Health officials in those states (Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma and South Carolina) welcome the funding, but told Fortier that ending or slowing rural HIV transmission is a big challenge.

In rural areas,there is still a stigma attached to being gay and/or having HIV or AIDS, says Dr. Michelle Salvaggio, medical director of the Infectious Diseases Institute at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center in Oklahoma City, a federally funded HIV clinic. It employed a case manager to serve a nearby rural area, but eliminated the position because no patients went to see her, Salvaggio told Fortier: "They didn't want to be seen walking into the HIV case manager's office in that tiny town — that can only mean one thing."

That lack of anonymity is not just a problem in small towns. When Native Americans, an at-risk population in Oklahoma, "go into an Indian Health Service clinic, it is possible that they will see their cousin behind the desk, and their cousin's brother-in-law working in medical records, and their niece's boyfriend working in the pharmacy," Salvaggio said.

An HIV-positive Cherokee, Ky Humble, told Fortier that rural Oklahomans with HIV and AIDS need more than medical funding; they also need more access to related services like food pantries, mental health therapy, and transportation assistance.

Another difficulty: Oklahoma, and many other states with large rural populations, don't require comprehensive sex education that could help teens learn about cheap, effective methods of preventing HIV, such as use of condoms. Lack of health insurance will also likely hamper efforts to get rural residents tested and treated, especially in states that did not expand Medicaid, Fortier reports.

Youth suicide rates up in at least 36 states; some blame decline in prescribing antidepressants

At least 36 states saw a rise in youth suicide rates from 2006 to 2014, Michael Ollove reports for Stateline. The overall rate for suicides among people 19 and under rose during this period from 2.18 per every 100,000 teens to 2.72. The biggest increase was in Utah, where youth suicide rates rose from 2.87 for every 100,000 teens to 6.83. (Stateline map: Change in teen suicide rates from 2006-14)

Experts site a decline in psychiatric medicine for the increase in suicides, Ollove writes. In 2003 the U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued warnings that antidepressants may increase the risk of suicide in teens and adolescents, leading many doctors to stop prescribing them. A study in 2003-04 linked higher rates of teen suicide to the decreased prescribing of antidepressants. Experts say another possible cause for the rise in teen suicides is in increase of cyber-bullying.

One study in rural Wisconsin linked higher teen-suicide rates to rural areas, "where people are more likely to be depressed and mental health services may be less accessible," Ollove writes. In Utah, for example, "public schools are barred by law from 'advocating homosexuality," which, critics say, discourages any candid conversation on the subject" and leaves LGBTQ youth with no support system. Utah does not track suicides by sexual orientation, so little data exist on that theory.

Researchers map geotagged 'tweets of hate'

A group of academic geographers at Humboldt State University in California and the University of Kentucky are researching geotagged "tweets of hate," including racism and homophobia,  and finding that they are more prevalent outside major metropolitan areas. The maps "show the significant persistence of hatred in the United States and the ways that the open platforms of social media have been adopted and appropriated to allow for these ideas to be propagated," the researchers write. Here's a map of racist tweets; click on the image for a larger version, or here for the original, interactive version.

"Quite depressingly, there are a number of pockets of concentration that demonstrate heavy usage of the word," the researchers write. "In addition to looking at the density of hateful words, we also examined how many unique users were tweeting these words. For example in the Quad Cities, 31 unique Twitter users tweeted the word 'nigger' in a hateful way 41 times. There are two likely reasons for higher proportion of such slurs in rural areas: demographic differences and differing social practices with regard to the use of Twitter. We will be testing the clusters of hate speech against the demographic composition of an area in a later phase of this project." Here's their map of homophobic tweets:
"Only around 1.5 percent of all tweets are geotagged, as it requires opting-in to Twitter's location services," the researchers acknowledge. "Sure enough, that subset might be biased in a multitude of ways when compared with the the entire body of tweets or even with the general population. But that does not mean that the spatial patterns we discover based on geotagged tweets should automatically be discarded." (Read more)