Charlotte’s LGBT history shows radical attitude shifts, despite fights over trans rights

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The Charlotte Pride Festival wrapped up on Sunday with a parade, floats, dancing and thousands of cheering people filling uptown in every variation of rainbow garb. But this year’s Pride took place against the backdrop of statewide and national fights over LGBT rights that hold center stage in our ongoing culture wars.

The North Carolina General Assembly last week overrode Gov. Roy Cooper’s veto of a trio of bills. One bans puberty blockers, gender surgery and other transition-related health care for minors. One forbids transgender women and girls from playing on female sports teams from middle school through college. And one requires schools to notify parents if their child wants to start using a different name or pronoun.

Meanwhile, so-called “don’t say gay” bills like in Florida, battles over LGBT-themed books with sexually explicit passages such as "Gender Queer" and the place of trans athletes in sports have dominated the headlines for months. And with a bitterly divided 2024 election shaping up (in North Carolina, Republican Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson is a seasoned culture warrior with a history of controversial remarks about the LGBT community), that doesn’t look likely to change anytime soon.

With all of the acrimony today around LGBT people’s rights, it can be easy to forget how profoundly attitudes have already shifted in just the space of a lifetime — or even the last couple of decades. (Only seven years passed from Barack Obama opposing same-sex marriage on the campaign trail in 2008 and praising the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2015 ruling that legalized same-sex marriage nationwide.)

In this newsletter, we’ll take a look back at several key points in Charlotte’s LGBT history. The city of Charlotte published a timeline recently that includes some of these events; you can also find a trove of recorded interviews online at UNC Charlotte with LGBT activists and residents if you want to hear firsthand what it was like growing up and living as a gay person in Charlotte in previous decades.

A Charlotte Observer story from 1959 highlighted what the city believed to be its lenient — for the time — approach to the “problem with homosexuals.” While state law allowed prison sentences of five or more years for homosexual acts, Charlotte police at the time were only fingerprinting and warning the men they arrested (the article doesn’t specify how police identified the 30 suspected homosexuals arrested in the previous month.)

Charlotte Police Chief Jesse James (no relation to the outlaw) told the newspaper that he believed homosexuality wasn’t a law enforcement problem.

City of Charlotte

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Newspaper archives

“We don’t want to arrest them on a felony charge,” James said. “And we think it is mainly a medical problem.” Charlotte had this ongoing “problem,” James said, “because homosexuals flock to Charlotte due to the city’s size.”

Two psychiatrists were quoted in the article, debating whether homosexuality is the way people are born or if it’s acquired or learned behavior. Both are quoted anonymously, hinting at the sensitivity of the subject in the late 1950s — a time well within living memory.

Over the next decade, Charlotte’s LGBT community remained largely in the shadows, with a few rumored spots like a bar called Casablanca on Wilkinson Boulevard or hotel bars uptown that served gay men on certain nights of the week as the main gathering places. That began to change by the late 1960s. The Scorpio Lounge and Oleen’s opened in 1968 and became two mainstays.

“Almost everybody was closeted then,” said Greg Brafford, who owned and managed several LGBT bars in Charlotte, in an interview archived by UNC Charlotte. “You’ve got to realize Charlotte was a town of 70, 80,000 people then. Much smaller than it is now.”

Other milestones followed: The city’s first gay newspaper in 1975; gay bookstore Friends of Dorothy opening in 1981; the debut of QNotes (Charlotte’s longest-running LGBT publication) in 1983; a gay and lesbian chorus launched in 1991; and the city’s biggest Pride event to date in 1994 — drawing 4,000 people.

But the overall tenor of LGBT life was still furtive, wary of discovery and met with harsh discrimination. An Observer article from 1981 captured the zeitgeist: “Fear of Discovery Dominates Lives of Some Gays.”

City of Charlotte

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Newspaper archives

“Some gays fear the simplest act, like holding hands in the park, will expose their secret life,” the story noted.

Charlotte landed in the national news in the mid-1990s for the city’s reaction to the Charlotte Repertory Theater’s production of “Angels in America.” The show, with brief nudity, frank depictions of gay sex and open treatment of the AIDS crisis, drew ire from some local religious and political leaders who tried to block the play. The fierce controversy ended only after a last-minute order from a judge barred police from arresting anyone on stage over the nude scene.

The New York Times summarized the whole episode in an article with a memorable lead: “Alan Poindexter dropped his pants on stage in Charlotte for seven seconds Wednesday night, and nothing happened.”

That New York Times story also quotes then-Mayor Pat McCrory, who said the theater company should “use some common sense” and change the show’s nudity.

“The Pulitzer Prize does not give you license to break the law,” McCrory said.

While the show ended up being a success, the county defunded the Arts & Science Council for several years, with Mecklenburg commissioners voting 5-4 to suspend funding to groups promoting “perverted forms of sexuality.” The Charlotte Repertory Theater closed for good in 2005 after years of financial struggles.

The dustup highlighted an emerging tension in Charlotte, expanded on by The New York Times: “But the successful opening of the Charlotte Repertory Theater's production of the play has not quieted the rancor in a dispute that is, on one level, about the intersection of morality and art but is also about the cultural tensions created when a Bible Belt town tries to move quickly into the first rank of American cities.”

It was a theme that would be repeated 20 years later, on a bigger stage.

The New York Times

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Archives

Six months after the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage, Charlotte City Council’s decision to add sexual orientation and gender identity to its local nondiscrimination ordinance seemed like it might not be too controversial. After all, the biggest question in gay rights had just been decided by the highest court in the land.

But the nondiscrimination ordinance touched off a firestorm, mostly focused on the rule that people in places of public accommodation could use the restroom matching their gender identity. That meant transgender women could use the women’s room in most public buildings (transgender men could use the men’s room, but that occasioned much less controversy). After Charlotte’s vote, state legislators in Raleigh quickly passed a new bill overturning the ordinance and forbidding other North Carolina cities from passing their own.

House Bill 2 quickly became known as “the bathroom bill,” because it required people to use the bathroom that corresponds to their biological sex, and it thrust the state into the national spotlight over LGBT issues. The economic reaction from companies was swift: The NBA canceled Charlotte’s All-Star Game, the NCAA pulled championships, Deutsche Bank and PayPal canceled major expansions and numerous other conventions, concerts and other events boycotted the state.

A year later, a compromise that pleased nobody repealed HB2 (by doing away with the law but putting a moratorium on new municipal nondiscrimination ordinances through 2020).

We’re more than seven years out from HB2. But in many ways, that law now feels like it was a test case for the current phase of the fight over transgender rights — and a preview for the controversies dominating the news today.

Ask SAM: What is the room that projects off the corner of Atrium Health Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center?

Q: What is the room that hangs off the corner of one of the Atrium Health Wake Forest Baptist towers?

Answer: “This is certainly an interesting question and one we enjoyed tracking down,” said Joe McCloskey, a spokesman for Wake Forest University School of Medicine and Atrium Health Wake Forest Baptist.

The glass block that sticks out from the side of Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center is a staff breakroom.

“The room the reader asked about is a staff breakroom on the corner of Wake Forest University School of Medicine’s Nutrition Research Center Building, on the campus of Atrium Health Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center.”

In addition, the building has laboratories and offices for faculty and staff.

Q: Is there a website or something where someone can check to see if they have money that they may not have realized they were owed. A friend thought she had heard of something but couldn’t remember what it was. Are you aware of this?

People are also reading…

Answer: Your friend is probably talking about NCCash.com, an N.C. Department of State Treasurer website that allows people to search for unclaimed money they might be owed.

The money could come from a number of places, including money left from “bank accounts, wages, utility deposits, insurance policy proceeds, stocks, bonds, and contents of safe deposit boxes that typically have been abandoned for one to five years.”

“Funds become unclaimed because the company loses track of the consumer, due to an incorrect address or other missing information,” according to the website.

The amount of money that North Carolina residents can claim is almost $1.09 billion.

To find out if you have money at the treasurer’s office, go to NCCash.com, click on ‘Search Now’ and put your name in the search link.

To claim the cash, you have to provide proof of ownership.

You must provide proof of your Social Security number. You can use a copy of your Social Security card, tax forms, pay stub or bank statement. Send copies, not the original documents.

You must also provide proof of address. That can include a copy of your driver’s license, a page out of a phone book or church/club directory, property tax bill, bank statement, or an envelope addressed to claimant with a U.S. postmark.

The money in the Escheat Fund earns interest and by state law, the interest is used for college and university, including community colleges, financial aid programs created by federal or state law.

The aid is administered by the N.C. State Education Assistance Authority. It is a state agency that is authorized by the General Assembly to administer the programs.

“The law further provides that this money will be utilized to provide grants and low interest loans to worthy and needy North Carolina students in state-supported schools of higher education,” according to the website.

The office can also be contacted by writing to the N.C. Department of State Treasurer, Unclaimed Property Division, P.O. Box 20431, Raleigh, NC 27619-0431, or calling 866-NCCash1 (866-622-2741) or emailing unclaimed.property@nctreasurer.com.

Between July 1, 2021, and June 30, 2022, $105,158,116 of unclaimed property was returned to its owners.

Melissa Hall, Straight Answer Ma’am

For more information, go to NCCash.com.

Email: AskSAM@wsjournal.com

Write: Ask SAM, 418 N. Marshall St., #100, Winston-Salem, NC 27101

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