Southern Perspectives on the Queer Movement: Committed to Home

By Harlan Greene

A collection of essays by South Carolina activists on the development of the LGBTQ movement

In Southern Perspectives on the Queer Movement: Committed to Home, Sheila R. Morris has collected essays by South Carolinians who explore their gay identities and activism from the emergence of the HIV-AIDS pandemic to the realization of marriage equality in the state thirty years later. Each of the volume's nineteen essays addresses an aspect of gay life, from hesitant coming-out acts in earlier decades to the creation of grassroots organizations. All the contributors have taken public roles in the gay rights movement.

The diverse voices include a banker, a drag queen from a family of prominent Spartanburg Democrats, a marching minister who grew up along the Edisto River, a former Catholic priest and his tugboat dispatcher husband from Long Island, the owner of a feminist bookstore, a Hispanic American who interned for Republican strategist Lee Atwater, a philanthropist politician from Faith, North Carolina, and a straight attorney recognized as the "Mother of Pride" who became active in 1980, when she learned her son was gay.

Southern Perspectives on the Queer Movement challenges the conventional understanding of the LGBTQ movement in the United States in both place and time. Typically associated with pride marches and anti-AIDS activism on both the east and west coasts and rooted in the counterculture of the 1960s and "Stonewall Rebellion" in New York City, Southern variants of the queer liberation movement have found little room in public or scholarly memory. Confronting an aggressively hostile environment in the South, queer political organization was a late-comer to the region. But it was the very unfriendliness of Southern political soil that allowed a unique and, at times, progressive LGBTQ political community to form in South Carolina. The compelling Southern voices collected here for the first time add a missing piece to the complex puzzle of postwar queer activism in the United States.

Harlan Greene, author of the novels Why We Never Danced the Charleston, What the Dead Remember, and The German Officer's Boy, provides a foreword.

Contributors:
Jim Blanton
Candace Chellew-Hodge
Matt Chisling
Michael Haigler
Harriet Hancock
Deborah Hawkins
Dick Hubbard
Linda Ketner
Ed Madden and Bert Easter
Alvin McEwen
Sheila Morris
Pat Patterson
Jim and Warren Redman-Gress
Nekki Shutt
Tony Snell-Rodriquez
Carole Stoneking
Thomas A. Summers
Matt Tischler
Teresa Williams

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
• Release date: Dec 20, 2017
• ISBN: 9781611178142

Harlan Greene

Harlan Greene is the author of the novels Why We Never Danced the Charleston, What the Dead Remember, and The German Officer’s Boy

Book preview

• PROLOGUE •

The Selection Process

I was riding down the road listening to sports talk radio one afternoon in 2014, and I heard conversations about the Baseball Hall of Fame inductees for that year. Apparently a controversy brewed over the three selections, and the callers were not happy fans. I was in the initial stages of choosing the people for this book, and I decided a Hall of Fame was the heart of my work. We don’t yet have a physical building like the one in Cooperstown, New York, where the greatest major league baseball players are celebrated and their lives remembered for posterity.

However, I believe our gay rights movement in South Carolina for the past thirty years deserves a place of honor in the history of this state. And what is a social crusade without its crusaders? Some of the men and women chosen have already received numerous awards for their part in our progress, and some prefer to avoid the countless meetings required to develop strategies and implement plans and thus, go largely unrecognized. They are, in my opinion, equally important and their contributions remain significant.

I expect my selection of our gay rights Hall of Famers will spark controversy similar to the discussions I heard that day on the radio. For my readers who are disappointed with my choices, take a deep breath, forgive my sins of omission, remember that several people I contacted declined to participate for personal reasons … and call this volume 1.

The narratives in this collection tell the stories of ordinary people who became extraordinary in our struggles for equality in a place and time that made change seemingly impossible. The queer community has more work to do to achieve our goals of fairness and inclusion in South Carolina, but these Hall of Famers paved the way for progress. We owe them.

Some of these essays grew out of interviews I conducted, and I thank the people who found the time for those warm, informative conversations: Jim Blanton, Matt Chisling, Michael Haigler, Harriet Hancock, Deborah Hawkins, Dick Hubbard, Pat Patterson, Jim and Warren Redman-Gress, Nekki Shutt, Tony Snell-Rodriquez, Carole Stoneking, Matt Tischler, and Teresa Williams. Other essays were crafted by the individuals themselves, and I likewise thank them for the time they put into crafting these meaningful, personal narratives: Candace Chellew-Hodge, Linda Ketner, Ed Madden and Bert Easter, Alvin McEwen, and Tom Summers. I thank both the interviewees and the writers for helping to document such an important time of change and growth in our state so that future generations may have witnesses to history.

• JIM BLANTON •

Dramatic Activist

I like to think that first pride march was instrumental in opening the closet doors to the altars…. I will never forget, just before the march started, seeing one brave gay friend who had opted to wear a makeup disguise…. He was literally quivering from fear. When I saw him after the march during the South Carolina statehouse rally, the makeup was gone. He had stepped up for equality—his and ours; he was transformed, he was jubilant!

I was born in 1948 and raised in Gaffney, South Carolina, where my father grew up, too. My mother was from Westminster, South Carolina. They got married when she was a student at Limestone College in Gaffney, and he was the dashing horseback riding teacher. Each mistakenly thought the other came from money. She was pregnant with me when she was finishing school, so I went to Limestone twice, once in the womb and once on my own. My enrollment at the college was less planned than hers had been.

I went to Central Elementary School in Gaffney, and when I was in the third grade, some kids started calling me sissy. I don’t know that I really understood what it meant, but I knew I was different. One afternoon several bullies were chasing me and said they were going to beat me up when they caught me, so I ran as fast as I could. Just when they were about to overtake me, I stopped abruptly and turned around to avoid being tackled from behind on the gravel road. The first boy was so startled he fell down and scraped his knee. That ended the chasing, but the sissy name-calling followed me through junior high and into high school.

When I was picking out colleges, my mother was a huge influence on me. She’d been a tomboy in her youth and had wanted to be in the military, so we visited the Citadel in Charleston. I was invited to stay for a weekend, and they treated me like royalty. There was fencing and sailing, and all that sounded so elegant; I think it was the unawakened actor in me who found the idea of that appealing. With a desperate hope that it would make a man out of me, I enrolled at the college, and the reality of being a freshman knob at a military school set in immediately. It was the wrong place for me to be—a nightmare.

I like to joke that I’m proud to say I at least lasted longer than Shannon Faulkner did. When she made history twenty-seven years later as the first female cadet, she was there only a week; I lasted for six. I sprained my ankle in the first week; required marching and physical therapy made it worse, landing me in the blissfully air-conditioned televisioned infirmary. I was failing all my courses, and after a lot of crying phone calls home, my parents finally came to get me. Unfortunately six weeks of the semester had passed, and it was difficult to find a new college home. Since my dad’s boss at the time was on the board of directors at Limestone College, he arranged for my enrollment on a provisional basis that first semester. During my time at Limestone, I began to appreciate what a great life experience my brief time at The Citadel had been. I learned that I could totally fail at something, overcome it, and move on.

After a Southern Baptist childhood of revivals and dreams of being a preacher (because he was the star of the show?), after small-town high school and six weeks at the Citadel, Limestone College became a turning point in my spiritual life. Limestone still had loose ties to the Southern Baptist Convention in 1966 when I enrolled. Daily chapel was a requirement, as was a mandatory course in religion. The religion instructor was a brilliant biblical scholar; I went into class with my childhood belief system intact and, to the chagrin of my Baptist family and to the college itself, I came out a semester later a much wiser man—a devout agnostic/sometime atheist … and happily remained a heathen for the next decade.

It was at Limestone my passion for theater emerged. My only previous acting experience had been performing in a high school play in Gaffney—I got an Oscar for that, but I’m sure I was godawful! At Limestone I met professional actor Laurens Lonny Moore, who became a big influence on my life. In the second semester of my freshman year he and his wife, Mary, taught an acting class that I lucked into. As the theater department grew, they produced the plays together—he directing, she stage managing.

Lonny filled out an application for me to apprentice at the Flat Rock Theater near Hendersonville, North Carolina. One of the questions on the form was What do you want to be when you grow up? He typed in professional actor. That had never even occurred to me, but off I went to Flat Rock for the summer, where I washed, resized, and painted the flats that set designer Walter O’Rourke frugally used over and over again. I picked up nails off the beautiful, big flat rock there on the grounds, and I parked cars and cleaned toilets and did whatever they needed me to do. And I acted in small parts. It was slave labor, but it was a great experience. A year later Lonny got me into the first University of South Carolina summer theater program, headed by Russell E. Green, who also became a mentor. And the following summer I worked as an actor/tech with The Lost Colony outdoor theater on the Outer Banks of North Carolina.

Limestone didn’t have a theater major, but they allowed me to graduate with an unofficial English and theater degree. In the fall of 1970, I entered graduate school at the University of South Carolina in Columbia to study again under Mr. Green. I was the first graduate assistant he ever permitted to teach acting; prior to that, teaching assistants had only been allowed to lead public speaking and oral interpretation courses. That was a point of pride for me at the time.

In 1972 I abandoned my graduate degree, going off to become a Broadway star in New York, where for the next three years I was a mostly out-of-work actor—the proverbial starving artist in the Big Apple. I did office temp jobs and took acting classes. The closest I got to fame was that one of my teachers, Harold Kennedy, was great friends with actress and TV personality Kitty Carlisle. I did small productions where I could, but mostly I went on unsuccessful open-call auditions. One audition on an actual Broadway stage landed me my only real gig—in an Actor’s Equity professional summer theater company in Augusta, Georgia. Four shows were scheduled, but the company went broke after the first production of The Glass Menagerie, and I spent the rest of the summer at home in Gaffney.

Though I hadn’t completed my master’s degree, Mr. Green hired me to teach theater classes at Coastal Carolina College for one semester. It was a one-person department, and the regular professor (another Russell Green protégé) needed time off to work on her doctorate. I enjoyed my few months at Coastal Carolina—it even snowed that winter at Myrtle Beach. I made some good friends, and we staged several successful productions; but I never completely felt at home as a faculty member. All of the other professors seemed so much smarter than me … writing books and doing serious scholarship. I just didn’t love it; I don’t know that I was particularly good at it, and I never completed my graduate degree or taught again.

In 1976 I left New York and got a job at South Carolina Educational Television (ETV) with the duties of casting, coaching acting, makeup, and costumes. While I had worked on costume crews for several productions in school, I wasn’t terribly gifted at it, so I managed to chuck that part of the job pretty quickly. I bluffed my way through the makeup artist part of the job. I could do men’s makeup just fine, but I was never good at women’s. In fact, when my former New York City acting teacher’s friend Kitty Carlisle came to Columbia to star in one of our productions, she must have sensed my terror; to my great relief, Miss Carlisle showed up for the taping fully made-up. Interestingly she also arranged with the lighting director to light her underneath her chin with a flattering amber glow to make her look younger; it erased her age lines. Now, at age sixty-seven, I could use one of those amber spots myself. The lady knew her stuff.

While my duties as a makeup artist brought me into close personal contact with other celebrities and politicians, the part of my job I loved was casting and coaching the actors. My first big assignment was on location for an educational history production set during the Revolutionary War. We started with a night shoot; I loved being a part of it—all the lights and equipment were glamorous—and I couldn’t believe my luck in landing such an exciting job.

Despite that, I remember my first year at ETV going by agonizingly slowly. I still had it in my head I was destined to be an actor. In fact, when Cynthia Gilliam, another of my mentors, cast me in Workshop Theatre’s Vivat! Vivat Regina!—my first community theater production since I returned from New York—I made them sign an Equity contract and pay me scale, even though I had to promise (probably illegally) to reimburse my salary to the theater. In hindsight that I’m a professional actor attitude seems ridiculous and embarrasses me, but I guess I needed that ego boost at the time.

Compared to that first eternal year at ETV, my next twenty-nine years there flew by. It was certainly never my plan to become a state employee or to stay at one agency for my entire professional life. I did have major job changes within the agency over the years: producing on-air fundraisers midcareer, then starting and ultimately developing to maturity the scetv.org Web site. Just as my college career and ventures into the theatre had been seemingly accidental, there was no career intent at all. It just happened, as did my LGBTQ activism.

The experience that led to my coming out as a gay man to my family happened early in my ETV career after a casual interaction with a psychic at the wrap party for a PBS American Playhouse episode that was shot on location at the Foxfire Center in Clayton, Georgia. Most of my friends, of course, had known I was gay for years before I met the psychic, and I think my brother had suspected. But I’d always felt I had to have a wall up with my parents. When I finally told them, my mother’s reaction was concern for my well-being. My father’s was that my sexuality was sinful; he certainly had more trouble coming to terms with it. My brother and his wife have always been wonderful in sharing their children with Unca Jimmy and, now, Unca Ed (my partner of nine years). And Ed’s children have completely embraced me as a member of the family. Our daughter and son-in-law gave us the wonderful gift seven years ago of a smart, gorgeous granddaughter—the Divine Miss L, who loves her Grandpa Ed and Grandpa Jim.

After my family knew, we talked about my being gay a great deal at first—me trying to educate them; Daddy trying to get me to read the Bible. Slowly it became easier not to bring it up, and we moved into a more or less comfortable silence. But I was freed from my secret. And I’ve been very lucky compared to how many LGBTQ people have been treated by their families.

Mama has been great about it ever since. When I talk to her on the phone, she always says to tell Ed I love him, too; he’s my son, too. Wonderful! Daddy never got to that point in his acceptance, and he never got to meet Ed. In 1999 we learned he had bladder and bone cancer, and he was gone three months later. The biggest compliment he ever gave me was saying to my mother, Jimmy’s a good nurse. And that was enough. I found in his car a letter I’d written to him after coming out. I was touched that he’d kept it, and placed it in the breast pocket of his burial suit.

In the 1980s the national HIV crisis started; most of us didn’t know it had reached South Carolina. I was aware of AIDS but thought I didn’t know anybody that had it at the time. I feared it was coming here, too, because of what I read in gay newspapers from outside the state. Two hit plays about the AIDS crisis, The Normal Heart and As Is, had been produced in New York. I asked Workshop Theatre to let me direct them both.

I was promoting my upcoming productions at a party in the summer of 1986 and remember saying to Bill Edens, who with Harriet Hancock founded PALSS (Palmetto AIDS Life Support Services), that while I thought it was important to do the plays for educational purposes, I really didn’t know anyone who had the disease. He told me, Oh, you do know people with AIDS—you just don’t know you do.

The plays ran for two weeks in late fall 1986, and I was really proud of them—I think they were good productions. Some nights we performed Normal Heart, some we performed As Is, and a few times we performed them both—which was … crazy. I directed both and played the Larry Kramer role in Normal Heart. They got a lot of press. I believe this was the first time the topic got as much attention as it did in the local papers, but the plays were not well attended. Workshop Theatre certainly didn’t make any money on them. We had very small houses. This was a time when you really didn’t know how this terrifying, murderous disease was transmitted, and people were afraid to come to these shows because they thought they would get it.

Thomas Richards played the lead in As Is—a guy who is dying from AIDS; I didn’t know it at the time, but Tommy was actually ill during rehearsals. He died three months after the production, the first person I actually knew who died from AIDS. Tommy was a talented ballet dancer, not really an actor. Why didn’t he tell us about his illness? I like to think it was because he was afraid we wouldn’t work him as hard. So I’ve always been very grateful to him that he didn’t tell us he was sick. Tommy is still my hero.

Workshop Theatre playbill for the AIDS-themed plays Normal Heart and As Is, 1986. Courtesy of Jim Blanton.

I have had an approach/avoidance conflict throughout my life with all things spiritual. During one of my approach phases, Drucilla Brookshire, a dear friend and member at Trenholm Road United Methodist Church, asked me to help her inaugurate their television ministry. Trenholm Road’s preacher at the time, Bill Bouknight, was a friendly, charismatic minister that everybody loved. I stayed involved with the program, which aired on local TV, until the Sunday Bill started to rail against homosexuality from the pulpit; that rant made me so angry I refused to help put that message on the air. I was working a camera in the balcony, and while I don’t actually remember Bill’s exact words, I do recall feeling an overwhelming sense of fury.

I told Bill I could not put him on television with that message—that I was gay, and I wasn’t going to have any part of it. His stance at the time—and I hear he’s still very conservative, very much opposed to marriage equality for same-sex couples—was basically love the sinner, hate the sin. We corresponded for a while in an effort to win each other over. His stance was that it was okay for me to be gay as long as I didn’t do the thing that made me gay in the first place … which made no sense. I countered that if either of us should be celibate, it should be he, given the history of the church. Needless to say, neither convinced the other, and I moved on. (Drucilla, on the other hand, is still faithfully heading up Trenholm Road’s television ministry and has lasted through several preachers.) I drifted away from the church again over this unpleasant encounter with a narrow-minded preacher—and never went back to that church. It was my first overt gay activism.

I joined the Episcopal Church, receiving my confirmation at Columbia’s St. Michael and All Angels’, and for a while I enjoyed the theater and poetry of the services. However, because of doing community theater work—working late and sleeping late—it was easy for me to get in the glorious habit of sleeping in on Sundays, practicing the Gospel according to St. Mattress. After a few years, however, I once again started missing my spiritual life. In 1988 I was invited to what was billed as a Weekend of Awakening for gay men at a private home in the mountains in Saluda, North Carolina. That wonderful experience renewed my spiritual appetite and began my journey into New Age–ism.

The death from AIDS of another friend in August of that year had an enormous impact on me, and I began to study the writings of Dr. Bernie Siegel and Louise Hay about alternative healing methods. Jimmy Sullivan, Bob Waites, Eric Schell, Marge Cooley, and I began a healing circle that we called the Healing Energy Circle (THE Circle). I’d met Jimmy during Bernie’s visit to Trinity Cathedral in Columbia; we discovered we had the same idea for starting a circle. Dr. Siegel’s message was that there is no such thing as false hope (only false no-hope), and that was the mantra behind many of the activities in THE Circle.

We started out with about twenty people at the first gathering and grew to around a hundred people at its peak. We met for two hours every Tuesday at Trinity Cathedral at the invitation of Bob Waites, who had recently finished a capital campaign for their chapel. THE Circle was a place you could love and be loved unconditionally for at least those two hours a week. We respected everybody’s beliefs and tried different forms of alternative healing: self-affirmations, crystals, Reiki, touches and hugs, and so forth. We never said this will cure you. We said if you find something that’s meaningful for you, take it and use it. And if you don’t, wait until next week; there’ll be something different. We celebrated birthdays and mourned when a participant passed over into immortality, to use cofounder Jimmy Sullivan’s words. Jimmy died about a year after we started the group. I stayed on for two more years in the role of the primary facilitator. Meeting once a week for two years made doing community theater impossible; and at some point I realized my passion for the theater had, well, passed over into immortality.

When I was running THE Circle, I didn’t know I was HIV positive and felt—wrongly, stupidly—that I was somehow magically protected. I had never been tested. I had long since stopped reckless behavior. The only treatment at the time was AZT, and from what I’d read about AZT, I was convinced it was poison and did not want to take it. However, about a year after I stopped participating in THE Circle, I developed a severe case of psoriatic arthritis. My rheumatologist insisted on my being tested for HIV, and the results came back positive. A few months later, my CD4 T cell count began to plummet, so I wound up taking AZT, after all.

While I was fortunate in that I never had to keep my diagnosis a secret from my family, close friends, or my ETV colleagues, I was shattered. Reeling from this life-changing diagnosis, I turned to friends from THE Circle, who had formed an HIV support group after the larger group had disbanded. I called the group leader, told him my news and that I was devastated and needed help. I never got a return call. Weeks later I happened to bump into him in the Devine Street shopping district. He said, This is so hard, and went on to tell me essentially that I’d been blackballed. Friends I loved and had supported did not want me there because they felt my presence would distract from their own needs. I was left to guess who in the group had voted against me and why. That was the darkest period of my life. (And I’d thought that my six weeks at the Citadel had been a nightmare.)

Eventually more and more meds were developed for HIV treatment, though many had unpleasant side effects. There were combinations of meds that were difficult to manage; you had to take some with food, some without food, and I’d be driving down the street and have to stop the car and throw up. Others caused such severe diarrhea that it was difficult even to leave the house. Fortunately those days are mostly over. For more than a decade now I’ve been on a regimen of only two pills once a day that can be taken with or without food, so it’s a breeze to manage, and the side effects have either diminished or I’ve gotten used to them. I take more medicines for old age now than for HIV. And my doctor tells me I can live to 114 years of age with my HIV, but if I don’t start exercising and losing weight …

As time passed, I began to feel that many of the methods of healing we’d explored were hogwash. The church, as an official institution, was infuriatingly homophobic. Once again I became less spiritual, and I moved on to another cause—LGBTQ equality.

In the summer of 1989, on the day Columbia was celebrating gay pride at a private picnic hidden away from the media—twenty years after the drag queens had rebelled against police brutality at the Stonewall Inn—my friend Drucilla and I ran into Harriet Hancock at Shoney’s breakfast bar. Harriet asked me if I were coming to the picnic later, and I mouthed off: That’s not gay pride; that’s gay shame. And that doesn’t interest me. If you ever decide to take it to Main Street, I’d love to march with you. Harriet, whom we lovingly consider the Mother of Gay Pride in South Carolina, called my bluff. She (now famously) took a clipboard to the pride picnic and collected names of those who’d be willing to participate in a public march in a year’s time.

The first planning meeting was held Sunday, September 24, 1989, at Barbara Embick’s West Columbia home—two days after Hurricane Hugo hit South Carolina hard. Hurricane Harriet had gathered a small group of committed people to form the Gay and Lesbian Pride March (GLPM), with the goal of having the first march down Main Street, Columbia, South Carolina, in June 1990.

I don’t recall the details of how roles were divided up, but a decision was made that each steering committee position (publicity, fundraising, rally, etc.) would have female and male cochairs. Barbara was chosen as executive cochair to lead the organization, but no qualified male stepped forward to join her. I thought there were several men in attendance that would excel in the position. A guy at the meeting from Greenville seemed to me to be a natural leader; he would have been superb but was simply too busy to accept. So by default I became executive cochair with Barbara, and nine months of hard labor began.

By nature, despite years spent on stage as an actor, I’m not an outgoing person—I’m not a social person. I’m not a naturally gifted public speaker. I can’t remember people’s names that I know I should. I can’t hear conversations in a noisy environment. I’m much more a homebody. I’m much happier when I’m at home than when I’m out with people. One time Harriet and I were booked to appear on a live local morning TV show in Augusta, Georgia, to promote the pride march. I enjoyed our drive, spending time with Harriet, and getting to know her better. The TV host was so friendly and so charming and made us feel welcome and at ease. But when it was time for our spot, this very nice host guy got on camera and turned on us—his Dr. Jekyll turned into Mr. Hyde. I was not a natural spokesperson, and this guy’s on-air transformation into a rabid right-winger shocked me so much that I practically couldn’t make a sentence. I don’t remember what he said or asked, but it was vicious, and I was ill-prepared to turn the interview around. After this our wonderful publicity committee gave Barbara and me classes where they did their best to train us in public speaking and talking to the press.

I’ve never particularly enjoyed going to gay bars, but every weekend that year we were in a different gay bar somewhere in South Carolina to promote the pride march, trying to get folks to wear a button with a pink triangle proclaiming GLPM. June 23, 1990. I’ll be there. Early on it was hard to convince folks to take them. People thought we were crazy—they thought we would get killed or that nobody would come. Gay rights are fine. You just need to be quiet about it.

Even the name of the organization was controversial. We used the abbreviation GLPM for Gay and Lesbian Pride March because people were afraid to use the words gay and lesbian publicly or even on our letterhead. Even with our using the abbreviation, people were afraid to get mail from us. When Columbia city councilwoman Frannie Heizer received a GLPM flyer, she demanded we take her name off our mailing list. As did others.

The GLPM steering committee agonized over every single decision, large and small. The intense but tedious meetings were held at Marge Cooley’s South Shandon Street living room and lasted for hours and hours and hours as we attempted to reach consensus. Should the women wear dresses and the men wear coats and ties to the march? Should we allow drag queens to march with us? Well, duh! Remember those Stonewall drag queens?

But the toughest, most important decision we made was the careful formulation of nine demands (and hours were spent over whether to call them demands versus requests or goals). These nine demands were as much as anything an attempt to educate ourselves about issues of great importance to the LGBTQ community—a list of the reasons why we felt the need to march publicly down Main Street in the first place. The resulting list and the reasons behind them were complex, yet they really all boiled down to one issue: the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Questioning community wanted equal protection under the law.

Love and acceptance would be nice, too, but we demanded legal protection. In 1989 when we formulated our list of demands, marriage equality wasn’t even mentioned—none of us dreamed it would ever be possible. Yet twenty-five years later, in November 2014, South Carolina became the thirty-fifth state to recognize same-sex marriages. Miraculous! And I like to think that first South Carolina pride march in the summer of 1990 was instrumental in opening the closet doors to the altars.

Barbara Embick and I wrote an open letter to the media twelve days before the march: "A growing number of us refuse any longer to be a silent minority. We are