Showcase City of the South Rebels at Anti-Gay Arts Vote

Hoyle Martin doesn’t like it, the steady creep, the constant surge and seep of sex into everyday life. He especially abhors “deviant sex.” It’s everywhere, he says. Just look at Ellen DeGeneres on the cover of Time magazine, he says with disgust. Why can’t homosexuals keep their private lives private? That’s what he wants to know.

“People ask me if I have any gay friends,” said Martin, 69. “I tell them that if I do, I don’t know it. And that’s the way it ought to be.”

Martin’s opposition to homosexuality is not uncommon, especially among people of his generation here in the Bible Belt.

What makes his views noteworthy is that the retired college instructor and journalist has managed, as a member of the Mecklenburg County Commission, to enshrine his notion of morality into law.

Earlier this month, the County Commission, the equivalent of Los Angeles County’s Board of Supervisors, voted to approve Martin’s measure to stop funding organizations that expose the public to “perverted forms of sexuality.” In so doing, it plunged this thriving New South mecca into the country’s seething culture wars and opened a rancorous and potentially transformative local debate.

In the churches and boardrooms and bars and art studios in North Carolina’s largest city, residents are asking fundamental questions about their community: What manner of place have we become? What kind of city do we want to be?

The answers likely will take time to hash out, but the mere posing of the questions already is causing startling new political and social alignments.

Charlotte, home to some of the nation’s largest banking concerns, is the South’s Second City, a regional business center with designs on rivaling Atlanta as a major metropolis. But the County Commission’s vote--evoking as it does memories of a kind of traditional Southern intolerance--threatens the city’s carefully crafted progressive image. As such, the vote was widely interpreted locally not only as an assault on homosexuality but also as a challenge to the downtown business interests that shaped the modern cityscape and its culture. Now, in an unlikely alliance, starched-shirt bankers and business executives have joined with artists and gays to battle Christian conservatives over the soul and image of the city.

‘Angels’ in Charlotte

The County Commission’s vote was sparked by the Charlotte Repertory Theater’s production last spring of the Pulitzer Prize-winning play, “Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes,” and by the same company’s plans to stage a production (which has since opened) of John Guare’s acclaimed “Six Degrees of Separation.”

Martin acknowledges that homosexuality is incidental to the plot of the latter play, which is based on an actual incident. But even a peripheral gay theme is too much for him. “There’s enough smut out there in movies, on television and in magazines without us putting that stuff on the stage,” he said. “To spend [tax] money on something like that just seems incomprehensible.”

The Charlotte Repertory Theater receives funding from the local Arts and Science Council, which in turn has received $2.5 million a year of its $11-million budget from the county.

Now the council no longer will receive any county funds. Arts groups must make their requests directly to the County Commission, which will decide on a case-by-case basis which projects to support.

Gays say they fear that, the way the bill is written, it could be used to justify eliminating funding to a host of other non-arts-related projects that deal with homosexuals or even to justify the firing of gay county employees.

In some ways, the controversy mirrors the national debate over the National Endowment for the Arts, which social conservatives frequently attack for funding projects they consider offensive. But it differs in the stark way in which the issue has exposed deep fissures in the ranks of Republicans who in recent years have gained new, unprecedented influence here, as throughout the South.

The County Commission’s vote was a sign that Christian conservatives--who have been gaining influence in the state’s burgeoning Republican Party--were ready to flex their muscles in support of their social agenda, even if it meant challenging more moderate Republicans and the powerful downtown business community.

“The fundamental issue is about power,” said Robert L. Barret, a local gay psychologist. “It was about who has the power to make the decisions in the city.” Gays and the arts community became pawns in the contest, in his view, because they are so vulnerable.

The current controversy is, in a sense, Act 2 of a drama that began last spring when “Angels in America” was greeted with protests and pickets. Things quieted down after that, until the funding issue was raised last month. The bill passed, 5 to 4, on April 1, with Martin, a Democrat who is considered liberal on most issues, siding with Republicans.

Now, Act 3 will be the community’s response.

Carroll Gray, president of the Chamber of Commerce, calls the commission’s vote “an aberration” that “blew my mind.” He worries, he said, that people will view it as an example of Southern reactionary attitudes, even though “most of our political leaders are from someplace else.” He noted, for example, that Martin is no Bible-thumping local white Baptist, but a black Seventh-day Adventist from New York.

He predicted a swift response from the community that will show that the commission’s action does not reflect widely held local views. Corporate interests began mobilizing a response immediately.

Bid to Oust Politicians

Seven days after the commission vote, executives from Charlotte-based NationsBank Corp., First Union Corp., Duke Power Co. and the local Urban League chapter announced that they were joining forces to try to oust offending politicians from office in next year’s elections.

They plan to hold a number of forums around the city in which issues will be discussed and new potential political candidates will be identified. “We are looking to identify pro-diversity, pro-tolerance leaders and help them make a decision about whether to enter the political arena,” said Henry Doss, a senior vice president at First Union.

In the view of David Ferebee, a gay activist, that means the anti-gay commission members’ days are numbered. “You know the old saying--’if you give a person enough rope, they’ll hang themselves’?” he said. “That’s what happened here.”

Bill James, one of the Republican commissioners who voted to cut arts funding, criticized corporate executives for getting involved. “We’re treading on dangerous ground when one or two individuals making millions of dollars a year, representing the largest corporations in Charlotte, try to circumvent the political process by trying to dictate who gets elected and who doesn’t,” he said. “It will be interesting to see if in the name of democracy, the NationsBank et al contingent tries to buy elections.”

The business community is concerned that the issue may spark the kind of protests and threats of economic boycotts that occurred in Colorado and Cincinnati after anti-gay measures were passed there.

So far, no boycotts have been threatened, but Gray, the Chamber president, said he has received telephone calls from executives who had thought of relocating here who said they now are reconsidering.

But perhaps of equal concern to corporate giants was the commission’s brash challenge to what Gray called “the way we’ve gotten things done.”

Charlotte, with 1.3 million people in the metropolitan area, ranks 43rd in size in the country. Yet it is a major national banking center with a flourishing, postcard-perfect downtown (locals call it uptown), new professional sports teams and a history of racial harmony that makes it the envy of the South. The focused leadership of the business community made that all possible.

It is clear from taking a walk uptown--with its wide, clean sidewalks and plazas, bubbling fountains and public sculpture--that order and appearance are paramount here. One local artist calls the business district “The Emerald City.”

Now the corporate police are seeking to restore the order.

Martin acknowledged that business interests may well make his current term his last, but he added: “I’m not a career politician. Life goes on.”

He noted, however, that while influential constituents in his district have questioned him about whether arts funding is the sort of thing he should be spending so much time on, no one has accused him of neglecting the vital interests of his inner-city constituents.

In the meantime, Ferebee said he is urging gay artists to seek county funding so that a pattern of discrimination can be established. The American Civil Liberties Union, which has denounced the commission’s action, is considering filing a lawsuit challenging the law’s constitutionality.

‘Typical’ Southern City

The irony of all this is that, until now, the city’s gay and lesbian communities had been rather somnambulant. This isn’t Atlanta, with its thicket of gay bars and anything-goes neighborhoods where the sight of gays walking the street in drag draws little attention.

“Charlotte is a fairly typical Southern city that hasn’t gotten to the size of Atlanta,” said Ferebee, one of a small group of activists that has been involved in gay and lesbian issues since the early 1990s. “Atlanta’s still the only Southern city that has gotten to the point where the gay community really is a gay community.”

He describes “the Southern gay thing” as being allowed to live as you please as long as you do your best to blend in and stay in your place.

To be sure, the growing visibility of gays--such as comedian DeGeneres’ recent announcement that she is lesbian--hasn’t gone over very well in the region.

In Alabama, a Birmingham television station is refusing to air the April 30 episode of DeGeneres’ television situation comedy, in which her character reveals that she is gay. A local gay comedian tried to rent a theater to show the episode but the owner refused, calling the issue “too controversial.” A city-owned auditorium has since been rented for the event.

And last year, Cobb County in suburban Atlanta and Greenville County in South Carolina caused problems for organizers of the Summer Olympic Games when they passed resolutions condemning homosexuality. In response, Olympic events were pulled from Cobb County and the Olympic torch was carried through the South Carolina county in a van rather than by runners.

Although Charlotte was the site of a gay pride parade in 1993 and other public gay events have been held since then, past efforts by Barret and a few others to form consciousness-raising groups have faltered because of lack of interest. The city has no gay political organization.

But the commission’s effort to keep a lid on homosexuality has politicized the gay issue here as nothing else ever has done. The controversy is helping a nascent gay leadership to emerge. And gays who previously had sought nothing more than to lead quiet lives of anonymity are becoming public personages.

The meeting at which county commissioners voted to cut arts funding was an argument about community morality that included public airing of the ugliest gay stereotypes. People spoke with disgust about predatory gay sex offenders, pedophiles and serial killers. But a number of gays also used the meeting to come out of the closet.

It was all an effort to show, in the words of Barret, that “we are your neighbor, we’re the person who works in the dry cleaner, we’re the person who works in the law office.”

Such courageous public statements are important, Barret said, in order to counter the impression held by some that gays are all child molesters. “We’ve failed in our responsibility to teach them about who we are,” he said.

Martin, who said he met with more than 40 gays in the weeks leading up to the vote, acknowledges that some gays can be decent people. But in the next breath he declares homosexuality one of America’s greatest threats and says he rejects the notion that he, as an African American, should empathize with the gay rights movement.

“Dr. [Martin Luther] King said judge people by the content of their character, not the content of their sexuality,” he says.

He too speaks of predatory gay child molesters and of an “aggressive homosexual agenda” to spread influence through the arts.

In voting with socially conservative white Republicans he said he recognizes that he was siding with people who do not always hold his inner-city constituents’ interests at heart. It is a coalition, he said, that will not last.

“But I have to vote my convictions,” he said.