The past, the old joke goes, is not what it used to be. But it’s also not funny anymore: LGBTQ history is being targeted in a national government purge, wiping out web pages and censoring libraries, an ethnic cleansing of a very diverse story.
Here in the South, historians and archivists are warning community members about donating queer-related materials to repositories whose web addresses end in .edu or are funded by state legislatures targeting LGBTQ issues and trans people especially, as is happening in S.C. The fear is that orders will come to dump these collections, or that collecting will no longer be robust, out of fear of drawing too much attention to the issue.
Even before diversity, equity and inclusion became taboo, one local academic library turned back the papers of a queer man, claiming his libertarian organization was anti-Black. It wasn’t — he closed it down and publicly repudiated the bigots and homophobes who had flocked to it — yet earnest (straight), tone-deaf staffers insisted on keeping the shelves sanctified and safe (and empty) by mounting a protest against a few folders of printouts of web pages and newspaper clippings. They drove a divisive spike between the Black and LGBTQ communities, resulting in gay erasure and queer baiting. So, we lost that really interesting bit of queer Charleston political history.
In my 2022 book on local LGBTQ history, I concluded that gay organizing (as it was called then) seemed to have begun when the first gay newspaper appeared here around 1981. I had seen a tantalizing hint of a previous organization, but the traces left behind were unrecoverable, I believed. Not so! Thanks to materials in the archives of the S.C. Historical Society, a private nonprofit dedicated to telling everyone’s story, we can now push back the date of the community’s first organizing attempts by a good five years to 1976.
Forty-nine years ago as this country was celebrating its bicentennial, there was a surge in our revolutionary spirit. When our local newspaper published an op-ed on the “moral abdomination” of homosexuality, Catholic priest Father Michael Kaney wrote a reply, repudiating its facts and innuendos (and correcting the spelling!). He and the others who bravely outed themselves in print founded what now I believe to be the first gay publication to rally the troops.
In the White Point Gazette, Kaney, Timothy Sloane, Jimi Shealey, David Mooneyhan and others wrote of national news, put out warnings and advised of local opportunities, showing strength in numbers and countering the narrative that the mainstream press and most political and religious leaders were then emphasizing. What happened to that group is unclear.
But the very next year, another group appeared, calling itself the Gay Task Force and putting out the word it was organizing. But pressure was put on landlords of the building of where they were to meet. Kicked out, they rallied at the Unitarian Church, perhaps a first for queer tolerance in the local religious sphere.
Many may not remember that in 1977, the Miss USA Pageant was held in Charleston. Feminists and the local National Organization for Women chapter, with many lesbian members were incensed. They mounted a counter-protest with a Mr. USA contest, won by gay man, Terry Frick, who “had to bare his chest, show his hairy legs, be pinched, paddled and strut on stage in his clingy yellow bathing suit,” as the local press spoofingly reported it.
But the joke was on them: Frick went on to modeling in New York City. And, chagrined reporting noted that the Miss USA contest went $30,000 in the hole, while the Mr. USA pageant turned a profit. Its proceeds supported the Women’s Advocacy Center of Charleston.
No wonder with victories like that, some may want our history repressed, but now at least, it’s back in our consciousness — and before it can be censored, here it is in print, a part of the community’s annals of Pride and Protest.
Harlan Greene is a local novelist, historian and author of The Real Rainbow Row: Explorations in Charleston’s LGBTQ History. If you have any information or contacts to help add to the Lowcountry’s queer past, contact him at harlangreene@gmail.com.
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