This story first appeared as part of WFAE's EQUALibrium newsletter, exploring race and equity in the Charlotte region. Get the latest news and analysis in your inbox first by signing up here.
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.
In the '50s: 'New Laws Needed for Homosexuals?'
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.
“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.
Slowly moving out of the Charlotte shadows
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.”
“Some gays fear the simplest act, like holding hands in the park, will expose their secret life,” the story noted.
1996: 'Angels in America'
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.
2016: House Bill 2
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.
