RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — North Carolina Republican Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson sued CNN on Tuesday over its recent report that he made explicit racial and sexual posts on a pornography website’s message board, calling the reporting reckless and defamatory.
The lawsuit, filed in Wake County Superior Court, comes less than four weeks after a report that led many fellow GOP elected officials and candidates, including presidential nominee Donald Trump, to distance themselves from Robinson’s gubernatorial campaign.
Robinson, who announced the lawsuit at a news conference in Raleigh with a Virginia-based attorney, has denied authoring the messages.
CNN “chose to publish despite knowing or recklessly disregarding that Lt. Gov. Robinson’s data — including his name, date of birth, passwords, and the email address supposedly associated with the NudeAfrica account — were previously compromised by multiple data breaches,” the lawsuit states, referencing the website.
Robinson, who would be the state’s first Black governor if elected, called the report a “high-tech lynching” on a candidate “who has been targeted from Day 1 by folks who disagree with me politically and want to see me destroyed.”
CNN declined to comment Tuesday, spokesperson Emily Kuhn said in an email.
The CNN report, which first aired Sept. 19, said Robinson left statements over a decade ago on the message board in which, in part, he referred to himself as a “black NAZI,” said he enjoyed transgender pornography, said he preferred Hitler to then-President Barack Obama, and slammed the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. as “worse than a maggot.”
The network report said it matched details of the account on the message board to other online accounts held by Robinson by comparing usernames, a known email address and his full name. CNN reported that details discussed by the account holder matched Robinson’s age, length of marriage and other biographical information. CNN also said it compared figures of speech that came up frequently in his public Twitter profile that appeared in discussions by the account on the pornographic website.
Polls at the time of the CNN report already showed Democratic rival Josh Stein, the sitting attorney general, with a lead over Robinson. Early in-person voting begins Thursday statewide, and over 57,000 completed absentee ballots have been received so far.
Robinson also in the same defamation lawsuit sued a Greensboro punk rock band singer who alleged in a music video and in an interview with a media outlet that Robinson, in the 1990s and early 2000s, frequented a porn shop the singer once worked at and purchased videos. Louis Love Money, the other named defendant, released the video and spoke with other media outlets before the CNN report.
Robinson denies the allegation in the lawsuit, which reads, “Lt. Gov. Robinson was not spending hours at the video store, five nights a week. He was not renting or previewing videos, and he did not purchase ‘bootleg’ or other videos from Defendant Money.”
Money said in a phone interview Tuesday that he stands by his statements and the music video’s content as truthful: “My story hasn’t changed.”
The lawsuit, which seeks at least $50 million in damages, says the effort against Robinson “appears to be a coordinated attack aimed at derailing his campaign for governor.” It provides no evidence that the network or Money schemed with outside groups to create what Robinson alleges are false statements.
Attorney Jesse Binnall, right, speaks at a news conference, with his client North Carolina Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, left, in Raleigh, N.C., Tuesday, Oct. 15, 2024. (AP Photo/Karl B DeBlaker)
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Robinson’s lawyer, Jesse Binnall, said that he expects to find more “bad actors,” and that entities, which he did not identify, have stonewalled his firm’s efforts to collect information.
“We will use every tool at our disposal now that a lawsuit has been filed, including the subpoena power, in order to continue pursuing the facts,” said Binnall, whose clients have included Trump and his campaign.
In North Carolina courts, a public official claiming defamation generally must show a defendant knew a statement was false or recklessly disregarded its untruthfulness.
Most of the top staff running Robinson’s campaign and his lieutenant governor’s office quit following the CNN report, and the Republican Governors Association, which had already spent millions of dollars in advertising backing Robinson, stopped supporting his bid. And Democrats from presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris to downballot state candidates began running ads linking their opponents to Robinson.
Robinson’s campaign isn’t running TV commercials now. He said that “we’ve chosen to go in a different direction” and focus on in-person campaign stops.
Robinson already had a history of inflammatory comments about topics like abortion and LGBTQ+ rights that Stein and his allies have emphasized in opposing him on TV commercials and online.
Stein spokesperson Morgan Hopkins said Tuesday in a statement that “even before the CNN report, North Carolinians have known for a long time that Mark Robinson is completely unfit to be Governor.”
Hurricane Helene and its aftermath took the CNN report off the front pages. Robinson worked for several days with a central North Carolina sheriff collecting relief supplies and criticized Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper — barred by term limits from seeking reelection — for state government’s response in the initial stages of relief.
Trump endorsed Robinson before the March gubernatorial primary, calling him “Martin Luther King on steroids” for his speaking ability. Robinson had been a frequent presence at Trump’s North Carolina campaign stops, but he hasn’t participated in such an event since the CNN report.
More than 800 veterans who were kicked out of the military for their sexual orientation under a policy that banned gays and lesbians from openly serving, known as “don’t ask, don’t tell,” will receive honorable discharges, Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin announced Tuesday.
“Under President Biden’s leadership, the Department of Defense has taken extraordinary steps to redress the harms done by “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and other policies on these former Service members,” Austin said in a statement.
The news comes a little more than a year after proactively reviewing the records of LGBTQ+ veterans who might be eligible for an honorable discharge but had not yet applied for one. The 800+ veterans receiving this relief will see their discharge papers – known as a DD-214 – automatically change to “honorable” without the burden of having to go through the military’s formal process of applying for a discharge upgrade.
An honorable discharge status unlocks access to benefits that some of these veterans may have been missing out on for decades, including things like health care, college tuition assistance, VA loan programs and even some jobs.
A defense official said the department is sending information to veterans receiving the upgrade on how to obtain copies of their new discharge certification. The official also noted that because DD-214’s contain sensitive personal information, the former service members must request the new copies themselves.
In a separate effort announced in June, President Biden sought to redress some of the harms brought about by the military justice system against those suspected of homosexuality when he issued pardons for former service members convicted under a military law from years past that explicitly criminalized consensual “sodomy.”
Last year, CBS News documented in a yearlong investigation how many LGBTQ+ veterans were still being deprived of an honorable discharge more than a decade after the military repealed “don’t ask, don’t tell.” The investigation also found that the military’s formal process for veterans who wanted to seek a discharge upgrade was confusing, time-consuming and often required the help of an attorney.
But the Pentagon’s review does not apply to those who served in the decades before the Clinton-era “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy went into effect, when gay and lesbian troops were not just barred from serving openly but from serving at all. The CBS News investigation found that some of those veterans from prior decades are among the most deeply harmed by the military’s long history of discrimination.
Former Air Force Captain Andrew Espinosa, who CBS News interviewed last February, has spent 30 years fighting what he believes was a conviction fueled by homophobia.
In May 1993, just a few months before “don’t ask, don’t tell” was implemented but in the middle of a debate raging about whether gay people could serve, Espinosa was accused of placing his hand on the knee of a male airman and kissing him on the cheek. He was charged with indecent assault, convicted and dishonorably discharged — the military’s most punitive form of separation. After 10 years of service to his country, Espinosa, who has always maintained his innocence, was effectively a felon.
At the time, the military claimed Espinosa’s case had nothing to do with his sexual orientation — despite a 1993 letter from a military official to his mother acknowledging “homosexuality is a factor in this case.” Years later, following the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell” and the swell of support for LGBTQ+ military members, Espinosa applied for a discharge upgrade through the Air Force. He was denied.
When asked about Espinosa’s case last year, an Air Force spokesperson told CBS News, “there was insufficient evidence to warrant clemency in this case.”
Espinosa is one of an unknown number of servicemembers who were court martialed by the military for other infractions, even though the driving motivation behind their dismissal may have been their sexual orientation. Those veterans remain without a path to restore their honor.
The Pentagon will not be continuing its proactive review of cases beyond the approximately 800 veterans included in today’s announcement. Others who want to seek upgrades will have to submit an application. In a statement, a defense official told CBS News, “We encourage all veterans who believe they have suffered an error or injustice to request a correction to their military records.”
To celebrate National Coming Out Day 2024, The Mary Sue can reveal an exclusive excerpt from Hey, Mary!, an upcoming LGBTQ graphic novel from Oni Press. Written by Andrew Wheeler and illustrated by Rye Hickman, the book follows Catholic high schooler Mark, whose feelings for another boy cause a crisis of faith as he’s suddenly saddled with hundreds of years of judgment and shame. He also worries about how his parents will respond.
But perhaps Mark doesn’t have to suffer for being queer. In Hey, Mary! he seeks advice from a local drag performer and his priest, but also receives unexpected help from important figures in Catholic history and lore. His surprise advisory council includes Joan of Arc, Michelangelo, Savonarola, and St. Sebastian.
(Oni Press)
“Faith is not something you get up to at the weekend,” said writer Andrew Wheeler in the announcement. “Being raised in the Catholic Church is not just about Sundays and holy days; it’s every day. My family was Catholic, my community was Catholic, my school was Catholic, and I was Catholic, absolutely and to my core. Realizing that I was also gay as a teenager meant finding ways to reconcile my relationships with all those parts of my life, because my queerness and my Catholicism are both indelible to my identity.
“Writing Hey, Mary! has been part of that lifelong process of reconciliation, and a chance to talk out in the open about that process in a way that can hopefully resonate for people with similar experiences,” Wheeler continued.
Visual storyteller Rye Hickman said, “When I was a little younger than Mark I attended a private Christian school where it was an explicit school policy to expel any student who was discovered to be gay. At that time, my friends were all obsessed with manga. I found myself fixating on some books more than others—ones where a character changed sex, or where same-sex attraction was such strong subtext it might as well have been text. Much like Mark looking at the painting of Saint Sebastian, I kept that locked away deep in the back of my mind—I was normal! Just like Mark.
“His journey starts with fear, hurt, and denial—the way it did for a lot of us. Andrew wrote levity and joy into Mark’s first steps, despite the heaviness of hiding yourself from yourself, and I think that’s the universal heart of this book, visible from the start. Joy, wonder, and love are too powerful for fear to hold sway forever,” Hickman continued.
Check out an exclusive preview from Hey, Mary! below.
LGBTQ people of faith aren’t the only ones who struggle to reconcile their identities, though of course many share similar stories to Mark. Reconciling your sexuality and gender when you come from a deeply homophobic and transphobic culture is hard and often incredibly painful. Resources and support are available for those who need them.
Since 1988, National Coming Out Day has been celebrated on October 11 to commemorate the courage of those who identify publicly as queer or trans, and to support anyone who is still figuring things out or who cannot publicly claim their sexuality or gender for fear of violence or other punishment. The day is named for the “coming out of the closet” metaphor, but many in the LGBTQ community have moved away from this language because it positions queer and trans identities as shameful. Some have instead chosen to talk about “inviting people in” to the knowledge of their identity, which is more about building trust than offering people the opportunity to reject or harm them.
Next spring, Hey, Mary! will add to a growing LGBTQ literary canon that tells realistic stories of growing up queer that also allows its characters to experience affirmation and joy. The graphic novel will be available everywhere books are sold on April 15, 2025.
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If you believe what you read on social media, you might think the NFL’s Kansas City Chiefs have taken a stance against LGBTQ+ Pride. But that’s just the internet fumbling the truth.
“Breaking: Kansas City Chiefs refuse to host a Pride Night, ‘It’s woke ageпda,’” read a viral Oct. 4 Facebook post.
The post, which had more than 50,000 likes as of Oct. 7, directed readers to an article claiming the Kansas City Chiefs issued a “formal declaration” that it would “not be hosting a Pride Night event at Arrowhead Stadium, citing concerns over what they refer to as the ‘woke agenda.’”
(Screenshot of Facebook post)
The post was flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and Threads.)
That’s because it’s baseless: This claim — and the story the post linked to — originated as satire.
In early September, the claim was shared by SpaceX Fanclub, a Facebook account that shares satire. Its bio declares, “We post SATIRE nothing on this page is real.”
The account’s Sept. 5 post featured the same headline and linked in the comments to the satire website Esspots.com. The article linked in the recent Facebook post is an exact copy-paste of this satirical Esspots article.
The original SpaceX Fanclub post included a watermark indicating it is “Rated Satire,” but a disclaimer did not appear on the recent Facebook post. Some commenters appeared to believe the claim was authentic. “It’s about time someone stood up!” one wrote. “Good for them!” wrote another.
PolitiFact found no legitimate news or press releases from the Chiefs declaring the team “refused” to host a pride event. In June, we rated a similar claim False.
Harrison Butker, the team’s kicker, made headlines earlier this year after delivering a Catholic college commencement speech during which he referred to Pride as a “deadly sin” with “an entire month dedicated to it.”
But there is no evidence this reflects the team’s position. In fact, the team’s official pro-shop sells Pride-themed Chiefs merchandise.
“The world has shifted and so have we,” owner Jody Bouffard said in a statement on the bar’s Instagram account.
Bouffard opened Blush & Blu in 2012, taking over the space occupied by one of her previous ventures, tHERe Coffee Bar and Lounge.
A dive bar with classic Colfax-worthy drink prices and lovable lo-fi ambiance, Blush & Blu hosted drag events, dance parties, open mics and, of course, women’s soccer watch parties.
However, the bar’s reputation took a hit in recent years.
Three former employees sued the bar in 2021 over wage theft and racial discrimination. The lawsuit alleged that Bouffard “willfully weaponized the so-called ‘safe space’ and the ‘family’ at Blush & Blu” to create poor working conditions.
Those claims did not go to trial. The parties “reached a mutually agreeable resolution” after a day of mediation, and the case was dismissed in 2023.
“Bouffard has never intentionally belittled anyone in the manner described or otherwise, nor withheld rightfully earned pay. This filing is an unfortunate retaliation against Bouffard and Blush & Blu for unrelated staffing decisions, and does not accurately represent the work environment at Blush & Blu.”
Denverite has reached out to Blush & Blu for comment.
Meanwhile, Bouffard appears to have plans for a new business. As originally reported by OutFront Magazine, on Oct. 1 she registered a new trade name, “Cocks on Colfax,” with a delivery address that’s the same as Blush & Blu’s, 1526 E. Colfax St. The description she provided to the state was simply “gay bar.”
Real quick, what’s going on with lesbian bars?
As queer life and rights have slowly entered the mainstream, establishments traditionally recognized as lesbian bars have declined.
The Lesbian Bar Project, created in 2020, has cataloged 34 remaining lesbian bars in the states. Blush & Blu was the only Colorado bar on the list. They’re rare in the largest cities, too. New York only recorded four on the list.
Why? The reasons are wide-ranging, from the income gaps between men and women to shifting identities in the queer community to alcohol consumption in general tumbling.
Lesbian spaces in Denver won’t die with Blush & Blu
But Denver won’t enter a drought of lesbian spaces when Blush & Blu closes its doors this weekend. A number of gathering places for and by queer women still remain.
They also reflect the evolving definition of a “lesbian bar,” and the changes in the communities served by these spaces. The “lesbian bar” might now be a bookshop, a brewery or an event space.
After all, as The Lesbian Bar Project itself puts it: “What makes a bar uniquely Lesbian is its prioritization of creating space for people of marginalized genders including women (regardless if they are cis or trans), non-binary folks, and trans men.”
A Pennsylvania middle school is installing windows in its gender-inclusive restrooms that will allow teachers and students to look into the wash areas from the hallways.
The far-right South Western School District board approved the construction project at Hanover’s Emory H Markle Middle School this summer.
The school board president, Matt Gelazela, cited student safety for the decision. In a statement released to the media, he wrote that “in making the area outside of stalls more viewable, we are better able to monitor for a multitude of prohibited activities such as any possible vaping, drug use, bullying or absenteeism.”
The board said that it would “create openings” to add “privacy in the toilet area” and “increase oversight of the wash area.” Gelazela added that these changes put the restrooms in line with facilities in the local elementary schools.
Gelazela, a libertarian and former police officer, became politically active with the South Western School District board in 2021, fighting COVID-19 mask mandates and railing against schools teaching students about “sexual identity.”
The new restroom windows at Markle Middle School are being built only into the gender-inclusive bathrooms and are set to cost the district roughly $8,700. The school currently has five bathroom options. The Hanover Evening Sun wrote that these include “male, female, male gender identifying, female gender identifying, and single-stall private bathrooms.”
Gelazela did not respond to HuffPost’s requests for comment.
The construction of the bathroom windows has outraged parents and LGBTQ+ advocates alike, who see it as a privacy infringement for students and a specific targeting of LGBTQ+ youth.
Jennifer Holahan, a parent of a student in the school district, said her son, who is not part of the LGBTQ+ community, was told he had to use a gender-inclusive bathroom because it was closest to his classes.
She told WGAL-TV in Lancaster that the window construction “just raised a ton of concerns for me — privacy concerns, safety concerns. … I felt like it was a deterrent to keep them [students] from using them.”
She added: “I can understand needing to have supervision over middle school and high school kids, especially in the bathroom. … But I also think windows aren’t the solution. I think if it was a real issue, it wouldn’t just be the gender-inclusive restrooms.”
The board approved the construction in August after seeking guidance from the Independence Law Center, a Christian law firm contracted by the board.
The law firm has contracted with other school boards in the state to push forward various anti-LGBTQ+ policies, such as restricting transgender students’ participation on school sports teams that align with their gender and allowing school administrators to avoid using a trans student’s correct name and pronouns.
The construction of bathroom windows is one of the latest targeting moves by the South Western School District, which in the last two years has sought to roll back protections for LGBTQ+ students.
Gelazela was appointed school board president in December 2023 after serving as a regular member. Five Republican newcomers, who organized under the group We the Parents of South Western School District, were also elected to the board that year. The new members ran on a platform in support of “traditional education” and removing “political agendas” and critical race theory from school curricula.
As president, one of Gelazela’s first actions was to put forth a set of policies to erase gender identity from the district’s sexual harassment policy and establish a narrow definition of sex that excluded the existence of trans and intersex people.
At the time, another member of the board had advised Gelazela not to stray from state and federal guidelines — including the Biden administration’s recent Title IX guidance that explicitly bars discrimination on the basis of gender identity and sexual orientation — out of fear of inviting litigation.
But in March 2024, Gelazela entered the board into a contract with Independence Law Center, which so far has helped the board carry out these policy goals.
Earlier this year, the school board adopted a dizzying set of policies around how transgender students could update their names and pronouns in the school records, often creating exceptions for school officials to not be compelled to comply based on their religious beliefs.
The board allowed school personnel to refuse to use a student’s name or set of pronouns that use “language inconsistent with their beliefs.”
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Thank you for your past contribution to HuffPost. We are sincerely grateful for readers like you who help us ensure that we can keep our journalism free for everyone.
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Students who want to correct their name and pronouns in the school records can do so only if they submit a written “accommodation request” from their parents. But still the board would not allow students to change their sex on their school records and would allow school personally to not address a student by the “unwanted first name.” Instead, school administrators can choose to refer to students as “you” or “they.”
Since 2020, several members of the far-right activist group Moms for Liberty, have been elected to school boards at more Pennsylvania school districts, helping to introduce policies banning discussions of LGBTQ+ issues or racial justice.
Can’t afford to contribute? Support HuffPost by creating a free account and log in while you read.
Thank you for your past contribution to HuffPost. We are sincerely grateful for readers like you who help us ensure that we can keep our journalism free for everyone.
The stakes are high this year, and our 2024 coverage could use continued support. Would you consider becoming a regular HuffPost contributor?
Thank you for your past contribution to HuffPost. We are sincerely grateful for readers like you who help us ensure that we can keep our journalism free for everyone.
The stakes are high this year, and our 2024 coverage could use continued support. We hope you’ll consider contributing to HuffPost once more.
One of the best parts of discovering an artist you can’t get enough of is getting to step into the immersive world they create with their music and visuals, and we can confidently say that no one does that quite like BAYBE! Her signature fusion of dark pop, metal, hip-hop, and horror has propelled her into a league of her own and proven she’s a genius artist you need to keep a close eye on. And now is the perfect time to start doing so, because BAYBE just dropped her latest single, ‘Pretty Gay!’
‘Pretty Gay!’ is a sapphic anthem that sees BAYBE pining for a girl who says she’s straight, with a chilling soundscape that combines the tumultuous adrenaline of falling in love with the edgy thrill of films like Jennifer’s Body. In fact, we actually need a film inspired by this song, because we’re absolutely obsessed with the plot and imagery. We’re feeling pretty lucky, because we got to ask BAYBE all about the song, her thought-provoking visuals, and so much more! Check out ‘Pretty Gay!’ below, then keep reading for our Q&A.
Hi BAYBE, congrats on the release of ‘Pretty Gay!’ How does it feel to let the song out into the world and see how your fans are reacting? Thank you! It’s been an interesting release for sure- I’ve been nervously holding onto this song for over two years now so finally getting it out into the world feels great. My music tends to receive a mixed review online, but this one probably wins for most dividing response so far.
What does ‘Pretty Gay!’ mean to you? This song started as just a song about liking a girl with a boyfriend. When writing the chorus, it evolved into a sort of jab at internet culture and how overly sensitive we all can be. There’s a sort of tip-toe feeling around using the word “gay” in a negative context nowadays, which I think is a complex argument on both sides. The point I wanted to make was that it’s just not that serious. There are many things I will not say, or sing about. I think this one in particular is funny though, and I like laughing.
There are so many cool lyrics on ‘Pretty Gay!,’ with one of our favorites being “all your boyfriends wanna fight me.” Is there a certain line on the song that you’re especially proud of? I think the line I’m most proud of is the outro, specifically “When they say the end is near and the missiles head our way, all I think about is you and I think that’s pretty gay.” The producer, Paige Blue, and I couldn’t stop laughing when writing it, but there was such a deeper feeling of dark, satirical sadness tucked into that section which makes me love it so much more.
“Pretty gay” has long been used as an insult against the LGBT+ community – what has it been like for you to get to reclaim the phrase and build such a powerful story around it? I think if we used it in a lighthearted fun way, as it’s used in the lyrics, it wouldn’t hold such negativity around it. Being gay rocks, and calling things “gay” also rocks. I don’t think we have to choose.
Speaking of reclaiming, you released a reimagined version of your previously-released song ‘Cherry Pie’ this summer after taking it down. How did you approach remaking the song with a new BAYBE flair? What has it been like to see how much fans are embracing it? It’s been amazing. After two years of comments and messages asking for it to come back to streaming, I decided it was time to give the song a second chance. I gave it my own touch so it’s a lot darker and heavier now- it’s been great hearing from fans that they’re loving this new version more 🙂
Your songs have such a cinematic quality to them while often talking about relatable experiences – how do you go about creating an immersive world around the stories you’re telling in your lyrics? Thank you! That means a lot. When writing a song, I picture the music video simultaneously. Those two things happen at the same time for me, so I like to keep the visuals in mind when producing or recording, to make sure they’ll lend to something special visually.
You blend elements of metal, hip-hop, and pop so effortlessly! When you’re starting to write a song, do you typically know which direction it will go in production-wise, or does that come later? Do you feel like certain feelings match certain genres better? That’s a great question – I think when I go into a session I generally know if I’m feeling like leaning one way or the other beforehand. With that being said, I’m a believer in “the song writes itself” for the most part, so if the song tells me it wants to be heavier with more organic metal instrumentation, I listen. The feeling and emotion of the lyrics play a huge role in dictating the genre as well.
Another defining quality of your work is how much thought you put into your visuals – one of our favorites is the ‘Dinner For One’ video, which sees you killing a creepy guy who wants to go on a date even after you claim to be 14. What’s your creative process like when you’re preparing a music video? I touched on this earlier, but when I write songs, I write the video concept as well, usually day-of. Last week I had a session in LA and left with such a detailed vision for the music video, that I drove straight to a coffee shop and sat for 3 hours until I finished the entire video treatment. I might not even shoot it for another year, but I had to get it down. I think in another life, or maybe just later in this one haha, I would be a director. I direct all of my music videos, and I don’t think there are many things in life that make me happier.
Content Warning: The ‘Dinner For One’ music video contains blood and slight violence.
Something else that stands out to us about songs like ‘Dinner For One’ is how intentional you are with the themes and imagery you use, even if it’s not always apparent on the surface. For example, the cannibal-themed ‘Dinner For One’ makes a statement against predators in the music video and ‘Stray Dog’ explores the effects that toxic relationships can have on someone. How do you go about finding the right balance between surprising or shocking imagery and making sure the message is clear? Do you feel that these messages have been overlooked among casual listeners, or do people seem to grasp them well? I have absolutely no idea if people catch onto it or not. I hope they do! It’s all very intentional. I’ve tried many times to keep the artwork, visuals, and promo for songs ultra simple (for my own sanity), but I cannot do it. I am obsessed with pairing each song with a visual world, as I think songs on their own hold much less weight than if I can immerse someone into it fully.
How do you feel you’ve grown as an artist since releasing your God’s Favorite EP last year? I think I change as an artist every single day, as we all do, so it’s a tough thing to measure. I’ve discovered new music that changed the way I think, experienced new things for the first time, etc. – it’s such a cool thing to think about. To answer the question: immensely, and in many ways.
What can your fans look forward to in the rest of 2024? I have one more release coming out this year that I’m so excited about, which may or may not have a featured artist on it.
Is there anything else you’d like to mention or say to your fans that the questions didn’t touch on? Not really, other than my constant “thank you.” The artist-to-fan relationship is so special, and I love finding my people while releasing the music I love creating.
As a site with a mission to celebrate the connection between artists and fans, we couldn’t agree more! Thank you so much to BAYBE for answering our questions and sharing your vision with the world! You’re a truly special artist and we’re so excited to see what ‘Pretty Gay!’ and this new chapter bring to you.
Now honeybees, we have some questions for you! What do you think of ‘Pretty Gay!’ and BAYBE’s music? Which of her songs do you think is the best sapphic anthem, and which one is your personal favorite? Let us know in the comments below or hit us up on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter! We could talk about her work all day, so we’ll be waiting to hear your thoughts.
With about a month until Election Day, U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wis., is leading Republican challenger Eric Hovde in the most recent Marquette University Law School poll. Criticisms of one by the other are at a fever pitch.
During a Sept. 16 appearance on the Vicki McKenna Show on WIBA (1310), Hovde dogged Baldwin for a federal earmark she requested for a Madison-area organization that serves at-risk youth.
In doing so, Hovde claimed, Baldwin “gave our taxpayer money to a transgender clinic, affirming clinic — which is their buzzword — that does it without even telling parents.”
His remark strays from the facts. Let’s take a closer look.
Hovde mischaracterizes organization’s work
When asked for the evidence behind the claim, a Hovde spokesperson pointed to the $400,000 in federal money that Baldwin requested from a $1.2 trillion government spending package passed in March for Fitchburg-based Briarpatch Youth Services, which serves runaway and homeless youth in Dane County.
Its programs include a youth homeless shelter, employment services and help for people navigating the criminal justice system, among others.
But the move triggered Republican uproar because Briarpatch also runs a program called Teens Like Us, which supports LGBTQ+ youth ages 13 to 18. Last year, its website mentioned that youth did not need a guardian’s permission to join the program, and that gender-affirming clothing like chest binders and swimwear was also available.
Neither point appears on the page today, a move the organization told Wisconsin Watch it made to protect youth safety. Briarpatch Executive Director Jill Pfeiffer told PolitiFact Wisconsin that in most cases, parents are the ones bringing their children to the Teens Like Us program to give them a safe place to explore their identity.
PolitiFact Wisconsin asked Hovde’s team to clarify what he meant in saying the organization “does it” without telling parents. His spokesperson declined to specifically answer the question, noting that news outlets reported the gender-affirming clothing offering and that youth can join the program without permission.
But in the multiple times Hovde has offered variations of this claim, he doesn’t mention clothing. Instead, he’s made vague claims that the organization works with children on “transgendering them,” helps kids “go through the transgender process,” or, in the case of the specific statement we are examining here, “does it.”
After his statement, McKenna claimed the organization would “alter children, mutilate them surgically or put them on drugs that can have a permanent impact on their quality of life” — things Hovde didn’t dispute.
Taken together, this all connotes an element of gender-affirming medical care that Briarpatch does not provide. Not only does his phrase “transgender clinic” misconstrue the organization’s overall mission, law prohibits Wisconsin minors from getting medical treatment without a parent or guardian’s signature.
Second, the taxpayer money Hovde refers to is not going to the Teens Like Us program, Baldwin’s staff told the Journal Sentinel in March and Pfeiffer confirmed to PolitiFact Wisconsin.
Because the request came from the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Service Administration, a Baldwin spokesperson told the Journal Sentinel, the funds would be prohibited from being used for the activities described in the Teens Like Us program. Pfeiffer confirmed the money is for counseling for youth experiencing homelessness and other hardships.
Our ruling
Hovde claimed that Baldwin gave taxpayer money to a transgender-affirming clinic that “does it without even telling parents.”
Baldwin did secure funds for Briarpatch Youth Services, which has a program for LGBTQ+ youth that doesn’t require parental permission to join. But Hovde’s vagueness leaves room for the idea that there’s gender-affirming medical treatment happening, which is not accurate. On top of that, and most significantly, the funds Baldwin requested went to an entirely different program, and are not being used for the purpose Hovde claimed.
TBILISI, Georgia — The speaker of the Georgian parliament signed into a law Thursday a bill that severely curtails LGBTQ+ rights in the country and mirrors legislation adopted in neighboring Russia.
Shalva Papuashvili, the parliament speaker, said on social media that the legislation does “not reflect current, temporary, changing ideas and ideologies, but is based on common sense, historical experience and centuries-old Christian, Georgian and European values.”
Georgian President Salome Zourabichvili had refused to sign the bill and returned it to parliament on Wednesday. It was introduced by the governing Georgian Dream party and approved by lawmakers last month.
The bill includes bans on same-sex marriages, adoptions by same-sex couples and public endorsement and depictions of LGBTQ+ relations and people in the media. It also bans gender-affirming care and changing gender designations in official documents.
“This law protects the rights of all citizens, including freedom of expression, so that the rights of others are not violated, which is the essence and idea of true democracy,” Papuashvili wrote.
Parliament gave the legislation its final approval as Georgia, a largely conservative country where the Orthodox Church wields significant influence, prepares to vote in a parliamentary election. The law has been widely seen as an effort by the governing party to shore up support among conservative groups. It was decried by human rights advocates and LGBTQ+ activists, who said it further marginalized an already vulnerable community.
The law has drawn comparisons with Russia, where the Kremlin has been highlighting what it calls traditional family values. Russian authorities in the last decade have banned public endorsement of “nontraditional sexual relations” and introduced laws against gender-affirming care, among other measures. Its Supreme Court effectively outlawed LGBTQ+ activism by labeling what the authorities called the LGBTQ+ “movement” operating in Russia as an extremist organization and banning it.
In Georgia, the LGBTQ+ community has struggled even before the legislation was introduced. Demonstrations and violent outbursts against LGBTQ+ people have been common, and last year hundreds of opponents of gay rights stormed an LGBTQ+ festival in the Georgian capital, Tbilisi, forcing the event’s cancellation. This year, tens of thousands marched in Tbilisi to promote “traditional family values.”
A day after parliament gave its final approval to the anti-LGBTQ+ bill, transgender actor and model Kesaria Avramidze was stabbed to death in her apartment in Tbilisi. Rights advocates had worried that the bill would stoke more violence.
Papuashvili, the parliament speaker, said that by not signing the bill, President Zourabichvili and the Georgian opposition “did not have enough courage to openly express their opinion regarding this law.”
Some analysts say parts of the Georgian opposition are walking a fine line ahead of the Oct. 26 election between condemning the move to curtail LGBTQ+ rights and not wanting to alienate some voters.
Zourabichvili has long been at odds with the governing party and vetoed a “foreign influence” law adopted by parliament earlier this year. She was overridden by parliament, where Georgian Dream dominates.
The measure requires media and nongovernmental organizations to register as “pursuing the interests of a foreign power” if they receive more than 20% of their funding from abroad. It ignited weeks of protests and was widely criticized as threatening democratic freedoms. Those opposing the law compared it to similar legislation in Russia which is routinely used to suppress dissent, and accused the governing party of acting in concert with Moscow, jeopardizing Georgia’s chances of joining the European Union.
The South Caucasus nation of 3.7 million formally applied to join the EU in 2022, after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, but the bloc halted its accession in response to the “foreign influence” law and froze some of its financial support. The United States imposed sanctions on dozens of Georgian officials in response to the law.
Georgian Dream was set up by Bidzina Ivanishvili, a shadowy billionaire who made his fortune in Russia and served briefly as Georgia’s prime minister in 2012. It promised to restore civil rights and “reset” relations with Moscow, which fought a brief war with Georgia in 2008 over the breakaway province of South Ossetia. Russia then recognized the independence of South Ossetia and another breakaway Georgian province, Abkhazia, and established military bases there.
Many Georgians backed Ukraine as Kyiv battled Russia’s invasion in 2022. But the Georgian government abstained from joining sanctions against Moscow, barred dozens of Kremlin critics from entering the country, and accused the West of trying to drag Georgia into open conflict with Russia. The opposition has accused the governing party of steering the country into Russia’s orbit to the detriment of its European aspirations.
In 2022, career bookseller K. Kerimian conceived of The Nonbinarian Book Bike, a trans- and queer-led mobile mutual aid initiative that distributes free LGBTQIA2s+ books for all ages throughout Brooklyn. The Book Bike made its street debut with a custom-built cargo bike from Icicycle Tricycles last summer and distributed more than 500 unique titles at park pop-ups and other events in 2023 alone.
With another distribution season coming to a close, Kerimian and the Nonbinarian team (which includes me, its newsletter editor and book club coordinator) are taking steps to expand. Specifically, they’re aiming to open a Brooklyn bookstore with exclusively queer inventory—the first of its kind in the borough.
On October 1, the Nonbinarian launched a Kickstarter aiming to raise $100 thousand to fund a holiday pop-up store for the end of 2024, as well as the initial rent, equipment, and inventory for its permanent brick-and-mortar storefront. Slated for residence in the Prospect Lefferts Garden neighborhood of Brooklyn, which has been a book desert since Greenlight Bookstore closed its location there last year, The Nonbinarian Bookstore aims to be a community space for trans and queer Brooklynites, similar to how Bluestockings Cooperative (a partner of the Book Bike) operates in Manhattan.
“Two of the core tenets of the Nonbinarian’s mission are ‘everyone deserves to see themselves on the shelves’ and ‘book ownership is a right,’” volunteer coordinator Alyssa Lo tells me. “By opening a bookstore stocking exclusively queer books and goods, we’re helping to ensure that Brooklyn’s queer community is guaranteed to find a story in our shelves they can see themselves reflected in.”
The Nonbinarian team is comprised of career booksellers like Kerimian, many of whom have over a decade’s worth of experience, as well as publishing professionals, marketing professionals, influencers, artists, makers, and readers of all stripes. The team is intimately acquainted with the competition provided by Amazon and other box retailers, as well as the competitive retail-rent market in New York—and it’s ready for the challenge.
“Opening a bookstore unto itself is already incredibly exciting, but I’m really looking forward to the store also being a community space. There are a lot of excellent organizations and mutual aid collectives in Brooklyn doing great work to support the borough’s LGBTQ+ community, several of which we’ve partnered with in our capacity operating as a cargo bike,” says Lo. “Having a physical space will allow the Nonbinarian to expand our programming, and I hope we get to partner with and meet many more folks through the brick-and-mortar.”
As for the Book Bike itself, it’s not going anywhere. In the Kickstarter description, Kerimian writes, “In providing a year-round space for our community, we aim to continue the work we started with our pop-up events and empower and affirm queer and trans people of all ages in a time of rising censorship and legislative violence. We will continue to offer accessible services, such as free resources, workshops, and events, as well as continuing the foundational work of the Book Bike’s mobile book distribution.”
The Nonbinarian operates on the tenet that “we take care of us,” which has been central since Kerimian launched the project for their 34th birthday two years ago. The team crowdfunded the bike itself and still relies on community support to maintain its storage unit, inventory, and bike upkeep. In addition to donating physical media, supporters can also subscribe on Ko-Fi, buy merchandise, purchase books from the Nonbinarian’s Bookshop storefront, and select the bike their store of choice on Libro.fm,.
But for the duration of the Kickstarter campaign, which runs until October 31st at 10:31 a.m. ET, the team hopes supporters will focus their donations toward The Nonbinarian Bookstore. In the first 24 hours of the campaign, the team raised nearly $5 thousand and earned the coveted “Project We Love” badge from Kickstarter. It’s offering two “early bird” discounts on exclusive merchandise tiers until Thursday, October 3, and backers can also pledge for stickers, bike multi-tools, custom book subscriptions, the ability to curate a shelf when the store opens, the ability to have their name painted on the store’s “founders wall,” and more.
And although the Book Bike and the planned Bookstore are located in Brooklyn, Kerimian still hopes to increase the project’s reach. As they said last year, they want to “bring this work to the most vulnerable populations and reach book deserts outside of cities. That’s a longer-term vision I hope to manifest over time.”
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Washington State-native Travis Holp is a psychic medium with close to 300 thousand followers on Instagram and 500 thousand on Tik Tok. Known on social media as the Warrior Unicorn – a nod to his fighting spirit toward LGBTQ and mental health awareness issues, combined with his effervescent personality – Travis connects with those who have passed over and delivers messages to their loved ones in the physical world.
Through one-on-one readings and large public events, he says he does it with one aim in mind: that clients leave their time with him feeling a new sense of connection, clarity, closure and healing. He’ll make his Los Angeles debut at The Vault in the Beverly Center on Sunday, September 29, at 7pm.
Holp doesn’t recall when he discovered his psychic ability. He simply remembers being very young, maybe four-years-old, and having long conversations with what people around him assumed were his imaginary friends but, he now realizes, were his Spirit guides. “I can’t say there was one specific moment, but more like many moments throughout my life.”
It wasn’t until his early 20s when he decided to turn his skill into a profession. “Early on in my journey, I read as many books on mediumship as I could find,” he continues. He quickly found himself inundated with Spirit hoping to connect with loved ones in the physical world.
One of his biggest concerns became protecting his energy and learning to keep boundaries with the spiritual world.
“My now mentor and friend MaryAnn DiMarco wrote this great book called Medium Mentor, and she has some great exercises for spiritual protection.”
He also takes steps to nurture his special gift. “I regularly meditate and do things to raise my vibration like dancing to music.” A favorite song of his to listen to before readings and live events is Belinda Carlisle’s “Heaven is a Place on Earth”.
He believes most people have psychic abilities. Some, like himself, are born with it, and others access it later in life. “Like any other ability, it is absolutely possible for a person to learn to connect for him or herself,” he says. He often teaches people how to do it during sessions and at live classes.
The best way he has found to enhance mediumistic abilities is to actively participate in one’s own emotional healing. He says the connection we have with ourselves is the foundation for mediumship. “Like anything, it takes some training but I have gotten really adept at understanding the messages Spirit tells me,” Holp explains. He sees Spirit in his mind’s eye, and he hears and feels their communications. “Spirit uses my own frame of reference and symbols to help me convey their messages.”
His main purpose with Spirit is being a vessel. He views himself as the Guncle (gay uncle) of the Spirit world. “I always tell it like it is,” he says, “but I’m careful to deliver information with kindness, joy, and hope.”
Though both of his grandmothers “pop in” from time to time (he’ll feel their warm and loving energy and always enjoys it when they come to say hello!), he typically won’t read for close family members because he knows too much information about them. However, sometimes Spirit does present itself for a loved one.
When it does, Travis will thank the Spirit for coming but let them know that he prefers not to send a message. It’s all about keeping healthy boundaries between himself and his loved ones.
He does the same thing while on dates.
“I don’t date much, but when I do and I tell a guy how I make my living, they often worry that I’m reading them. I am not,” he insists. “I may get little nudges here and there, like one time I felt the energy of a mom in Spirit for someone I was on a date with, and a few moments later, he shared his mom had passed from cancer a few years prior, but I won’t stop a date to deliver a reading. It’s not very romantic,” he laughs.
“I believe I am meant to help others along their healing journey,” he continues. “Whether a client seeks guidance on a specific topic, wants to connect with a loved one in Spirit, or wants to deepen their own spiritual practice, I’m here to help like any great guncle who knows a lot of sh-t would.”
He admits that he often surprises himself with the accuracy of his messages. “I especially love it when the two people shared a special word or song and then Spirit reveals that word or title to me so that I can relay it back to my client. It’s validation, for sure, but it is also a fun feather in my cap.”
As far as the messages that he most often receives from Spirit, Holp says our dearly departed wish that we would let go of regret, guilt, and shame. “One of the things I have learned from Spirit is that most of what we carry isn’t necessary. In the end, all that really matters is love.”
Travis Holp appears at The Vault in the Beverly Center (8500 Beverly Blvd, Suite 860) on Sunday, Sept 29th at 7pm. For tickets, visit: www.travisholp.com
A former Prince George’s County, Maryland, elementary school teacher who was arrested on assault charges in Virginia and indicted for…
A former Prince George’s County, Maryland, elementary school teacher who was arrested on assault charges in Virginia and indicted for allegedly attacking people with pepper spray in a D.C. park was found not guilty.
Years after Michael Thomas Pruden, 50, was hit with seven federal assault charges related to “bias-motivated assaults” on men from 2018 to 2021 in Meridian Hill/Malcolm X Park, a jury of his peers in Washington D.C. acquitted him of all charges.
Initially, prosecutors argued before a grand jury that Pruden attacked victims because of their perceived sexual orientation, targeting a park known for cruising, or “a meeting place for men seeking consensual sex with other men,” according to charging documents.
The indictment identified a total of five victims who were assaulted during evening activities at the park in D.C., claiming Pruden pretended to be a member of law enforcement and attacked unsuspecting men.
“Before spraying the men, Pruden pretended to be a Park Police officer, shined a flashlight in the victims’ faces and gave the victims police-style directives,” the department said in a July 2022 press release.
Prosecutors also brought forth digital evidence from Pruden — “text or social media messages or profiles that reference ‘cruising,’ Meridian Hill Park or Malcolm X Park,” and social media activity on platforms like Jack’d and Grindr ahead of this week’s jury trial. Jurors began deliberation Thursday and reached their decision Friday afternoon.
Pruden’s acquittal comes more than two years after his arrest in Norfolk, Virginia, due in part to significant delays in the trial. Notable issues included changes in representation and motions to bifurcate the trial — separating the question of whether Pruden committed the offenses charged from deliberation on the reason being the victims’ espoused or assumed sexual orientation.
Over a year into enacting a policy requiring instructors to tell parents if their children request to go by a different name or pronouns, Katy ISD officials report that there have been 36 instances where officials have made such notifications.
This number is an increase compared to the 19 notifications made roughly two months after the policy was adopted in August 2023. According to a public information request filed by Students Engaged in Advancing Texas — a student-led advocacy group — there have been no identified cases where a family member was not informed of a name or pronoun change.
The district declined to provide information regarding how and why decisions to notify were made, indicating that further details would be located in student files and confidential education records, which the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act protects.
“It’s sad to see this number increasing, and students are standing up for those who can’t advocate for themselves,” Cameron Samuels, executive director of SEAT and a former Katy ISD student, said. “We really hope this won’t be a norm for future generations.”
The controversial “gender fluidity” measure requires teachers to receive written permission from parents or guardians to use the name or different pronouns that a student requests to go by.
However, it states that instructors can choose not to refer to a student by their chosen name or pronouns despite parental consent.
One of the main arguments board president Victor Perez and fellow trustees Mary Ellen Cuzela, Amy Thieme and Morgan Calhoun made during the discussion before voting to approve the policy was that it reinforces the prioritization of parents’ rights.
The trustees in favor of the measure also indicated that it would prevent teachers from interfering in parent-child relationships by withholding such information from students’ parents or guardians.
Jarred Burton, a senior and president of Tompkins High School Sexuality and Gender Alliance, said those on the board who backed the policy’s passage are likely frustrated as the number of notifications going out to parents may not be as high as they initially anticipated.
“It depends on the school and the teachers,” Burton said. “I have heard of a lot of teachers enforcing it, but a lot of teachers also see the danger in it, and they’re scared to enforce it.”
“It’s not what they [trustees who supported it] wanted. It’s not what they envisioned,” he added. “I think it also shows how much of a waste of time it is for the district to constantly do all these things and make all these policies that they should know their employees, constituents and stakeholders don’t stand for.”
Trustees Rebecca Fox, Dawn Champagne and Lance Redmon voted against passing the policy. During the August 2023 board meeting, Fox said it would “make problems worse” for the district, similar to the book policy and ban of websites like the Trevor Project, which triggered a complaint against the district.
Fox’s concerns were actualized when SEAT filed a Title IX complaint against the district in November 2023. In May 2024, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights opened an investigation into the matter.
In an October 2023 report by the Houston Press, James Onambele, a former Katy ISD student who identifies as a transgender male, described the most harmful part of the policy as the “outing” or revealing students’ identities to their parents who may not be accepting or aware of their child’s situation.
Onambele noted that if the policy had been in place while he was a student, it would’ve made him “less open,” and being referred to as a girl would’ve made him “super uncomfortable.” He added that not feeling like he had anyone to talk to would’ve harmed his development.
“It seems like such a small difference, but in reality, it would’ve affected my life if I didn’t have those few teachers who were allowed to ask me, ‘What are your pronouns? ‘What is your name,’ Without spreading my business,” Onambele said.
Under the policy, employees are prohibited from asking for students’ pronouns and discussing “gender fluidity” or teaching such topics. Students are also required to use bathrooms and other facilities that align with their sex assigned at birth.
Many LGBTQ rights advocates who have spoken out against the policy warn trustees of assuming all parents are supportive their kids’ choices.
Photo by Faith Bugenhagen
Basil Chen, a senior and president of the gender and sexuality alliance at Jordan High School, said many transgender friends stopped introducing their names to their new teachers due to fear they won’t accept them.
Chen’s friends have what Chen described as an “it is what is” attitude toward not being able to identify the way they want to.
“We tend to joke about it being a ‘Texas’ thing, probably just to feel better about it,” Chen wrote to the Houston Press via text. “I’ve heard people talk about how much it hurts to be referred to by the wrong name, but ultimately there’s not much we can do about it since we’re not the ones in power and safety is always the top priority.”
Chen said it is discouraging to see participation dwindle at GASA meetings because students fear being seen attending them. Last year, the group had roughly 90 members, only about 10 of whom consistently showed up for meetings after the policy passed.
The group has not met this school year due to logistical issues with sponsorships. Participation further slowed over the summer, with only one to three students showing up to events. Chen added that when recruiting new people to join, many say something along the lines of “I’d love to join, but my parents will get mad if they find out.”
The policy has a clause that makes an exception for notification to parents and guardians in cases of “suspected abuse,” but it does not specify the guidelines for making this distinction.
One staff member per campus is responsible for processing and sending the notifications. Burton said the implementation of the policy varies across the district and is largely contingent on a campus’s LGBTQ-friendliness.
However, Burton indicated that he heard from peers that teachers felt emboldened to purposely address students using their “deadname” or incorrect pronouns when the policy first passed.
Burton referred to one incident in which a student arrived at class following the board’s vote to adopt the measure and was told by an instructor that they would be “going back to” using the student’s deadname. The student left the room and subsequently dropped out of the district.
Burton hasn’t heard of many more instances like these. He echoed Chen’s sentiments, saying there is likely a direct correlation between this and students concealing their identities to protect themselves.
“Other than the outing of students — which is bad on its own — I think the precedent it creates that you cannot be safe being yourself in the classroom is doing a lot of damage to the newer students,” Burton said.
In a statement to the Houston Press, Samuels expressed concern for the 36 students affected by these notifications.
“This 36 is not only an abstract number but 36 students’ livelihoods. Each of these parental notifications holds a potentially heartbreaking story not foreign to domestic violence or suicide ideation. Forcibly outing a student places them in harm’s way and neglects their plea for support when courageously navigating this journey to loving themselves. Every transgender student deserves the same dignity and respect that is afforded to peers. We deserve agency and confidentiality to come out when ready, and Katy ISD has cost 36 students their livelihoods.”
VESTAVIA HILLS, Ala. — Principal Lauren Dressback didn’t think about it after it happened. After all, she was workplace-close with Wesley Smith, the custodian at Cahaba Heights Elementary School, in this affluent suburb of Birmingham. She called him “the mayor.” She said that he knew her two children, asked about her family almost daily and made a point of interacting. “Every day, a huge bear hug,” she recalled.
So, when Dressback, just after last Valentine’s Day, asked Smith to come into the nurse’s office and shut the door, and then shared three photos on her phone of who she had just started dating, it felt ordinary. Afterward, she said, “I just moved right on about my day.”
But the 2 minute, 13 second-exchange — captured on video by the nurse — would prove fateful.
In a few short months, after a two-decade career, Dressback, a popular educator, would go from Vestavia Hills City school district darling to controversial figure after she came out as gay, divorced her husband, and began dating a Black woman.
Within days of showing the custodian the photos, she was ordered to leave the building and was barred from district property. Soon, she found herself facing a litany of questions from district leaders about a seemingly minor issue: employee timesheets. In April, she was officially placed on administrative leave. On May 2, during a packed school board meeting, she was demoted, replaced as principal, and sent to run the district’s alternative high school.
At that school board meeting, as he had for weeks, Todd Freeman, the superintendent, refused to offer an explanation, even to Dressback. Rather, at the beginning of the meeting, he read a statement that “we have not, cannot, and will not make personnel decisions based on an individual’s race, sex, sexual orientation, religion, national origin or disability.” (When contacted, Vestavia Hills City Schools spokesperson Whit McGhee said the district would not discuss confidential personnel matters and declined to make Freeman available for an interview. He provided links to school board meeting minutes, district policies and Alabama educator codes without explaining how they applied in Dressback’s case. Freeman and two other district officials involved in the situation did not respond to emails requesting interviews or a list of detailed questions.)
Lauren Dressback on June 19, at the apartment where she moved after she and her husband divorced and sold their home. Credit: Charity Rachelle for The Hechinger Report
Despite Freeman’s assertion regarding personnel decisions, many people in the community believe differently. So many, in fact, that “the Dressback situation” has lit up social media (one TikTok post has more than 313,000 views), spurred supermarket conversations and online chatter — and challenged allegiances.
“The entire situation has divided the community,” said Abbey Skipper, a parent at Cahaba Heights Elementary. Some people, she said, are “trying to label everyone who is on the side of Dressback as leftists or Democrats or radicals” and assuming “everyone who supports the superintendent and the board is a Republican — which isn’t true.”
A private Facebook group, “We Stand With Lauren” quickly gathered 983 members, while a public Facebook post by a fifth grade teacher at Cahaba Heights complained of the “news frenzy and whirlwind of social media misinformation” and stated that, “We Stand for Our Superintendent, Our District Office, Our Board, and our new principal, Kim Polson.” The May 8 teacher post, which got 287 likes and 135 comments, both in support and challenging the post, went on to say, “To do our jobs to the best of our ability, we trust the people who have been charged to lead us.”
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Alabama has among the strictest anti-gay policies in the nation. This past legislative session, the House passed a bill to ban LGBTQ+ flags and symbols from schools. It also expands to middle schools the current “Don’t Say Gay” law, which prohibits instruction or discussion of LGBTQ+ issues in elementary schools. Its sponsor, Rep. Mack Butler, who represents a suburban community in northeast Alabama, stated that it could “purify the schools just a little bit.” He later walked back the comment. The bill died in the Senate, but Butler has vowed to reintroduce it next session.
The bill was one of dozens introduced or passed in states around the country restricting classroom discussion of gender identity, books with LGBTQ+ characters and displays of pride symbols. The laws have contributed to a climate in which “every classroom has been turned into a front” in a battle, said Melanie Willingham-Jaggers, executive director of GLSEN, which advocates for LGBTQ+ individuals in K-12 education. “Every educator, every administrator now has to be on that front line every single day,” she said. “We’re seeing educators leave because of the strain of the job made worse by the political moment we’re in and we’re also seeing because of the political moment we’re in, educators being targeted for their personal identity.”
Tiffany Wright, a professor at Millersville University in Pennsylvania who studies the experience of LGBTQ+ educators, said right now many “are very on edge.”* Wright and her colleagues have surveyed LGBTQ+ educators four times since 2007, with new 2024 data to be released in November. While the past decade has seen strides toward acceptance, “the regional differences are huge,” she said. “Folks in the South definitely felt less safe being out to their communities and students.” November’s presidential and statewide elections could yield even sharper differences in LGBTQ+ protections between red and blue states.
While quite a few states long had laws barring discrimination based on sexual orientation, it took a 2020 Supreme Court decision, Bostock v. Clayton County, to bring such protections to Alabama. That changed landscape spurred Dressback to engage lawyer Jon Goldfarb, who filed a complaint alleging work-based discrimination with the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which is investigating.This fall, he expects to file a separate federal civil rights complaint. In 30 years of practice in Alabama, Goldfarb said, “I’ve had a lot of people that have come to me and complain about being discriminated against because of their sexual orientation.” Until Bostock, he would tell them, “There is nothing we can do.”
A review of Dressback’s personnel file shows no reprimands until June, when she received an evaluation questioning her professional conduct that followed her filing the EEOC complaint. This raises a question: Why was she removed?
Dressback’s situation, however, is about more than the law. It also challenges her place in the white Christian, predominantly conservative community she grew up in, belongs to and loves. And it offers a test case in a divided political time: Will her removal and the outcry that followed harden partisan alignments — or shake them? Even in Alabama, a Pew Research Center survey shows, more than one-third of those who lean Republican say homosexuality should be accepted.
Cahaba Heights Elementary School in Vestavia Hills, Alabama, where Lauren Dressback served as principal and from which she was escorted out in February. She was banned from school grounds until mid-August. Credit: Charity Rachelle for The Hechinger Report
Brian DeMarco, a local attorney and high school classmate of Dressback’s, was sporting bright print swim trunks, a T-shirt and a Vestavia Hills baseball cap when we met at the public swimming pool where he’d brought his kids. We sat at a picnic table; the squeals of children released to the joys of summer carried in the warm Alabama air. He said he understands why some people may not be comfortable with a gay elementary school principal.
“Her coming out as an educator, being around children, I think that frightens people, certain people all over the country,” he said. And in the South, in a conservative town, “it does become a bigger issue to people.” Politically, DeMarco tends “to swing right,” but sent Dressback a message of support on Facebook. “Everybody that knows Lauren knows she is a good person,” he said.
In fact, Dressback’s case has spurred public outrage because so many people do know her. She attended Vestavia Hills Public Schools — Class of 1997 — and her mother, now retired, was a popular high school English teacher and yearbook adviser. She followed her parents into education (her father was a geography professor) and returned to teach social studies at the high school.
In 2015, she was named secondary teacher of the year; in 2017, the graduating class dedicated the yearbook to her. She moved into administration and advanced; in 2022 she was appointed principal of Cahaba Heights Elementary School. She was awarded a three-year contract, effective July 2023, following a probationary year. In December — weeks before she was told to gather her things and was escorted off school grounds — she was given a positive write-up by an assistant superintendent who observed her running a meeting of teachers about the school’s “core values.”
It also matters that this story is unfolding in Vestavia Hills. The city’s motto is “A Life Above,” and the municipal website declares that it “exemplifies the ideals of fine southern hospitality.” The community was born as a post-World War II subdivision and incorporated in 1950 with 3,000 residents (it now has 38,000). It is an effortfully attractive place with well-kept painted brick homes and clipped lawns. It is named for Vestavia, the exotic estate of former Birmingham Mayor George C. Ward whose Roman-inspired home was here. The 1930s-era news accounts describe lavish parties with male servers draped in togas.
Vestavia Hills is also one of the “over the mountain” suburbs of Birmingham. When you drive over Red Mountain out of the urban core with its reminders of steelmaking and jazz, of Martin Luther King Jr. and the Negro Leagues, away from streets where shabbily dressed men push wheeled contrivances, where pride flags fly and breweries sprout, where drag queens coexist with affirming churches, you enter a different world. Birmingham is a Black city; Vestavia Hills is 86 percent white.
And like surrounding white suburbs of Mountain Brook, Homewood and Hoover, Vestavia Hills competes on lifestyle, including its public schools. Alabama is hardly an education leader, yet the four districts earn mention in U.S. News rankings. Church is also central to life here; biographies for public officials name which they attend.
“You move a child into the school system, there’s two questions they’re asked,” Julianne Julian, a resident and another Dressback high school classmate, said when we met at a coveted rear table inside the Diplomat Deli, a popular Vestavia Hills lunch spot. “Who are you for as far as football — Alabama? Auburn? — and what church do you go to?”
Teams matter in Vestavia Hills — the high school’s in particular. The district itself was founded in 1970 amid federal desegregation orders, when residents broke away from the Jefferson County Schools and agreed to pay an extra tax. They adopted the Rebel Man in Civil War military uniform as the district’s mascot. Dressback’s 1996 junior year high school yearbook includes a photo of students at a rally waving massive Confederate flags. “It was just kind of the way we were growing up,” said DeMarco, who in high school displayed a Confederate flag on his Nissan pickup. “It was just kind of cool.”
It wasn’t until 2015 that the district considered changing the mascot. After contentious public meetings in which some argued that the mascot and flag were not racist — a point ridiculed by John Oliver on national television — the district chose to adopt the 1Rebel rebrand. (Mess with one Rebel and you mess with us all, is the concept. They are still called “The Rebels,” but simply use the letters “VH.”)
Lauren Dressback on June 19, several weeks before she was cleared to return to work — at the alternative school. Credit: Charity Rachelle for The Hechinger Report
When I met with Dressback, days after school let out, she answered the door to her apartment wearing a T-shirt that read “love. empathy. compassion. inclusion. justice. kindness.” She looked like she could use every one of those things.
She was welcoming, but said she was nervous about talking. She had not spoken publicly since she was escorted out of Cahaba Heights Elementary in February. We sat at her dining table — I brought an Italian sub, no onions or peppers, hot, from Diplomat Deli, Dressback’s regular order — and in our conversations then and later, she appeared to believe the best about people.
Others in Vestavia clearly believe the best about her: Since things erupted, her phone has pinged with messages, including from former students. “Thank you for making an impact on my life,” said one of the many that she shared with me. “You stood up for me in class when someone made fun of me for having depression and I’ll never forget that,” wrote another. And, “you may not remember me, but I had you as a teacher during my time at VHHS and even when I was not your student, I still saw you as a person who cared for all students, not just the ones on your roster.” (Dressback said she has “not received any negative messages. Not one.”)
At Cahaba Heights, parents noticed her gift for calming children with behavior issues. A mother of twins who got tripped up by transitions (drop-off is “the hardest part of our morning”) said that, with Dressback greeting them at the curb, “We didn’t have that struggle this year at all.” Sometimes Dressback would slip on a wig or costume — Santa, Minion, astronaut, among others; before winter breaks she donned an elf outfit and climbed atop the brick marquee in front of the school to the delight of arriving children and passing cars. She wanted to remind everyone that school is fun.
“Her love for the children just reached every square inch of the school,” said Skipper, the Cahaba Heights parent of a second grader who moved to the neighborhood specifically for the school. Her removal “plunged me into grief. I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t sleep, I lost weight. The amount of upset was palpable. I loved her. She loved my child.”
As we sat at her dining table, Dressback shared that she sensed she was gay in high school but said that “it sort of felt clear to me that I couldn’t have that life here.” The only gay people she knew well were two family members. When her Uncle Dennis died of complications from HIV and her cousin Robyn died by suicide, as upset as she was, being out was tough to imagine.
The tragedies coincided with her time at Samford University, the private Baptist college where her father taught. “It’s one of the most religiously conservative schools in the nation,” she said. “You go to Samford to not be different.” And it was there in a geography class that she met Shane Dressback, when the two arrived early one day and “started chit-chatting.” They were engaged the next year, and married in January 2001, just after her December graduation.
“I met Shane and did very genuinely fall in love with him,” she said. “He is a wonderful man.” They had two children — Kaylee graduated from college in May and is playing semi-pro soccer, and Tyler is a senior in high school — and were consumed with family life. But then, as she approached becoming an empty nester, Dressback began having panic attacks around being gay, she said, feeling that “I’ve pushed this down for a really long time.”
This past December, she came out to Shane. They didn’t speak for more than 24 hours. Then, she texted him to say she was going to church. Minutes after the service began, she told me, “He texted me and said, ‘I’m here. May I come sit by you?’ So, we sat together at this church service. Both of us cried the whole way through it.”
Shane Dressback told me that he struggled with the news. On one of his worst days, however, he said that God told him to love her “no matter what.” The next day, he told Lauren, “I was going to love her unconditionally and unconventionally.” The marriage ending was painful, but they remain close. “I know she loved me for 23 years,” he said. “There was nothing fake there.”
The two held hands as they told their children and parents. They divorced, sold their home and rented apartments near one another. They still have family dinners and Shane cooks; leftovers of “Daddy’s Jambalaya” were in the refrigerator of Lauren Dressback’s apartment when I visited. Kaylee came by with her goldendoodle, Dixie, to grab a helping for lunch.
Throughout Dressback’s ordeal with the school district, Shane has been her defender. “Lauren is a child of God and should be treated as such,” he said, as we sat at a friend’s brewery during off-hours. He knows her to be professionally excellent; her personal life should not matter. “It was no one’s business what was going on in our bedroom beforehand and I don’t think that’s anybody’s business now,” he said. “People have drawn a line in the sand where I think it needs to be more about, you know, loving people as Jesus did.”
Shane was the one who urged Dressback to attend a brunch in early February organized by members of a LILLES Facebook group, which connects later-in-life lesbians. There she met her girlfriend, Angela Whitlock, a former medical operations officer in the U.S. Army and law student (she graduated in May). The two began a relationship that appears to charm and steady Dressback. At a dinner during my visit, they held hands under the table.
Dressback says she came out to Freeman, the superintendent, at the end of a one-on-one meeting in January in the spirit of transparency. But the incident that appears central to Dressback’s removal unfolded just after Valentine’s Day, when Dressback asked Smith, the custodian, to come into the office of nurse Julie Corley, whom she described as a close friend at the time, and “close the door.”
Dressback said it was Corley’s idea to show Smith the photos to see his reaction. He was in the lunchroom near Corley’s office. The brief exchange between Dressback and Smith was captured on video. (Dressback said she did not initially notice Corley filming, but did not stop her when she did, something she now regrets.) Corley did not respond to several interview requests by email and text, and, when reached by phone, said she was not interested in speaking and hung up. Dressback said she has not had any communication with Corley since being removed.
“You shared something about your past, I was going to share something with you,” Dressback says to Smith in the video. “Do you want to see a picture of who I’m dating?” She and Whitlock had had their third date on Feb. 14. He says reflexively, “Shane?” She responds, “He’s my ex-husband.” Smith appears surprised. “April Fool?” and asks how long they were married. She says, “23 years.” He expresses disbelief. “You and him broke up?” Dressback holds out her phone to show a photo of her and Whitlock.
“Who the hell is this? I mean, Who is this?” he asks. Several times Smith states that he doesn’t believe it. She hands him her phone. “Bullshit!” he exclaims as he looks at the three photos. “Stop lyin’!” There is one of Whitlock kissing Dressback on the cheek, one with their faces cheek to cheek and one in which they are sitting at a bar with Dressback’s arms around Whitlock, their noses touching. Smith then says, “Wow, I’m sorry,” and pulls her into a hug. “Once you go Black, baby, you don’t go back,” he quips. She groans at his attempt at humor.
Dressback’s lawyer said that an affidavit the district obtained from Smith “appears to be in conflict on several points with what the video shows,” including a claim that he was made uncomfortable by the encounter. When reached by phone, Smith insisted, “I made no type of statement” even as district officials were “coming at me” seeking to query him, he said. “I hadn’t talked to nobody about the incident.”
(McGhee, the school district spokesperson, declined to provide answers to specific questions, including regarding the apparent affidavit from Smith.)
This sign on Route 31 greets drivers traveling from downtown Birmingham over Red Mountain to the affluent suburb of Vestavia Hills Credit: Charity Rachelle for The Hechinger Report
Days after Dressback shared the photos, on the morning of Feb. 23, Meredith Hanson, the district’s director of personnel, and Aimee Rainey, the assistant superintendent who had given Dressback the positive write-up in December, arrived at Cahaba Heights for a surprise meeting. Dressback said they told her that someone had complained that she shared “explicit” details of her relationship at a meeting with teachers. Dressback knew that to be untrue. “I kind of relaxed because I was like, ‘Oh, yeah, that absolutely did not happen,’” she recalled.
They questioned her in a way she found confusing. She asked for details of the complaint, but was told, “You know, ‘explicit.’ And I’m like, I know what ‘explicit’ means. Like are you going to tell me what they said I said or what?” They asked if she showed Smith photos of her and her girlfriend. She said she did. Meanwhile, she observed to me later, “There is a picture of Shane and me kissing on our lips at our wedding on the bookshelf right behind them.” (Hanson and Rainey did not respond to interview requests or to a list of detailed questions for this story.)
Dressback says she was then told to gather her belongings, and that she was being placed on “detached duty,” requiring that she work from home. She was barred from school property. She was escorted from the building, which she said made her feel “like a criminal.” She expected to be gone for a few days.
But several days later, Dressback was informed of a new problem: timesheets. In January, she had met with staff to remind them about clocking in and out (everyone must clock in, and paraprofessionals must clock out during lunch).
On March 4, while still barred from the Cahaba Heights campus, Dressback met with Freeman, Rainey and Hanson in the conference room at the central office to discuss timesheets. Two days later, she was told that the following morning, March 7, she was to fire two employees for irregularities on their timesheets. One, she knew, had an attendance problem. She said that she had already discussed with Hanson not renewing him at the end of the school year.
The other was a close friend, Stefanie Robinson, a paraprofessional who worked with students with severe disabilities, including those requiring help with feeding and diapering. Robinson often stayed in the classroom during her lunch breaks to aid the special education teacher because one student had as many as 30 seizures a day. When I met Robinson at her home, she acknowledged to sometimes forgetting to clock out or in, or not being able to do so if she was attending to a child’s needs. “If I’m in a massive diaper situation, I’m not going to remember to clock out, or if I’m helping a kid that’s having a seizure or, you know, one that’s in crisis,” Robinson told me.
What most upset Robinson, however, was that shortly after Dressback was escorted out of the school and placed on “detached duty,” requiring she work from home, Robinson faced 45 minutes of questioning by Hanson and Rainey about Dressback’s dating life that she says “felt like an interrogation.” After confirming that she and Dressback were close, Robinson says she was asked questions such as, “When Lauren goes on a date, what does she say happens? And I was like, ‘What do you mean? What do you want to know?” They pressed: “Well, when she goes on a date and the date ends, what does she say happens after that?” Robinson insisted, “I don’t ask her how her date ended.”
On March 7 at 5:58 a.m., Robinson received a text from Hanson asking her “to start your day at the Board of Education” instead of Cahaba Heights. As soon as she arrived at the central office, she saw Dressback in the room; Dressback said Freeman had told her to fire Robinson. “I could tell she’d been crying,” said Robinson. “And I just smiled at her, I was like, ‘It’s OK.’” Robinson recalled Dressback saying, “in the most robotic tone, ‘It’s my recommendation to the board that your contract be terminated immediately.’”
She hugged Dressback, told her she loved her, and left. Robinson texted the parent of one of her students, a second grade girl who is nonverbal, uses a wheelchair and has cerebral palsy and epilepsy. The girl’s mom, Payton Smith, no relation to Wesley, told me that she’d appreciated how Dressback had welcomed her child to the school a few years earlier. The principal had asked, “‘What do we need to do to make your kid feel comfortable?’ and recognized her as a child,” and not a set of legal educational requirements to meet, Smith recalled. Despite Robinson’s key role in her daughter’s education, Smith said she was not officially notified until March 19 — nearly two weeks later — via email that “Mrs. Robinson is no longer working at VHECH,” district shorthand for Cahaba Heights.
Yet an email of district documentation shared with me states the date of Robinson’s leaving as April 5, and said that she had resigned. Nonetheless, the district continued to pay her for the rest of the school year, which she said felt “like I was being paid off because they knew what they did was wrong.” She is now a clinical research data coordinator for University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Medicine. (Neither McGhee, the district spokesperson, nor Hanson, in charge of HR, responded to email requests seeking comment on why Robinson was fired, the claim that she had resigned, or the discrepancy in her pay.)
Meanwhile, on March 13, Dressback emailed Freeman asking to be reinstated to her position at Cahaba Heights, immediately. “I believe the action the system has taken against me is discrimination because of my sexual orientation, my interracial relationship, and my gender,” she wrote. The next day, Goldfarb, her lawyer, filed the EEOC complaint. (He later amended it to allege additional discrimination and that the district had retaliated against her for the filing.)
On April 18, Dressback received a letter signed by Freeman officially placing her on administrative leave. It states that she is “not to contact any employees of the Vestavia Hills Board of Education related to your or their employment or relationship with the Vestavia Hills City Schools.” The letter does not state a reason for the action.
Lauren Dressback watches her daughter, Kaylee, play for Birmingham Legion WFC, a semi-pro soccer club, on June 19. Credit: Charity Rachelle for The Hechinger Report
As a result, to parents and some educators, Dressback seemed to have vanished. “I thought like, ‘Oh, I bet she’s sick. That’s really sad,’” said Lindsay Morton, a Cahaba Heights parent, a reaction echoed by others. Then, on April 27, two of Dressback’s classmates from high school posted videos on social media.
“Where is Principal Dressback???” a schoolmate and friend, Karl Julian, titled a video on his YouTube channel. It has been viewed more than 11,000 times. Lauren Pilleteri Reece, who as laurenpcrna has 228.7K followers on TikTok, posted several videos narrating Dressback’s battle; the first has more than 313,000 views and 3,400 comments. Reece has known Dressback since high school.
When the Vestavia Hills School Board called a meeting five days later, on May 2, to take up Dressback’s employment, everyone seemed to know about it. People rallied outside the district headquarters holding posters with messages such as “We Stand with Principal Dressback” and “Love is Love.” Many people wore green, Dressback’s favorite color, to signal support. Local TV and news reporters showed up.
The room thrummed with emotion. There were angry, even tearful Cahaba Heights Elementary parents, teachers and retired teachers, students, former classmates and others who knew Dressback, plus some who didn’t know her. “I’ve never met her, I just know she had been wronged,” said Jim Whisenhunt, an advertising executive whose children, now grown, attended Vestavia Hills public schools.
Dressback, fearing that she could not keep her composure, did not attend. Those who did attend had a lot to share. But before public comments were permitted or a vote was taken, Freeman read the prepared statement in which he said he wanted “to address, in general, personnel decisions made by the board.” He went on to say that they “have not, cannot, and will not make personnel decisions based on an individual’s race, sex, sexual orientation, religion, national origin, or disability” and that “all of our decisions are vetted thoroughly and thoughtfully.” He added that “district employees contribute to academic excellence and are committed to our mission to provide every child in our schools the opportunity to learn without limits.” Then, over the objections of many in the audience who demanded a chance to comment before a vote was taken, the board officially transferred Dressback from Cahaba Heights Elementary to the alternative school.
When public comments began, the outrage was obvious. “We may color outside of your lines a little bit, but coloring outside of your lines at no point does that ever mean that we are unprofessional. Lauren did not become unprofessional overnight,” said a charged-up Reece, who also came out as an adult. “You started lookingat her as unprofessional overnight.”
Rep. Neil Rafferty, a Democrat who represents Birmingham, stated that he “felt compelled to drive straight here” after “a long week in Montgomery” even though it is not his district. “We are all watching this. It is not just a Vestavia Hills issue anymore,” said Rafferty, the only openly gay member of the Alabama Legislature. The action, he said, signals “to your students who might be LGBTQ that they don’t matter.”
Rev. Julie Conrady, minister of the Unitarian Universalist Churches of Birmingham and Tuscaloosa, and president of a local interfaith group, stood up to speak. “You are sending her a message that in Vestavia Hills it is not OK to be LGBTQ,” she told the board and superintendent. “You should not be punished in your job in 2024 because of who you love.” Conrady, in black liturgical robe and green stole, told the crowd “that there are consequences here for all these people. I want you to get pictures of every single name and vote them the hell out!” (The school board is appointed by the City Council, not elected.)
Another speaker, Allison Black Cornelius, who said she was “a conservative Republican,” focused on what seemed to make this issue explode: the silence. The superintendent and board had given no explanation, even to Dressback, as to why she was removed and now demoted, she said. “When you wait this long,” said Cornelius, “it puts this person in this black cloud.”
Her point underscored a question others raised at the meeting to a board that largely remained silent: If Dressback did something so egregious as to require she be escorted from school and barred from district property, why was she suitable to lead the alternative school? The district declined to answer this question.
The division, so apparent at that meeting, seemed to only harden a few weeks later during the board’s annual meeting on May 28. A group supporting the board and superintendent appeared in blue T-shirts and applauded after the board gave Freeman a new four-year contract that included a raise to $239,500 (he was paid $190,000 when he was hired in 2018) plus perks. Dressback supporters in green again spoke, sharing their frustration.
This is not the first time Vestavia Hills City Schools have made unpopular personnel moves. In August 2020, Tyler Burgess, a well-loved bow-tied principal, was removed as head of the high school and assigned to oversee remote learning during Covid, when many classes were online; the board voted not to renew his contract in March 2021. Students organized a protest; 3,134 people signed a petition calling for his reinstatement. The board and superintendent did not provide an explanation for their decision. Burgess, who has a doctorate in education, is now director of learning and development at a large construction firm. He did not respond to multiple interview requests.
Danielle Tinker came to Vestavia Hills after more than a dozen years in Birmingham and Jefferson County schools, first as assistant principal at Liberty Park Elementary. In spring 2021, she was selected as principal of Cahaba Heights. From the start, Tinker, who is Black, felt unwelcome at the school where the teaching staff was nearly all white, she told me when we met for lunch. The day she was introduced as the new principal, a staff member emailed her, saying that “Cahaba Heights is a family” and that “today was hard on this family,” according to a copy of the email that she shared with me. Tinker said she was told by staff that the faculty had wanted a different principal; a later inquiry confirmed that staff felt “blindsided” when she was selected over that individual.
As principal, Tinker raised questions with Rainey, the assistant superintendent, over student articles in a fall 2021 newsletter, including two about race. They were titled “Anti-Racist Kids: Leading the Way to New Beginnings” and “Learning About Racism: How It Can Change Lives.” Tinker told me she feared those articles would be “more fluff than addressing the actual challenge” with claims such as “Racism is part of our lives, but it doesn’t have to be a bad thing if we are the ones ending it.” Rainey agreed to pause publication of the newsletter, which she said upset several teachers who wanted it published.
On Dec. 16, 2021, several hours after Tinker told teachers that publication was being paused, Tinker emailed Hanson raising an “employee concern” after one of the teachers “stormed down the hallway” and was “pointing at me and yelling,” according to a copy of Tinker’s email exchanges that she shared with me. The next day, Tinker received a letter from Freeman stating that he was recommending she be transferred to the alternative school, effective Jan. 3. In March, Tinker filed a complaint of racial discrimination with the EEOC and resigned, using her remaining personal time to cover her pay for the remainder of the school year. In February 2023, she and the district reached a settlement for an undisclosed amount. She is using the money to attend law school. (McGhee, the district spokesperson, did not answer questions about Tinker or Burgess; Rainey and Hanson also did not respond.)
The Sibyl Temple Gazebo in Vestavia Hills, Alabama, a landmark and city symbol that nods to the Italian-inspired estate of former Birmingham Mayor George C. Ward, where the city is sited. Credit: Charity Rachelle for The Hechinger Report
On my last day in town in early June, Dressback gave me a guided tour of Vestavia Hills. We met inside the Diplomat Deli; Reece, Dressback’s high school classmate with the large TikTok following, joined us. As we walked out, Dressback, wearing a Care Bears T-shirt, showed off a new tattoo on her left forearm. In typewriter font it reads, “Speak the truth, even if your voice shakes.”
I slid into the passenger seat of her car, a red Buick Encore whose license plate reads “DBACK.” Reece hopped in back. An order of fries from Milo’s, a favorite Dressback fast-food spot since high school, leaned in a cup holder. Soon, we passed places they hung out as kids, schools they attended, new neighborhoods and old, the spot at Vestavia Country Club with a panoramic view where kids still take prom photos.
The discussion jumbled together past and present, reminding these childhood friends — both of whom came out as adults — how much has changed. And how much has not. When we reached Vestavia Hills High School, Dressback stopped near a small sign at sidewalk level that reads “Alternative Placement” with an arrow. I descended metal stairs that span a rocky embankment; the alternative school, Dressback’s new assignment, is subterranean, its entrance nearly hidden from view. If architecture can relay shame, it might look like this.
Yet when I returned to the car, Dressback told me she saw the alternative school as an opportunity rather than an exit. The school has often operated without a principal (Tinker never stepped inside or interacted with students, partly because of the Covid pandemic). At that late May school board meeting, Freeman could not say how many pupils attend the school. But Dressback was struck by what DeMarco, her classmate, told her. As a student, he spent time at the alternative school; he could have used someone like her.
“I’m not gonna just go and sit and read a book. I can’t do that,” Dressback said, as she pulled out of the high school driveway. She wanted to make it a place less about punishment and more about connecting with kids for whom the traditional school is not a fit. It should not be a dumping ground for educators or for kids, she said. “My mindset is I’m gonna go and I’m gonna make this the best damn alternative school in the state.”
In other words, Dressback is not willing to let go or to disappear. Yet “the Dressback situation” is hardly resolved. A few days after my visit, in early June, Dressback met with Freeman to receive an official performance review for the 2023-24 academic year, a copy of which she shared with me. It was the first official yearly evaluation she had been given in her career in the district despite a stipulation in her contract that this occur annually, she said. It is searing. It finds that her “job performance is unsatisfactory.” The report was sent to the state Department of Education, per Alabama code requiring that personnel records and “investigative information” of employees placed on administrative leave for cause be reviewed by the department.
Most damning are six bullet points of claims. One alludes to Robinson’s employment and the timesheet matter. The most explosive is cast as “failure to demonstrate moderation, restraint, and civility in dealing with employees” and includes salacious assertions, including “public displays of affection and of photographs which would not, for example, be tolerated even among high school students” — presumably a reference to the photos shown to Smith, the custodian. It includes a charge Dressback had never heard before: a claim of “remote activation by your husband of a sexual toy on your person while you were in a school meeting.”
Dressback was floored by the charges, and countered each in her rebuttal, which she asked to have filed with the state Department of Education in response to Freeman’s report. Regarding the sex toy claim, Dressback wrote that it is “false. I have never done that, and I would never do that.” The very idea of “remote activation” of a sex toy by her husband was absurd, she said. “I wouldn’t think that I would need to remind you that my ex-husband and I are divorced, that I have recently come out as gay, and that I am now in a committed relationship with a woman,” she wrote.
Such a thing never happened then, or in any school year, her rebuttal continued. She wrote that she “cannot imagine why you would credit this slanderous and irresponsible allegation” and include it in her personnel record, “other than to retaliate against me” for the EEOC filing.
Her lawyer said in an email that the performance review “is further retaliation and an attempt to create further pretexts for the adverse employment actions the Board has already taken against her.”
On Aug. 15, after the state Department of Education had reviewed the evaluation submitted by Freeman, the agency stated in a letter addressed to Dressback, cc’ing Freeman, that it had “examined information regarding an investigation in the Vestavia Hills City School System” and “decided to not take action against your Alabama Educator Certificate.” The same day, Freeman said in a letter to Dressback that she would “no longer be on administrative leave and may return to work” at the alternative school.
It has been baffling and infuriating to some in the community as to how such charges surfaced so soon after Dressback was given a three-year contract extension last year. The mystery that remains is why some people — people who were eager for her to continue leading the elementary school — now want her gone. The battle has been drawn up and is now readying to be fought. Dressback told me that beyond feeling driven to “defend my name and my integrity,” she wants to speak up for others who come after — or who are now silent.
Of course, Dressback had hoped this could all be avoided. “I tried to just be the good employee,” she told me. “I thought if I just do what they ask me to do, this is gonna get wrapped up and I’ll go back to work” at Cahaba Heights.
Notably, she still feels loyalty, even love, for Vestavia Hills and its school system.
“Maybe I shouldn’t feel the allegiance I feel,” she said when we spoke over Zoom several weeks ago. “But I can’t just turn it off. It’s not like a water faucet. You know, it’s my home. It’s where I grew up and it’s where I chose to plant my career. As betrayed as I have felt, I just can’t turn my back on the system.” Rather, she wants to nudge it forward.
*Correction: This story has been updated with the correct name of Millersville University.
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Before you come at me: I’ve seen the thirst trap TikToks about Drew Starkey as the erratic Rafe in Netflix’s Outer Banks. I know he’s been White Boy of the Month for a select group since 2020.
Sure, Outer Banks has a cast of overly attractive adults playing teenagers ripping off The Goonies. It’s terrific television due to how outrageously good-looking the cast is…and every viewer has their own personal favorite.
For many, that is Drew Starkey’s reckless, violent and unstable Rafe Cameron. If you search “Rafe Cameron edit” on TikTok, there are a multitude of videos with millions of likes. His Outer Banks clips alone have been repurposed and replayed billions of times.
While Drew Starkey made a name for himself as a heartthrob in the industry, he’s on his way to becoming a serious actor. This time, he’s in the same league as Daniel Craig in Luca Guadagnino’s Queer.
The film — which received a nine-minute standing ovation at this year’s Venice Film Festival — is the most daring movie of either actor’s career. Famous for his portrayal of LGBTQ relationships, Guadagnino’s Call Me By Your Name is a highly regarded film for this generation.
You already know who Daniel Craig — AKA 007 — is…but with the serious buzz around Starkey, everyone’s wondering: who the hell is he and — more importantly — is he single?
What is Queer About?
Queer is a historical romance drama that follows American expat — William Lee — in 1940s Mexico City as he falls in love with a younger man — Eugene Allerton. The film is based on a short novel that was written in the 50s by William S. Burroughs and published in 1985.
The book is semi-autobiographical and tracks Lee as he travels through South America and Mexico in search of sexual gratification and drugs. Lee — played by Daniel Craig — grows infatuated with fellow drug-addict, Allerton, who is played by Starkey.
It’s a complex, controversial novel for many reasons: mainly being that the novel came out during the rampantly homophobic 80s. This won’t be an easy love story to consume by any means.
The film debuted at Venice Film Festival on September 3, 2024 to rave reviews. Many are saying it’s the best performance from either actor. And there’s already Oscar buzz for Craig.
As the film ended in Venice, Guadagnino was met with chants of “Luca! Luca!” His recent success with Challengers starring Zendaya, Josh O’Connor, and Mike Faist was another amazing homoerotic blockbuster.
But there’s another pressing fact that’s becoming increasingly prevalent: Drew Starkey is about to become the people’s princess.
If you thought the thirst traps were bad when Drew Starkey starred as deranged sociopath Rafe Cameron…wait till you see Eugene Allerton in Queer.
The ladies have been swooning over his red carpet outfits, his press circuit quips, and steamy photos of him during this era. And while the film’s release date has not yet been set, I’m sure theaters will be packed.
His appearance at Venice Film Festival already stirred up internet memes, with his blue suit giving people PTSD flashbacks to last year’s Harry Styles — Don’t Worry, Darling — SpitGate drama.
He has all the makings for the next Hollywood heartthrob that we’ve been yearning for. Yes, Brad Pitt may be old and a terrible person…but there is a whole new wave of young, handsome actors to usher in.
So, while we gear up for the Drew Starkey inevitable renaissance, let’s answer the question we’re all here for:
Is Drew Starkey Single?
People ship the entire Outer Banks cast together…but don’t let it confuse you. Essentially, no one in the cast is dating in real life anymore.
Since his 2022 appearance in Hellraiser, Starkey has been linked to fellow co-star Odessa A’Zion. With multiple Instagram appearances on each other’s accounts, it looked like the pair were an item….until recently.
Neither A’Zion nor Starkey had confirmed their relationship in the first place…so fans are safe to assume that Drew Starkey is single until proven otherwise.
The Republican nominee to lead North Carolina’s public schools is attacking her Democratic opponent while accusing gay-rights advocates of promoting pedophilia.
State superintendent candidate Michele Morrow targeted her Democratic opponent, Mo Green, on social media Monday for accepting an endorsement from Equality North Carolina, a group that champions the LGBTQ+ community, which includes people who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or queer.
In a post on X, formerly Twitter, Morrow pointed to Equality NC’s mission statement, which says it aims to build “LGBTQ power.” Morrow claimed that the group uses a broader umbrella term — LGBTQ+ — in its mission statement, saying: “NEWSFLASH…the ‘+’ includes [pedophilia]!!” She added: “Mo Green will not keep our children safe!”
In a statement, Green’s campaign rejected Morrow’s comments and said they prove she’s “unfit to lead our public schools.”
Equality NC refers to LGBTQ+ on its website, although not in its mission statement as Morrow claims. And Morrow’s claim about the meaning of LGBTQ+ is wrong.
The plus symbol in LGBTQ+ is intended to “recognize those not captured within or represented by the acronym LGBTQ,” according to the American Psychological Association. It aims to show inclusivity toward people with other sexual orientations and gender identities, said Jazmynne Cruz, a spokesperson for Equality NC. The group doesn’t support pedophilia, Cruz said.
Pedophilia is a disorder “in which sexual acts or fantasies involving prepubertal children are the persistently preferred or exclusive method of achieving sexual excitement,” according to the psychological association.
There is no evidence the LGBTQ+ community aims to incorporate pedophilia into its advocacy, national fact-checking organization PolitiFact has previously found. The narrative is rooted in pastanti-gaymovements and is tied to a history of longstanding false claims that gay, lesbian and bisexual people molest children at higher rates than people who are not LGBTQ+. Research shows that notion is not supported by evidence. Studies of child sexual abuse have shown that most child molesters identify as heterosexual.
According to a guide compiled by the Human Rights Coalition, the plus sign in LGBTQ+ could include people who are:
Asexual: meaning they have little or no sexual desire.
Intersex: meaning people are born with a variety of differences in their sex traits and reproductive anatomy.
Non-binary: meaning someone who does not identify exclusively as a man or a woman.
Contrary to Morrow’s post, Cruz said safety is a primary concern of Equality NC. “We aim to ensure that every North Carolinian sees themselves reflected in this movement for equality, working together to create a safer, more equitable world for all marginalized individuals,” Cruz said in an email.
Cruz added that the group’s political action committee “endorses Mo Green for many reasons, including his public commitment to ensuring that all students are safe at school and have access to education that prepares them to be the driving force in their future.”
Morrow’s campaign didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment. The state’s superintendent of public instruction oversees hundreds of employees and education initiatives. The officeholder is responsible for recommending policies and academic standards updates to the State Board of Education, which votes on them.
The public instruction department distributes and tracks more than $13 billion in state and federal funding. The superintendent can also set priorities for the department and push lawmakers for changes.
Green is a former superintendent of Guilford County Schools and administrator in Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools. He first began working with public schools as a lawyer in Charlotte.
Green said Morrow’s claim shows she’s the “wrong role model” for North Carolina students.
“Every child deserves to learn, and every staff member deserves to work, in an environment that is safe, welcoming, and inclusive,” Green said. “Politicians like Morrow use schools as battlegrounds for their culture wars, and it’s simply unacceptable.”
Morrow, a former nurse and a homeschool co-op teacher, has never sent her children to North Carolina’s public schools. She says she’s running because she hears concerns from her neighbors and friends about the quality of public schools.
Morrow has previously faced criticism for social media posts, calling public schools “indoctrination centers” and urging people not to send their children to them. She’s also promoted numerous conspiracy theories, and called for the assassination of many Democratic leaders and philanthropists. She also pushed for the use of military intervention to keep former President Donald Trump in power on Jan. 6, 2021.
PolitiFact, the national fact-checking partner of WRAL-TV, has fact-checkedmultipleclaims falsely linking pedophilia to the LGBTQ+ community.
On Aug. 6, RNC Research, an X account run by former President Donald Trump’s campaign and the Republican National Committee, falsely accused Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz Aug. 6 of signing a bill “redefining ‘sexual orientation’ to include pedophiles.”
In July, a website known for spreading misinformation claimed that “LGBTQ+ leaders” signed a treaty to “accept pedophiles as ‘legally protected minority.” PolitiFact rated that claim Pants on Fire, meaning the statement is inaccurate and makes a ridiculous claim.
Our ruling
Morrow said the plus in LGBTQ+ includes pedophilia.
That’s ridiculous. The plus sign in the widely-used acronym “LGBTQ+” recognizes sexual orientations and gender identities that are not represented by the other five letters. There is no evidence of a connection between gay, lesbian or bisexual people and child molestation. In fact, studies of child sexual abuse have shown that most child molesters identify as heterosexual.
There’s no evidence to support Morrow’s claim. We rate it Pants on Fire!
PolitiFact Staff Writers Grace Abels and Madison Czopek contributed to this report.
Since Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz was tapped as the Democratic vice presidential pick, he has received national attention for his long-term support of the LGBTQ+ community. So it made sense when the Human Rights Campaign, a national LGBTQ+ advocacy group, asked him to headline its annual dinner.
But a deceptively edited clip from his speech that evening has gone viral.
“Tampon Tim falsely claims that being gay in Nebraska is ‘illegal,’” read the caption on an Instagram post shared by the conservative media outlet Townhall Media. (Walz’s conservative critics have used the moniker in a derogatory manner to refer to his advocacy for making free menstrual products available in schools.)
The post included a clip in which Walz said, “Think about this, when I was a kid growing up in Nebraska being gay was illegal, still technically illegal.”
The post was flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and Threads.)
A look at Walz’s full remarks at the Sept. 7 Human Rights Campaign event in Washington, D.C., however, shows Walz was not saying it is currently illegal to be gay in Nebraska.
His full statement:
“Think about this, when I was a kid growing up in Nebraska, being gay was illegal, still technically illegal. Look how much has changed since this organization was founded 40 years ago. Can you imagine, can you imagine going back to me, a high schooler in the early ’80s and saying, you know what, we’re going to kick down the barriers, we’re going to open doors, we’re going to pass laws that let you bring your authentic self, love who you want to love, and live the life that you want to live all by yourself with not interference from government.”
When put in the full context, it is more clear that Walz’s phrase “still technically illegal” is restating his claim about the past rather than making a claim about current law.
A Harris-Walz campaign spokesperson told PolitiFact by email that “the Governor was clarifying his own delivery,” and shared the prepared remarks with PolitiFact which read: “When I was a kid, growing up in Nebraska, being gay was still technically illegal there.”
According to the University of Nebraska library, Nebraska had antisodomy laws on the books until 1977 when the Legislature passed a revised criminal code. Walz, born in 1964, would have been around 13 when law was repealed. The 2003 Supreme Court case Lawrence v. Texas nullified antisodomy laws nationally.
We rate the claim that Walz “falsely claims that being gay in Nebraska is ‘illegal’” False.
“People are concerned because we realize that our rights are under attack in some cases,” said Mark Chesnut, a New York-based travel writer and speaker with 30 years of experience in the industry. “People aren’t going to stop traveling. They’re just more careful and taking precautions. They’re choosing destinations wisely.”
Read reviews. Network with locals. Know the laws and customs of a destination, Chesnut and other seasoned LGBTQ+ travelers and their allies suggest. Is it illegal there to be gay? Is it a taboo that can get you killed? Is it safe to embrace or hold hands in public? What are the ramifications for HIV-positive travelers? How about misaligned documents and security scans for trans people?
The potential pitfalls are many for LGBTQ+ travelers, especially couples looking to express their authentic selves, advocates said. But the possible dangers should be weighed against the joys of discovering new places, said Stefan Arestis and Sebastien Chaneac, the globetrotting couple behind the travel blog the Nomadic Boys.
“We as gay people have to do that extra layer of research compared to my straight friends. They can hop on a plane and go,” said Arestis, a Greek Cypriot.
He and Chaneac, who is French, left their London jobs (the former a lawyer and the latter in tech) to make Cyprus their base. They turned more than a decade of extended travel into a detail-rich website and, this year, a handbook for LGBTQ+ travelers, “Out in the World: The Gay Guide to Travelling with Pride.”
Granular due diligence will help
Arestis said it was clear in 2014, when they began blogging about their year-long sabbatical in Asia for friends and family, that LGBTQ+ travelers were hungry for information.
“After about a year, we started getting random people coming to our site. We thought who are these people? Basically, they were googling things like where are the gay bars in Bali? Are there gay hotels in Shanghai? Is it safe to go to Taiwan? They were finding our content,” he said, because at the time there was little else about the subject online.
Arestis has visited 97 countries of all sorts. Chaneac doesn’t count but does have places he wouldn’t go out of safety concerns, including Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.
On their site and in their book, the Nomadic Boys tell it like they see it, with practical tips and a feel for political and cultural landscapes.
They had a scare in Lebanon, for instance, when they were told they were blacklisted while trying to leave the country. And among their book’s listings are these warnings about Peru: It “lags behind its more progressive neighbors” in terms of LGBTQ+ rights but introduced anti-discrimination laws in 2017.
“We advise caution over PDAs unless you’re in a gay-friendly environment. Having said that, Peru relies heavily on tourism so gay travelers will feel comfortable and welcome,” they advise.
The couple went on to note they had no problems getting a double bed in any of the hotels they used in the Peruvian towns of Barranco, Miraflores, Cusco, Arequipa and Lake Titicaca.
That level of detail and practicality is what drew Black travelers to green books during the Jim Crow era.
Friendly locales only or venture out?
Some other LGBTQ+ travelers prefer to stick with safer and more accepting locales, for comfort and as a boycott of sorts against hostile destinations. Others travel out of their comfort zones for adventure and to support local and often suppressed gay communities.
“It’s a really robust debate,” Chesnut said. “It’s a personal judgment and a personal decision that travelers need to make.”
Traveling can be particularly fraught for trans people.
Gabrielle Claiborne in Atlanta is co-founder and CEO of Transformation Journeys Worldwide, a training and consulting firm that works with Fortune 100 companies on creating cultures of belonging for trans and gender-diverse people. She’s also the chair of the International Gay and Lesbian Travel Association Foundation’s Transgender Advisory Group.
Claiborne is a trans woman who frequently travels globally. At 6-foot-2, and taller in heels, she often draws stares in security lines.
“I get a lot of people whispering and gawking, just by being present and being visible in that space,” she said. “The security checkpoint is triggering for trans people because of the experiences with TSA agents, from other people in the line.”
Some trans people have documents with photos and gender markers that don’t align. Going through security scanners can be troubling, Claiborne said. Agents must press a button designating male or female.
“If they pressed the wrong button and an area of our bodies is flagged, we have to go through a very triggering pat down,” she said.
Claiborne doesn’t support boycotts of unfriendly destinations.
“We have a long way to go, yet I’m optimistic about the progress that is being made,” she said. “The reality is we make progress when people are willing to stand up and be visible. Until we’re visible in a space where we might be the only one like us in the room or in that space, people are not going to know what they don’t know.”
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP) — The golf course is not a threatened species in the Sunshine State — but the Florida scrub-jay is.
And advocates are warning that life for the small blue and gray birds and many other imperiled species could get much harder if Gov. Ron DeSantis’ administration follows through on a proposal to build golf courses, pickleball courts and 350-room hotels at state parks from Miami to the Panhandle.
State parks “are the last strongholds for a lot of wildlife in rapidly urbanizing communities in Florida,” said Julie Wraithmell, executive director of Audubon Florida.
“They have an outsized importance — not just to wildlife but also as places where Floridians and visitors can continue to see what Florida was like,” she said. “It’s the best of Florida.”
DeSantis has enjoyed rock solid support from the Republicans who dominate state politics. It has been rare for DeSantis to get pushback on anything from GOP lawmakers, and he has a reputation for seeking vengeance when they do.
But it appears a political line in the sand is being drawn after DeSantis’ administration announced plans this week to carve out golf courses and pickleball courts in Florida’s beloved state parks.
Unlike the issues of abortion, LGBTQ rights, race and guns that have divided voters, state parks apparently hold a place in the hearts of Floridians regardless of party. The state park system has received national recognition for years, and people are resistant to change the protected lands they enjoy.
The proposal announced by Florida’s Department of Environmental Protection to build new sports facilities, hotels and glamping sites at nine state parks across Florida has drawn a wave of opposition, not just from nature lovers and birdwatchers but also from members of DeSantis’ Cabinet, a Republican member of Congress and conservative state lawmakers. That includes outgoing Republican Senate President Kathleen Passidomo.
“Our vision (for state parks) did not contemplate the addition of golf courses and hotels, which in my view are not in-line with the peaceful and quiet enjoyment of nature,” Passidomo posted on X. “From what I know at this time, the proposal should not move forward in its current form.”
A spokesperson for DeSantis defended the plans — which are not final — and touted the administration’s investments in protecting and conserving the state’s natural resources.
“Teddy Roosevelt believed that public parks were for the benefit and enjoyment of the people, and we agree with him,” press secretary Jeremy Redfern said. “But it’s high time we made public lands more accessible to the public.”
The Department of Environmental Protection did not respond to requests for comment from The Associated Press.
All of the parks slated for development are located near heavily visited tourist destinations, including Miami, Tampa, Panama City and St. Augustine.
Florida’s state park system is a bastion of wildness in a state where vast stretches of sugar sand beaches and mangrove forests have long given way to condos, motels and strip mall souvenir shops.
Advocates say places like Topsail Hill Preserve State Park near Destin are literal beacons on a hill — the preserve is known for its 25-foot high sand dunes that tower over a stretch of the Panhandle known for its spring break destinations and military installations.
Eric Draper, a former head of the Florida Park Service, said Topsail is one of the last undeveloped stretches of Florida’s Gulf Coast.
In that part of the state, Draper said, “you can stand on the beach, you look right, you look left, and you just see a lot of condos and developments and houses. But this is one place that you can stand and look for three miles and not see any development.”
Under the new plans, Topsail would get up to four new pickleball courts, a disc golf course and a new hotel with a capacity of up to 350 rooms — a scale of development that Draper said is more in line with a conference center than a quiet beach retreat.
Another proposal is for a golf complex at Jonathan Dickinson State Park in Martin County on the state’s southeast coast north of West Palm Beach. Building the golf courses would entail removing a boardwalk and observation tower as well as relocating the residences and offices of park staff, as well as existing cabins for visitors.
A change.org petition targeting the would-be golf complex at Jonathan Dickinson had netted more than 60,000 signatures as of Thursday afternoon.
It is not the first time a Republican administration has raised the idea of leveraging more revenue from state parks by providing golf, lodging and other attractions. But past ideas were quickly dropped after public opposition.
In 2015, then-Gov. Rick Scott’s administration floated plans to allow cattle farmers to graze their herds and loggers to harvest timber from park lands.
Legendary former professional golfer Jack Nicklaus has long lobbied state officials to underwrite his push to build golf courses in state parks, efforts that fizzled following public pushback.
Wraithmell, the head of Audubon Florida, said she hopes state officials will listen to the Floridians who plan to pack public meetings next week to weigh in on the proposals.
“Absolutely there is demand for more people to enjoy state parks,” she said. “The solution is not to try to cram as many people into a park as we can …. The solution is to create more state parks.”
___
This story was first published on Aug. 22, 2024. It was updated on Aug. 23, 2024, to correct that there are nine state parks included in the proposal, not eight.
___ Associated Press reporter Brendan Farrington in Tallahassee contributed to this story.
___
Kate Payne is a corps member for The Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.
DEARBORN, Mich. (AP) — Ford Motor Co. has joined the ranks of companies that have pulled back on diversity, equity and inclusion policies while facing pressure from conservative groups.
CEO Jim Farley sent a memo to all employees early Wednesday outlining the changes, including a decision to stop taking part in external culture surveys and an annual survey by the Human Rights Campaign that measures workplace inclusion for LGBTQ+ employees.
“We will continue to put our effort and resources into taking care of our customers, our team, and our communities versus publicly commenting on the many polarizing issues of the day,” the memo said. “There will of course be times when we will speak out on core issues if we believe our voice can make a positive difference.”
Farley wrote that Ford is mindful that employees and customers have a wide range of beliefs “and the external and legal environment related to political and social issues continues to evolve.” The company, he wrote, has been looking at its policies during the past year.
Ford, he wrote, doesn’t use hiring quotas or tie compensation to specific diversity goals, and it remains committed to “fostering a safe and inclusive workplace.”
Robby Starbuck, a conservative political commentator who has gone after companies such as Lowe’s, Tractor Supply and John Deere, wrote in a Wednesday post on X that he was investigating Ford’s “woke” policies.
Starbuck posted Farley’s memo, the contents of which were confirmed by Ford. The company said Wednesday that the memo speaks for itself and declined further comment.
In a statement, the Human Rights Campaign said Dearborn, Michigan-based Ford was cowering to an “internet troll” by abandoning its longtime values and policies.
“Their shortsighted decision will hurt the company’s long-term business success,” the statement said.
