Touching Up Our Roots

10/14/2020

https://www.atlantamagazine.com/atlanta-pride-50/

We trace the strides Atlanta's LGBTQ+ community has made over the last half-century. But we still have far to go.

10/14/2020

Atlanta Magazine 50th Anniversary of Atlanta Pride issue

10/11/2020

Happy 50th Anniversary of Atlanta Pride.

To read our archived issues, please click here.

07/13/2020

THE 90S

The greatest advance in the 90s is the arrival of protease inhibitors in 1996, making AIDS a chronic condition and not a death sentence.

For me AIDS hit in 1991, when I knew about 25 men who died that year. After working out at the Colony Square gym, I sat in the atrium often crying uncontrollably, fearing I would lose my mind, although I am HIV negative.

Finally one day I heard a voice, "Dave, you've lost your mind, don't worry about it anymore. There's no way you can stay sane through this. Just do what you have to do for those you care for." Thus I took focus off myself and onto those who needed help.

Drag queens were on our front lines, headlining the bread and butter fundraisers we needed admidst stingy government assistance. Count Diamond Lil, Bubba D Licious, Charlie Brown, and Greg Troia's Armorettes as our heroic troupers.

Ironically the greater visibility AIDS gave us created a renaissance in the arts. Actors Express exploded here founded by two gay men Chris Coleman and Harold Leaver, and set a new bar both for theatre excellence and no holds barred depictions of g**s and le****ns (earning the nickname "Actors Undressed" for serious eye candy).

The pinnacle of the Express saw the debut of the musical "The Harvey Milk Show" in 1991 by Atlantans Dan Pruitt and Patrick Hutchison, which later became the showpiece of the Cultural Olympiad during the 1996 Olympic Games here.

The Olympics coincided with a vast and welcoming LGBTQ center at Center Stage Theatre on West Peachtree, overseen by Julie Rhoad, who now runs the Names Project AIDS Memorial Quilt headquartered here.

At Seven Stages Theatre, playwright Jim Grimsley stoked the burgeoning scene, world premiering his surreal meditations on gay life "Mr. Universe" and "Math and After Math", along with an adaptation of his novel "Dream Boy."

Part time Atlantan Elton John and the homegrown the Indigo Girls perform what seems an impromptu jam in Piedmont Park for our first AIDS walk in 1991.

In 1993 the beleaguered Theatre in the Square in Marietta becomes the flash point for right wing nuts, when T**S stages gay playwright Terrence McNally's "Lips Together Teeth Apart", which only mentions g**s in passing. Still the Cobb County Commission passes a resolution informing g**s and le****ns they're "incompatible with the values of Cobb County" (counties have values?!) and cuts off funding for the arts to boot.

Well, Native Atlantan Pat Hussain and her partner in crime Jon Ivan Weaver seriously object and assert that if that's how they feel, no Olympic events should occur in Cobb County. Creating Olympics Out of Cobb and mobilizing hordes of volunteers, their David defeats the Olympic Goliath, and Cobb is bereft of Olympic glory in 1996.

Tragically following the Olympic Park bombing, fanatic Eric Rudolph targets the le***an owned The Otherside on February 21, 1997, and although no one dies, the attack gradually puts the Otherside out of business.

A happier ending awaits Q***r Nation, when Lynn Cothren and others organize boycotts of Cracker Barrel restaurants, as they fire all their LGBTQ employees, including cook Cheryl Summerville who has no customer contact. Cheryl ends up on Oprah and featured in the documentary "Out At Work." Moreover activist Carl Owens organizes our folks to buy small stock in Cracker Barrel and eventually forces them to stop firing us, and get back to work.

After what feels like forever, Cathy Woolard is the first out person elected in Georgia, to the Atlanta City Council in 1997. In 1999 Kecia Cunningham becomes the first openly le***an black woman elected to the Decatur City Commission.

In 1995 Presbyterian minister Erin Swenson makes world history when she is the first mainstream minister to transition and keep her ministry,
"for the first time in Christendom" as our enemies would have it. Coinciding is trans woman Shelley Emerson leading the women's group Fourth Tuesday, and also being the cover girl for Atlanta Magazine in a feature length profile. You go girls.

Completing a tumultuous decade is Georgia's own Supreme Court, which on November 23, 1998 at last overturns the 156 year old ban on so**my, in a heteros*xual divorce case no less.

Whew. We'll go even further in the 2000s.

07/08/2020

Mike Smith co-founded the Names Project AIDS Memorial Quilt in 1987. Now living through his second pandemic, Smith is finding ways to help out amid COVID-19 ...

07/06/2020

The 80's

ONCE UPON A TIME IN MECCA
From The GA Voice (October & November Editions)
by Dave Hayward, Coordinator, Touching Up Our Roots, Inc.: Georgia's LGBTQ Story Project


Here's a "Greatest Hits" of our Georgia LGBTQ long march to freedom.
Feeling like one of the survivors of a slasher flick (sorry, folks), nevertheless I'm eager to spill the stories.

THE 80S

It was a dark new dawn in November 1980 when Ronald Reagan lambasted Jimmy Carter in a landslide, and our Democratic victory party became a wake. Slinking home we chirped "See you in the camps!" Seven months later our black humor became reality when AIDS - first called Gay Related Immune Deficiency or GRID - was identified. Suddenly there were serious calls for quarantining, and even branding, all g**s and le****ns as a public health menace.

1982 - the end of that year designer Graham Bruton helped form AID Atlanta, which hosted a slideshow at Colony Square depicting the ravages of Kaposi's sarcoma. "Everything has to change" I realized, and indeed safe s*x (say what?) and condoms became the new normal for gay men.

Dr. Jesse Peel and others founded several AIDS organizations, and the buddy program to help people living with AIDS - not AIDS victims - began at AID Atlanta.

Even those who cared were terrorized, and in 1983 we hosted a dinner party for our brothers with AIDS. Should we throw out the plates after the party, we wondered. Neither the state of Georgia nor Ronald Reagan were much help. Local activists and doctors like Rick Hudson and Bernie Short and John Kopchak lobbied the Georgia General Assembly to keep draconian penalties from passing, and Gil Robison became the first openly gay and AIDS lobbyist at the Gold Dome.

1986 - In February we made a human chain around the First Baptist Church at 5th and Peachtree to decry Reverend Charles Stanley declaring AIDS "God's judgment against sinners." Groups like PFLAG lead by Judy Colbs and others became key allies, and ironically AIDS began bringing the LGBT community and the straight community closer, as well as gay men and le***an women.

In October we packed the Atlanta City Council to defeat the repeal of our gay rights ordinance, while the Citizens for Public Awareness railed "Do you want Atlanta turned into another San Francisco?" But you are Blanche, you are.

1987 - In 1986 the Supreme Court upheld Atlantan Michael Hardwick's conviction for so**my - arrested in his own bedroom, no less - and thus upheld all so**my statutes in states that still had them. Such an insult became the catalyst for the second National March on Washington for Le***an and Gay Rights in October 1987.

Atlantans Ray Kluka, director of the Atlanta Gay and Le***an Center, and Maria Helena Dolan were among hundreds arrested on the steps of the Supreme Court in a mass die-in.

At the March the Names Project AIDS Memorial Quilt (headquartered in Atlanta since 2001 under CEO Julie Rhoad) made its national debut, and visitors grieved like people from another culture hugging and sobbing above the panels. Finally we had an outlet for our agony, and those we loved are enshrined in the world's largest folk art project.

1986 - Spurred by the Supreme Court Hardwick fiasco, Winston Johnson comes out to his dear friend Coretta Scott King and enlists her into actively advocating for LGBT rights, as does her longtime assistant Lynn Cothren. Before she knows it, Ms. King is the keynote speaker at the Human Rights Campaign dinner in New York, and guest of honor at the first Atlanta HRC dinner in 1987.

1988 - Playwright and actress Rebecca Ranson who lead SAME, the Southeastern Arts and Media Education foundation, premieres "Higher Ground" featuring a cast of actors living with HIV at the World Congress Center, in tandem with a display of the Quilt. Ranson also wrote the first play about AIDS, "Warren" about her friend Warren Johnson, which opened at Seven Stages Theatre in 1984.

In March 1988 Ranson and Chris Cash founded Southern Voice, the precursor to Georgia Voice.

1988 - Out of the Democratic National Convention held here, the DNC LGBT caucus steamrolls an Atlanta ACT UP FIGHT AIDS chapter. We picket Circle K gas station for refusing to stock SPIN Magazine with condoms on the cover, and also "die in" at the Governor's mansion.

Richard Rhodes and Melinda Daniels are the first gay man and le***an woman to be delegates - from Georgia - to the Convention, and Rhodes also is a delegate to the 1992 DNC. For good measure, he and Gil Robison are the first openly gay men to run for office here in 1988 for the Georgia House of Representatives.

Neither win, but now we have an LGBT caucus of five in the Georgia House of Representatives.

1989 - When activist icon Ray Kluka passes from complications of AIDS, a park honors him at Monroe Drive and Greenwood Avenue. Along with the John Howell Park on Virginia Avenue, Ray and John are the only two gay men who have public spaces named for them in Georgia.

As Rebecca Ranson says, everyone does everything they can to help, and our loved ones keep dying. They live in us and we celebrate them.

06/30/2020

The 70's

ONCE UPON A TIME IN MECCA
From The GA Voice (October & November Editions)

by Dave Hayward, Coordinator, Touching Up Our Roots, Inc.: Georgia's LGBTQ Story Project


Here's a "Greatest Hits" of our Georgia LGBTQ long march to freedom.

Feeling like one of the survivors of a slasher flick (sorry, folks), nevertheless I'm eager to spill the stories.

THE 70S

1971 - Arriving in October 1971, I instantly became a Yankee carpetbagger to the co-chair of the Georgia Gay Liberation Front, Bill Smith, who co-lead the GGLF with proudly bis*xual Judy Lambert. Judy took flack for supporting the GGLF, which lead to Georgia's first le***an group the Atlanta Le***an Feminist Alliance forming in 1972.

Fresh from co-creating the Washington, D.C. Gay Liberation Front in 1970, I thought Atlanta would be a fresh fun horizon, after graduating from George Washington University. Native Atlantan Bill Smith berated me "David! If you go downtown to Five Points and shout out Sherman's name, you will be torn limb from limb!"

Uh, Sherman, that Civil War general? Really?! OK, I'll gladly be reconstructed.

1972- The GGLF was a minority of a minority, and we were bodily ejected from two gay bars for promoting Pride. "We don't want any of that radical s**t in our bar!" the Cove's Frank Powell thundered, as one of our brothers went flying through the air out of the Cove's saloon doors.

Our political protest march was peaceful, and unlike the first Pride March in 1971, we persuaded "the city too busy to hate" to give us a permit to march in the streets. The GGLF's Berl Boykin told me that in '71 there were 125 marchers, "I know I counted them twice!", so they marched on the sidewalks and stopped for every traffic light. Also the Georgia chapter of the ACLU rebuffed the GGLF's call for help: "you are not a minority" they scoffed.

When we didn't burn Atlanta down again after 1972, the bars slowly came around, and we registered voters at Bulldogs and at the Sweet Gum Head bar by the end of the 70s.

Also in 1972 we celebrated our first openly gay anything, when Mayor Sam Massell named GLF stalwart Charlie St. John to the Community Relations Commission. The next year Bill Smith replaced him, so we had some seat at some table, along with Abby Drue, who was the first "out" person at City Hall.

1976 - There was Hell to pay for Mayor Maynard Jackson, the first black mayor of a major Southern city, as he declared Gay Pride Day that year. The Southern Baptist "Citizens for a Decent Atlanta" demanded his impeachment, and we picketed the Baptist church next to Phipps Plaza. Jackson stayed mayor, but in 1977 he fearlessly announced "Human Rights Day."

Perhaps we brought the Bible Belt out of bo***ge to gender conforming norms. At least we're not usually denounced from pulpits here now.

1977 - Native son Gil Robison invited candidates to speak to us, creating the LGBT vote, and he and friends founded First Tuesday, the first LGBT political action committee.

1978 - Our little engine was hijacked when alt right reactionary Anita Bryant became guest of honor at the Southern Baptist Convention at the World Congress Center, riding her "Save Our Children" (don't you love these names?)
crusade to rescind lgbt rights ordinances across the country. But we had our own Selma moment, as for the first time straight allies marched with us, like white allies did with civil rights activists in 1965.

And we raised so much money fighting Save Our Children that we started our second Atlanta Gay and Le***an Center. Thanks to our poster child Anita!

Le***an firebrand Maria Helena Dolan delivered her "I come to you today as a defiant d**e!" challenge at our rally at the World Congress Center, and we had thousands of people joining us in pandemonium.

1979 - Our little Mecca became the Southeast hub for the first National March on Washington for Le***an and Gay Rights in October that year.

06/29/2020

Dave Hayward is at the Ellis Hotel, formerly the Winecoff. Known for the 1946 Winecoff Hotel Fire that changed how cities regulated commercial construction materials, the hotel was also one of Atlanta’s earliest known safe spaces for Atlanta’s LGBTQ community!
The first church “created by homos*xuals for homos*xuals” formed at the hotel just before the fire in 1946. The church was formally established after LGBTQ members and allies within the Basilica of the Sacred Heart Catholic Church engaged in one of the earliest recorded acts of civil disobedience for LGBTQ equality.
Dave Hayward, is the founder of Touching Up Our Roots, Georgia’s LGBTQ History Project.
The Georgia Trust for Historic Preservation
.

06/26/2020

THE SAGA OF TOUCHING UP OUR ROOTS, GEORGIA'S LGBTQ STORY PROJECT

by Dave Hayward, Coordinator, Touching Up Our Root

In 2002 i realized that our stories of our community were passing away, along with our pioneers who initiated our LGBTQ long mach to freedom here - still very much an ongoing effort.

So that June I huddled with my good friend and mentor Berl Boykin. If you've never heard of Berl, well, that's kind of the point. Please find a separate story all about Berl after this message.

We have to tell our stories, I insisted, and Berl said OK we'll begin a group and do it.

And so we have. Borrowing from le***an activist Liz Throop, we took on the name of "Touching Up Our Roots," a fitting sobriquet for an LGBTQ group, and a tongue in cheek play on words. We are after all a festive group of folks and we all have to touch up our roots!

Soon we incorporated as a non-profit in the state of Georgia and started to get the good word out anyway we could. A big boost came from Atlanta Pride, when they chose Berl as their honorary grand marshal in 2003.

For years we laid siege to the Story Corps outlet at WABE Radio, where for a small donation we could interview our sisters and brothers who helped make our rights happen. Prominent among them were the late performer Diamond Lil, one of the first out drag queens in Savannah and Atlanta, and also the late Richard Rhodes, who along with Gil Robison was the first openly gay man to run for office in Georgia in 1988. Richard was also the first gay man from Georgia to become a delegate to the Democratic National Convention, first in 1988, and then again in 1992. Le***an activist Melinda Daniels also was a Georgia delegate in 1988.

Once we had a few donations, we interviewed people on camera. Thanks to the support of Reverend Harry Knox and the Human Rights Campaign, we shot a documentary "Out of Darkness Into Wholeness" on Reverend Erin Swenson, the first mainstream minister (in the Presbyterian Church) to transition from male to female and stay a minister. Erin is proud that "for the first time in Christendom" she helped the church live up to its credo of justice for all.

We also shot a documentary "In the Eye of the AIDS Storm" about Dr. Jesse Peel, a psychiatrist who co-founded all the major organizations to fight AIDS in Georgia. Dr. Peel is a longtime survivor of living with HIV and continues to support our advocacy and arts groups.

Being a lifelong journalist I have written and published extensively about our stories, specifically our human and civil rights challenges for equality here in Atlanta.

Roots now has many audio and video interviews with our foremost LGBTQ leaders and allies.

Also we offer programs and events all the time, including the annual LGBTQ Story Tour we present every June with le***an activist Maria Helena Dolan, in partnership with Atlanta Pride and the LGBT Institute at the Center for Civil and Human Rights. Also every February Atlanta Pride and Roots present Our Founding Valentines, celebrating our pioneers and pathfinders and trailblazers.

We will continue to shop until we drop. Please connect with us and let us know what you think and what you want us to do,
and most of all, how you can help.

06/19/2020

ORIGINS OF ATLANTA PRIDE

Six weeks after the Stonewall riot in New York City, Atlanta had its own showdown with the police when they raided the Ansley Mall Mini Cinema in early August 1969. Showing Andy Warhol's "Lonesome Cowboys", the show was stopped, the audience interrogated and photographed, and the theatre owner George Ellis and his projectionist arrested. All this for a movie that dared to show cowboys in love.

Soon after, a standing room only protest was held at the New Morning Cafe in Emory Village, and the Georgia Gay Liberation Front was born. The key founder Bill Smith insisted on calling it the Georgia Gay Liberation Front to encompass the entire state, and took the unusual step - for the time - of legally incorporating the GGLF.
GGLF co-founder Berl Boykin reports that the group staffed a table at the Piedmont Park Arts Festival in 1970, the first anniversary of Stonewall.

In June 1971, the GGLF mounted the first Atlanta Pride march despite the city of Atlanta - "the city too busy to hate" - refusing to grant a permit for the march. Thus the 125 marchers had to "march" on the sidewalks and stop for every traffic light. Berl Boykin also reports the Georgia chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union refused to help the GGLF obtain a permit, because "you are not a minority."

Then on July 14, 1971, Boykin and Bill Smith and Klaus Smith met with then Governor Jimmy Carter to petition for a series of civil rights advances, including overturning the Georgia so**my laws. Carter's response was a series of resounding "Nos!"

Finally in 1972, Atlanta gave in and Pride was able to march in the streets, several hundred strong, and lead by Bill Smith and Judy Lambert as co-chairs of Atlanta Pride. Proudly bis*xual Judy Lambert marched alongside her bis*xual husband Phil, so bi folks were out in front from the very beginning.

06/10/2020

ATLANTA CELEBRATES 50TH ANNIVERSARY OF FIRST ATLANTA PRIDE RALLY

by Dave Hayward, Coordinator, Touching Up Our Roots, Inc.: Georgia's LGBTQ Story Project, http://www.touchingupourroots.org

Atlanta is often touted as "the city too busy to hate." Indeed in the early 1960s metro Atlanta peacefully integrated, unlike cities like Birmingham, Alabama, known as "Bombingham" for violent reprisals against establishing equality for all people.

As the birthplace of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), Atlanta is called the cradle of the civil rights movement, and the adopted home of legends such as the late Reverend Joseph Lowery, Andrew Young, and our current United States House Representative John Lewis. Women such as Coretta Scott King and Turner Broadcasting's Xernona Clayton also played pivotal roles in our nation's long march to freedom.

Unique among Southern cities, Atlanta was lead by a coalition of black and white progressives, shepherded by Atlanta's Mayor Ivan Allen and by Georgia's Governor Jimmy Carter, who of course went on to become President Carter in 1976, to name just a few folks.

For LGBTQ people, freedom was and is a long time coming.

Before the Stonewall Inn riots in June 1969 in New York City, the Atlanta Journal and the Atlanta Constitution ran smear pieces about "driving the perverts out of Piedmont Park", and the two papers advocated police pogroms against gay men.

In this hothouse climate, Fulton County Solicitor General Hinson McAuliffe (a deacon in the Baptist church, no less) spearheaded an August 5th, 1969 raid on the Ansley Mall Mini Cinema showing of Andy Warhol's ho******ic comedy "Lonesome Cowboys." Our own Abby Drue, the CEO of the Ben Marion Institute for Social Justice, was entrapped in that raid and recalls the police interrogating her "Does your husband know where you are?" Well our dear Abby didn't answer that question.

The good news is that shortly after the Gestapo tactic raid, a standing room only meeting at Emory Village's New Morning Cafe lead to the founding of the Georgia Gay Liberation Front, as GLF groups sprang up across the country. My late friend and mentor Berl Boykin told me that Atlanta native the late Bill Smith insisted on calling it the Georgia GLF to cover the entire state, and legally incorporated the GGLF, not something normally done in the late 60s.

Like Atlanta at large, the GGLF was an alliance of folks, like native Atlantan the late Lendon Sadler, a man of color who grew up on Auburn Avenue and was a major force in Pride. Women such as the radical activist Vicki Gabriner and bis*xual Judy Lambert championed Pride, and Judy was co-chair of Atlanta Pride with Bill Smith, while her husband Phil was an avid participant in the GGLF.. Thus bis*xual folks were front and center even back in the day.

Although we didn't have the language for it in 1969, Atlanta native the late Paul Dolan became our first non-binary and gender non-conforming poster child in his alter ego as Severin, performing what he called "cosmic drag" in an evening gown and a bushy black moustache (said to have inspired Fred Schneider and the B-52s in Athens). In 1994 Severin was depicted in the 25th anniversary Pride exhibit in the Seagrams Building in New York City, although he was billed as an "unknown protestor."

According to Phil Lambert and retired University of West Georgia professor Ara Dostourian, the GGLF mounted a rally in Piedmont Park for the first anniversary of Stonewall the end of June in 1970. When I asked Berl Boykin why they didn't have a march, he said they were afraid only a handful of people would show up. Even in 1970 there was a terror of being out and openly gay, especially in the Deep South and the Bible belt.

Nevertheless the GGLF persevered for Atlanta's first Pride march in 1971, and Berl swore "there were 125 people, I know, I counted them twice!" Sadly our "city too busy to hate" refused a permit for the march, and the 125 had to march on the sidewalks and stop for every traffic light. Even our natural allies like the Georgia chapter of the ACLU bailed, telling Berl no, we won't help you get a permit, because "you are not a minority."

Happily ever after, the late Charlie St. John, Georgia's first openly gay political appointee, and others obtained a permit for the 1972 Pride march, the first march in the streets. There were about 500 people in the march and the rally in Piedmont Park.

I know because I was there, You can see the pictures at HOME | Tour
https://www.touchingupourroots.org/

Gay History Archive | Touching Up Our Roots | United States
Dave Hayward is one of the core collective that produced the 1972 Atlanta Pride, and has the dubious honor of being thrown out of two gay bars for promoting the 1972 Pride. He has helped produce every Pride since, and with Berl Boykin founded Touching Up Our Roots, Georgia's LGBTQ Story Project, in 2002.

Party on Pride.