We’re still in the midst of a 100-year ban on pride parades in Moscow thanks to a law passed in 2012. By all accounts, the state has lost millions in business over the backlash.
That was partly what prompted the Obama administration to issue guidance to schools nationwide that transgender students must be allowed to use the bathroom that matches their gender, and that segregating trans student amounted to discrimination. When the Department of Justice told him the state was violating federal law, he counter-sued and made national headlines again. Instead, he went on Sunday news shows including Meet the Press and spread the lie that transgender people are child predators. McCrory wasn’t content to keep his fight local. Failure to comply, he said, amounted to trespassing. And it explicitly barred transgender people from using the public bathrooms and locker rooms and other facilities that match their gender identity. It undid any local ordinances that had included LGBT people in anti-discrimination statements. While running for reelection, Pat McCrory called a special session of the legislature and in 24 hours passed and signed House Bill 2. The anti-transgender movement needed a national spokesman, so North Carolina’s Republican governor decided to embrace his potential celebrity in 2016. “Do I look like a homosexual? Do I talk like them? Do I move like them?” But that original interview reads like a Hollywood script’s foreshadowing of scenes to come: “I don’t lend myself to that type of confusion,” he said. Defending Gibson even now are his loyal friend Jodie Foster (a 1992 Sissy winner for long staying closeted) and his gay brother. And the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation has taken him to task more than once for what it said were homophobic portrayals in his movies. Gibson was named 1992’s Sissy of the Year for pointing to his backside during an interview and declaring, “This is only for taking a shit.” That Gibson felt a need to clarify should have been the world’s first hint that something is a little off with this guy. When the actor was caught in an anti-Semitic meltdown and arrested in a 2006 DUI or embarrassed in 2010 by tape recordings of a violent, racist rant against his ex-girlfriend, gay media were quick to point out neither was his first offense. If only more of the figures on this list had evolved. Davis voted for AB1, an anti-discrimination bill, and called for greater acceptance of gays by the Republican Party, which led opponents to chastise him as “the GOP’s leading crusader for homosexual rights.” The same phenomenon spread to law enforcement nationwide. The man who had once overseen hundreds of arrests for public sex in entrapment schemes (as well as raids on clubs where LGBT patrons were beaten or intimidated into staying home) went on to become a state senator and had a surprising turnaround. The only conversion Davis got was his own.
Most notorious among chiefs was Los Angeles’s Ed Davis, who once compared gay people to lepers and opposed the city’s first pride parade in 1970, saying, “As far as I’m concerned, granting a parade permit to a group of homosexuals to parade down Hollywood Boulevard would be the same as giving a permit to march to a group of thieves and murderers.” Davis told the Christopher Street West Association that he “would much rather celebrate Gay Conversion Week, which I will gladly sponsor when the medical practitioners in this country find a way to convert gays to heterosexuals.” It might be hard to imagine now, with gay officers marching in pride parades and big-city squads having dedicated LGBT liaisons, but The Advocate wrote in 1973 that gay people had come to think of police “as their natural enemies.”
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