HUFFINGTON
11.10.13
STONEWALLED
customers, particularly those from
around Shannon, would park down
the road so passersby or police
wouldn’t see their cars in the lot.
But the bar never brought in
much money, and in 1998 Newton decided to sell. She and her
partner moved from Tupelo to
Memphis, where Newton worked
in marketing. Over the years,
they ran a variety of businesses
in Tennessee, including two other
bars and a company that contracts with realtors to prepare
houses for sale. Newton assumed
her time in Shannon was behind
her. But in 2010, when the owners of Rumors decided it was
time to sell, too, they called Newton and asked her if she would
consider buying the bar back.
At first she said no. She liked
living in Memphis. She changed
her mind only after hearing from
dozens of former customers and
old friends. “I said, ‘Okay, if you
really want it and you’re going to
come out and spend money, we’ll
do it,”’ she recalled. She leased
the building and poured thousands of dollars from her savings
account into fixing it up, clearing
the nearby lots that were filled
with trash and old tires, replacing
the deteriorating wood with new
siding and getting the building up
to code. To save money, she did
most of the work herself.
Newton is tall, with spiky white
hair. She wears cowboy boots and
bolo ties. She’s both confident and
mild-mannered. “If I could just
meet with every person in town
and talk to them, I know they’d
change their minds,” she said.
“There are a lot of LGBT
people out there who
have not yet received
the benefits of all the
headlines we see in the
papers every day, and
we’re looking to find
those people and make
sure they do.”
The day after the lawsuit was
filed, she held a party at a restaurant in Tupelo for old customers
and friends. Her partner, a blonde
in her 50s who asked not to be
named, drove in from Memphis,
where the two women still live.
Newton made the rounds, reminiscing with old customers and
handing out blue and melon-colored cocktails and bottles of beer.
Someone had ordered plates of
fried pickles with ranch dressing