HUFFINGTON
11.10.13
STONEWALLED
part of town. The town clerk told
one gay applicant that the “community would not tolerate an establishment that catered to the
LGBT community,” according to
the lawsuit. The applicant then
suggested a recreation center instead of a bar, but the clerk rejected that proposal, too.
The lawsuit cites several examples of the mayor and town
aldermen allegedly conspiring to
prevent Newton’s bar from opening. Lucy Blair, a Shannon resident
who is active in community affairs,
told HuffPost that she overheard
Alderman Joey McCord telling two
women outside a town meeting
that he welcomed the possibility
of a lawsuit. “Hell, we hope they’ll
sue us,” Blair recalled McCord saying. “That’ll delay this thing for at
least another two years.”
Along with an endorsement of
family values, Shannon’s website
offers a somewhat poetic description of a town gone to seed: “At
one time Shannon was known of
having quite of [sic] few aspiring artists. At one time they were
three cotton gins, corn elevator
and a grain elevator in operation
here. Coca Cola was bottled here
in around 1915 and 1916. Sadly
only remnants remain of what
once was the bustling downtown.”
Tom Lyles, the owner of the auto
body shop next door to the onestory gray building where gays once
gathered for drag shows, summed
up the town’s economic problems
this way: “When I’m closed, they
say the whole town is dead.”
Lyles is black, with freckles
across his nose and white hairs
sprinkled in his goatee. He is 65
and has lived in Shannon his
“I don’t think we need any
bars, but we sure don’t
need a gay and lesbian
bar. That’s for New York
and places like that.
Not for a little town.”
whole life, serving as a county constable for the last 12 years. He was
angry about the town’s decision
to reject Newton’s application, he
said, but not because he condones
homosexuality. “Two men, two
women, I’m against it,” he said.
“But I can’t stop it. The thing of it
is, it’s freedom of choice, freedom
of speech. We’re in America.”
“They never bothered nobody,
and they brought a lot of business to the town,” he said of Newton’s former customers. Striking a
philosophical note, he continued,