HUFFINGTON
11.10.13
STONEWALLED
sibility of opening a bar in Tupelo this spring, but she thought
better of it. The city is home to
the American Family Association, a prominent evangelical
group dedicated to the preservation of “family values.” The AFA
runs a radio network of 200 stations in 39 states broadcasting
Christian-oriented talk shows
and regularly calls for boycotts
of gay-friendly brands. Bryan
Fischer, a radio personality and
director of Issues Analysis for
the organization, once wrote a
blog post in which he claimed
that homosexuality “gave us
Adolph Hitler ... the Brown
Shirts, the Nazi war machine
and 6 million dead Jews.”
The group’s history with the
Southern Poverty Law Center goes
back a ways. In 2010, the SPLC
added the AFA to its list of active
hate groups, a distinction shared
by neo-Nazis and black separatists.
Leaders of the AFA responded by
calling the law center a hate group
for oppressing Christian students
and attempting to silence those
who oppose homosexuality. The
American Family Association did
not respond to request for comment about the Shannon case.
At the party in Tupelo the day
the lawsuit was filed, Benson Hill,
a 34-year-old gay man who grew
up there and sits on the board
of a local advocacy group called
Equality Mississippi, said he remembered thinking about an AFA
radio campaign the first time he
went to Rumors eight years ago.
The AFA had devoted a broadcast
to the Folsom Street Fair, an annual street festival in San Francisco that celebrates all things
“I have no one in my family
who is gay, I don’t. I might
feel differently if I knew
somebody, but I don’t.”
kink, bondage, and leather. Hill
had never been to a gay bar before, and he didn’t know what to
expect. Guys with whips?
“That’s not what I was looking
for,” he said. “I was just looking
for a place I could be myself. Be
me, be safe. I’d not gone to the
bar several times because of the
image I had.” Eventually, a friend
talked him into going. “I was just
so shocked and so pleased to find
it was just a neighborhood bar.”
Lila Shapiro is a staff reporter
at The Huffington Post.