This new project tells the hidden story of Columbia’s overlooked LGBTQ history
History is prominent in Columbia. The 200-year-old state capital can tell a lot of stories, but there are some it’s less inclined to tell than others — stories that until fairly recently have only been whispered or shared behind closed doors, when they have been discussed at all.
Those stories belong to Columbia’s gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender and queer communities — communities that have always been there, forming and coalescing in different places at different times. But only relatively recently have they been able to live their full lives openly, and share their stories with the wider world.
To rectify that long, silent history, the Historic Columbia Foundation is conducting an oral history project, collecting interviews from a wide cross section of the local LGBTQ community to try to put together a comprehensive history of the local community. The foundation is also working with the South Carolina Library at the University of South Carolina to pull and digitize archival information already collected on the community, with the goal of having it all publicly accessible in time for this fall’s annual Pride festival.
“This is different from some other history projects we’ve done, because LGBT history is not as openly discussed or documented the way other histories have been,” said Robin Waites, Historic Columbia’s executive director. But that obscurity also means “in some ways, this is more important than other projects we’ve done.”
A history on VHS
Travis Wagner is a doctoral student in USC’s School of Information Science. Even before Historic Columbia launched its project, Wagner was working on a Queer Columbia Oral History and Digital Archives project for the college, including curating previous material on the area’s LGBTQ history from the library archives.
While Wagner expects the project to collect info from older generations, they (Wagner’s preferred pronoun) want to focus on the activism of a younger generation of activists, particularly transgender and non-binary people. They already have a lot of material from the work done in 2015 to push back against a proposal in the state Legislature modeled on North Carolina’s “bathroom bill” prohibiting transgender people from using the public restroom associated with their gender identity. The project even saved some homemade signs used in protests against the bill.
“That was the moment visibility around transgender and non-binary issues became very visible,” Wagner said.
That era of activism is not over. LGBTQ activists in South Carolina have spent much of 2021 opposing bills in the Legislature that would ban transgender athletes from school sports (which ultimately did not pass). In June, after the city of Columbia adopted a ban on conversion therapy — controversial techniques that try to change a young person’s sexual orientation or gender identity — state senators began efforts to ban cities from enacting such measures.
But Wagner has also spent a good amount of time digitizing old tapes of marches and events from the 1990s or earlier.
The biggest problem with preserving VHS tapes, they said, is “people either record over it multiple times or they throw out their VCR.”
“It’s easier than it used to be,” Wagner said. “A lot of home movies are on tape, so there are low-effort devices that can pull video and audio. The problem is you don’t know what’s on it until you sit down to watch. It could be 10 minutes or three hours.”
Historic Columbia is helping support that work with a $10,000 grant from S.C. Humanities and a $5,000 grant from the National Trust for Historic Preservation, along with close to $30,000 in private and corporate donations. The funding will allow the foundation to conduct 30 in-depth interviews to be archived for the project — with the hope of adding more to the collection later, Waites said. A website will also be set up to make all of the project’s collection publicly accessible.
Archie Crowley is another USC student working on the Queer Columbia project, part of a wide net cast to collect as many people’s stories as possible.
“We had a booth at (Columbia’s) 2019 Pride festival to talk to people, ask them if they wanted to be interviewed,” Crowley said.
Crowley’s research specialty is the evolution of language around sex and gender, “such as the shift from transsexual to transgender as the community’s umbrella term … and why some people still identify using terms that have gone out of fashion,” Crowley said.
Wagner’s side of the project has also collected other items, like pins from USC’s old Gay Straight Alliance or pink triangles overlaid with gamecocks — emphasizing how much students through the years have been on the cutting edge of the movement for LGBTQ rights.
Younger students working on the collection, Wagner said, “have no idea any of this happened.”
How much to share?
The oral interview portion of the project is geared toward collecting the stories of as diverse a cross-section of LGBTQ Columbia as possible, including people whose contributions and experiences can be overlooked even in histories of the gay rights movement.
Nekki Shutt is a Columbia attorney whose involvement with local activism goes back to her time as a USC student, when she handled publicity for the very first pride march in 1990.
“That was more of a political march, with political demands,” Shutt said of the beginning of Columbia’s now annual Pride festival each October. “Now it’s more of a street carnival.”
That first march had the feel of breaking barriers. Those who spoke to the media at the time described it as the first time they publicly identified as gay, and worried about the possibility of violence.
Shutt went on to be a founding member of both the Gay and Lesbian Business Guild and S.C. Equality, the statewide nonprofit coalition that advocates for LGBTQ issues at the State House and beyond.
Shutt said when she first arrived at USC in 1986, the gay community in Columbia was much less visible, with fewer venues members of the community could authentically and safely be themselves.
“When I came from Florida, it was a culture shock,” she said. The gay community in her previous home of Orlando “was very active. You could go have dinner at gay-owned restaurants. It was more affirming.
“The only affirming place I found (here) was Trustus Theatre,” she recalled.
Trustus was also the venue where artist Terrance Henderson found a home. Henderson left Newberry in 1996, and ended up building a career in Columbia, where he found a nurturing LGBTQ community for the first time.
“I had a close family that loved and supported me, but I didn’t feel like I belonged,” Henderson said. “I needed to find myself, and I needed a safe space where I could do that. Here there are clubs, bars, civic organizations, theater.”
Today, Henderson is the director of modern dance at the Southeastern School of Ballet, and the dance coordinator at Midlands Arts Conservatory, as well as a company member at Trustus.
Henderson is taking part in the oral history project because he said he wanted the Black queer experience, often overlooked in the history of majority-white gay rights movements, to be represented as well.
“I’ll tell my story, the truth of my experience from the intersectionality of being Black and a member of the LGBT community, and that’s one context that’s been missing in history, because marginalized people have to navigate society looking for cues of safety,” he said.
As an artist, Henderson found “my tribe” in the theater world, but “it’s complicated when race comes into it. Even when you need a safe space, you can feel like there’s an issue with another part of you.”
That’s why Henderson is chairing an equity task force at the theater, to “center people of color” in the theater’s work. It’s also why he wants his experiences as a gay Black man to be counted and recognized.
”There’s a need to affirm Black queerness specifically, when we would not be as confident in a predominantly white gay setting,” he said. “People wouldn’t know we have a ballroom scene in Columbia, that’s not something you would see at the forefront of the pride movement.”
Ballroom culture is a subset of predominantly Black and Hispanic LGBTQ communities centered around a competitive atmosphere of costumes and performance, often in house parties or other private spaces — one of several subcultures in the wider community that has often flourished outside the view of the rest of society.
When he was preparing for his oral history interview, Henderson told The State he was still preparing what he wanted to say, and how to say it. As part of his work on the Trustus task force, “I sat down to write a narrative, and 15 pages later realized I couldn’t get it to be digestible.”
At another stage of his life, he’s not sure if he would feel comfortable talking so openly about his experiences, but now he feels compelled to, or else the stories of people like him won’t be remembered.
He describes a slow process of being “out” to varying degrees and with different groups of people over the course of years, a similar experience to other members of the community.
While those close to her knew she was a lesbian, Shutt wasn’t public about her orientation until a 1995 dinner for the Gay and Lesbian Business Guild. The featured speaker that night was Candace Gingrich, the openly gay sibling of newly elected U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich.
Shutt was present when veteran S.C. political reporter Lee Bandy interviewed Candace Gingrich for The State, and asked why Gingrich’s address at the dinner was closed to the media.
“I told him, ‘these are your lawyers, your plumbers, and it’s not safe for all of them to be out,’” Shutt said. “You could still be fired for being gay.”
Although she declined to give her name, Shutt ended up being cited in the story as the spokeswoman for the Gay and Lesbian Business Guild. It didn’t cost Shutt her job, but as a young new member of her law firm, she didn’t think that kind of publicity was looked on favorably by some of the partners.
“They thought it would be bad for business,” Shutt said. But by the time she joined a new firm years later, “I told them, ‘I’m gay. I’m going to bring my partner to events.’ It was painful, but it kind of propelled me into more leadership roles.”
The final project will tell those kinds of stories and more, dating back as far as living memory can go in the local community, and spanning as many perspectives as possible.
“We worked with our steering committee to identify as many people as possible, from senior gay white men to young gay Black men to trans folks,” Waites said. “We want to hit all the letters in the LGBTQIA+ alphabet, and we’ve gotten a good cross section.”
This story was originally published June 28, 2021 at 5:00 AM.
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