Charlotte Magazine – July 2019

16 CHARLOTTEMAGAZINE.COM // JUNE 2019

With the rst swing in sight, Warshauer

sits outside Undercurrent Coee on

a sunny and unseasonably pleasant

January a€ernoon. Passersby laugh as

they walk down Commonwealth to shop

at the Midwood Mania pop-up mar-

ket. But behind the lenses of his glasses,

Warshauer’s eyes keep turning back to

that swing, and, each time, he smiles.

Why? A swing has no purpose other

than leisure and enjoyment. No one

ghts on a swing. Most important, it’s

big enough for two—designed to mimic

the front porch swings once common in

the South, where friends and neighbors

could sit, swing, and shoot the breeze.

We all need a bit more of that, Warshauer

says, in our divided communities and

world. He would know better than most,

having lived in Charlotte as an out gay

man long before it was broadly accepted

in this Bible Belt city. His presence and

advocacy led to a prestigious honor in

February: The Human Rights Campaign

of North Carolina, the state wing of

the nation’s largest LGBT rights orga-

nization, presented Warshauer with its

Legacy Award during its annual gala in

Charlotte.

Warshauer, 63, spoke with Charlotte

magazine about the progress the LGBT

community has made over the years; his

former chairmanship of the Community

Building Initiative, a civic diversity non-

prot; and what he’s accomplished in his

29 years as a city o™cial. Here he is, in his

own words (edited for clarity and space).

WHEN I CAME OUT in high school, one

of the solutions was, ‘You should prob-

ably talk to someone.’ There just weren’t

many examples of people around, living

successful gay lives.

YOU KNEW YOU COULD BE an interior

designer. You could be a ¡orist. You could

cut hair. But you didn’t know if you could

do anything else. You didn’t see people

in other kinds of positions. And people

who were in those other positions—and

that was true of Charlotte, too, in the

early ’90s—were closeted.

WHEN I MOVED TO CHARLOTTE in

1990, we started a gay and lesbian lm

festival, and I went to nd a space to

have it, and I called people I knew and

was able to raise money—but for many

of the people who were giving money,

they gave it anonymously or rst name

only. If you were sending a mailer to

people, they didn’t even want their post

o™ce to know, so you wouldn’t put on

return labels.

AIDS WAS A BIG DEAL THEN, so if you

were coughing and you were gay, that was

a challenge to negotiate your life. If you

had a simple cold, what did that mean?

Might that mean something else if people

thought you were gay? The ability to have

relationships with your nieces and neph-

ews and cousins and children was more

prescribed, because people were so wor-

ried about AIDS and HIV.

ALL GAY EVENTS in the early ’90s were

either in a private home or a gay bar, so

when we did something at Spirit Square

for the rst time, for many people it was

the rst time they had ever been out in

a non-gay space as a gay person. It was

empowering for people to be out and

themselves in public places.

I CAME TO CHARLOTTE and wanted

to see lm that I can see in other cities.

And you didn’t have Net¡ix or streaming

services. So if we wanted to see lm, we

had to bring it in. This was before Will &

Grace. People were interested in seeing

themselves and depictions of their lives.

It means a lot to see yourself onscreen.

THAT’S ONE OF THE THINGS people

can miss. Extending rights to people

who are dierent expands your own

ability to express who you are. The more

room we give others, the more room we

give ourselves. It’s not a matter of giving

rights to people who are LGBT. It’s also

a matter of giving ourselves the rights to

be who we are and to be authentic to our

own voices.

WHEN WE WERE ABLE to have marriage

equality, it was an amazing moment. You

felt like you had won. But then, later, you

sort of realized, as the backlash against

HB2 came, if you don’t bring enough

people along in a democracy, it’s just not

stable. People started to realize, until our

society is more equitable and free for

everyone, whatever rights we get aren’t

sustainable.

THAT WAS A BIG MOMENT for me when

I saw that we can win a victory and step

back and lose it the next day. This isn’t the

rst time this happened in the history of

the world. People can take a step forward

and take horrible steps backwards.

WE HAVE TO DO A BETTER JOB of cre-

ating alliances with other marginalized

groups. It can’t just be about us. It has to

be about everyone being able to express

themselves and being able to live freely,

whether they’re Hispanic, immigrants,

Asian, black, or white, everyone needs to

have their story told, their story under-

stood, and the right to be themselves.

Only when that happens will LGBT peo-

ple also be able to live more openly and

more securely in this country.

WE AVOID HARD CONVERSATIONS.

One of the things we’ve been learning

with the Community Building Initiative,

and as white people, is that we need to

be willing to have hard conversations

with other white people and really seek

to understand what’s bothering them

about having people be more free.

People started to realize, until our society is more equitable and

free for everyone, whatever rights we get aren’t sustainable.

TOM WARSHAUER

THE BUZZ