Oral history interview conducted by College of Charleston Libraries Special Collections and Archives as part of the ongoing efforts to preserve, elevate, and document the stories and history of the LGBTQ+ community in South Carolina. George Holt (pronouns: He/Him/His), a noted small-scale developer and designer of unique homes, reflects on his life in Charleston, his founding of the newsletter Gay Charleston, and his current professional projects. Born in Madrid, Spain in 1959, he moved to Charleston with his family when his father retired from the military in 1974. He attended Stall High School and the College of Charleston and was happily astonished with what he found in the local gay bars he started attending at age 17. He describes the closeted attitudes and prejudices of the day, noting violence against LGBTQ people, and tension between gay men and lesbians, and his visit to the women’s bar, Frannie’s. Unlike others, he always believed “the world was the problem”, not him, and in a bar, the Lion’s Head, he met the gay priest who had counseled his mother when she had sought advice on her son’s homosexuality. Holt, who is White, describes the African American drag queens he knew (Bryan Seabrook aka “Africa”, Teraja, Ms Edie and Wally) and his discovery of the caste of color in local African American society. After spending time in Chicago, he returned to Charleston and with friends and advice from Armistead Maupin, launched the publication Gay Charleston in 1981. He describes the difficulties and successes of running it, noting other contributors, including Keith Griffith (1959 – 2012), later to run a sex-focused publication in San Francisco, and the local Unitarian minister, George Exoo (1942 – 2015). He also speaks of Barry Kohn (d. 1987), who revived the paper, as well as his personal and professional relationship with his partner Jerry Moran. Holt attended the first Pride March in South Carolina (ca. 1990), as well as the National March on Washington (ca. 1993). Reflecting on changes in the city, Holt expresses his delight in how younger people are much open even while they don’t understand the difficulties of the past. He explains his current interest in workers’ and immigrants’ rights, his desire to counter the mistreatment of older people, and his determination to provide sensible and pleasing housing for all, including the handicapped. At the end of the interview, he recalls how he was “set up” previously on local media, attacked for being gay, and how glad he is to let younger people take up the cause.
Oral history interview conducted by College of Charleston Libraries Special Collections and Archives as part of the ongoing efforts to preserve, elevate, and document the stories and history of the LGBTQ+ community in South Carolina. Greg Kanter (pronouns: He/Him/His), an out gay rabbi, discusses his life, the adoption of two children, one trans, and the impact of anti-trans laws on his family. Born in Cincinnati, OH and growing up in St. Louis, MO, he lived mostly with his divorced single mother. He matriculated at Hebrew Union College after graduating from Knox College in Galesburg, IL. When finishing the degree, he realized he was gay after another student came out as lesbian. Aware of anti-gay bias, he kept quiet on his sexual orientation to achieve ordination. He was hired by a Reform congregation in Minneapolis, MN. Coming out to the senior rabbi created conflict, the congregation allowing him to finish his two-year contract. Before going public, Kanter came out to his parents and his brother, who also confessed to being gay. As part-time rabbi for a gay congregation in South Florida, Kanter grew the organization, but members rejected his desire to include families and children. He met Mike Merrill, a non-Jew, who became more conversant with Judaism, and they became partners. Wanting children, they gave up surrogacy, turning to international adoption instead. When that the adoption of a child named Elijah was imperiled, they turned to in-state adoption, with Merrill acting as a single male, LGBTQ couples not being allowed to adopt. Alayna, born premature, was in their care when then the international adoption came through, too. Elijah immediately identified as female, and both parents demanded her school accepted her as Emily, which it did, having faced similar issues with Jazz Jennings, eventually known for her public appearances and cable television show. While Kanter was accepted in a synagogue in Del Ray Beach, FL, trans issues there were not embraced. Subsequently, Kahal Kadosh Beth Elohim (KKBE) in Charleston, welcomed Kanter and Merrill and their two daughters. Once the SC legislature discussed bans on gender-affirming care for minors, and the Medical University of South Carolina cancelled care, Merrill began taking Emily out of state for treatment, and the couple, with Emily’s permission, went public. In July 2023, with concerns for Emily’s health, and fear of further anti-LGBTQ legislation, Kanter announced the plan to leave for another state where he and his family would be protected. Concluding, Kanter discusses being a gay rabbi in Charleston, the need for allies fighting for LGBTQ rights and an upcoming Pride service, the first in KKBE’s history.
Oral history interview conducted by College of Charleston Libraries Special Collections and Archives as part of the ongoing efforts to preserve, elevate, and document the stories and history of the LGBTQ+ community in South Carolina. Gil (pronouns: He/Him) and Robin (pronouns: She/Her) Shuler, a heterosexual Caucasian couple, discuss their work in the 1999 film The Corndog Man, produced in the Charleston area, featuring African American actor Bryan Seabrook, also known, in drag, as Miss Africa. The Shulers speak of their work in local theatre with Steve Lepre and others and of Gil’s friendship with filmmakers Jim Holmes, Andrew Shea and David Steen, who, visiting in the area, asked for his help. The story, revolving around a character to be portrayed by actor Noble Willingham, who had committed to the project, needed locations, extras, and others to fill out the project, which had a minimal budget. Gil and Robin Shuler explain where many of the scenes of the film were shot, including in their yard and how they “wrangled” others to appear in the film. Of crucial importance was the casting of a drag queen, and it was Robin’s friendship with Bryan Seabrook, whom she had met at the King Street Garden and Gun Club, that brought a new racial perspective to the movie. She explains how she first visited the Garden and Gun Club years before as a Jewish high school student on a trip from Sumter to Charleston one weekend, found a diverse and accepting community there, and how that ultimately resulted in her decision to move to Charleston and attend the College of Charleston. She later went to other gay venues, but referring to “the Gun Club,” she states, “there was no place like it anywhere,” and she made friends for life there. The Shulers discuss the trouble they went through in getting extras to work long hours for no pay and how they moved Seabrook into their Mount Pleasant, SC, home to save him from homelessness during the filming and how their children loved him. With digressions on Seabrook’s death and funeral, they return to the topic of the film, which won some acclaim and became a bit of a cult classic, without making a large impression locally. The Shulers did not make any money on the film, and possibly never seeing the final cut, they did not realize the social “message” of the film and its powerful impact on viewers.
Oral history interview conducted by College of Charleston Libraries Special Collections and Archives as part of the ongoing efforts to preserve, elevate, and document the stories and history of the LGBTQ+ community in South Carolina. Ann Borden Lee (pronouns: She/Her/Hers) discusses her life before and after transitioning. Born in Wilmington, NC in 1947, she was raised in a very spiritual family, and spent early years in Chapel Hill, NC, where she and a friend crossed dressed. Always feeling “alien” and faced with “an issue with no answer” regarding gender dysphoria, she became an overachiever, accomplishments being her only route to feeling normal. The family moved to Charleston where her father taught at the Citadel and Lee did a lot of “guy things”, trying to meet society’s expectations. She attended Davidson College, and the Medical University of South Carolina, later doing a residency in Florida. Concentrating on work was a way to disregard the tensions caused by trying to get others to believe that she “was a healthy, heterosexual cis-gendered male.” She married, lost her first wife of twelve years to breast cancer, a diagnosis that impacted their decision not to have children. Working for decades as a general and trauma surgeon, Lee woke up one day determined to claim her authentic self, and to fully engage in life. Much of the interview centers on the positive changes that have occurred since that day; she notes how her reading of the existentialists and her participating in Jungian dream work and discussions in Charlotte, NC, have given her frames of reference on life. No longer needing the shadow self, James to help her survive, she discusses patriarchy, the toll it takes on men and women, the different natures inherent in males and females and the issues facing other trans men and women, particular trans women of color. She describes her coming out on Facebook, relates reactions, and describes how she wants to re-engage, realizing she can’t demand instant acceptance, having lived as an “impostor” and a “liar” for years. Decrying homophobia, racism, and sexism, she describes how many “feel purer” by looking down on and attacking others. It was her outsider status, and her “woman’s heart” that marked her empathy as a surgeon, she believes. While acknowledging how privilege had worked for her, she champions women and discusses her late in life found peace, sometimes wishing it had happened sooner. A firm believer in God, she sees Charleston and society changing, and ends the interview discussing her new legal status, gender fluidity, surgical options, and her desire to live life to the fullest and represent and help those in her community.
Oral history interview conducted by College of Charleston Libraries Special Collections and Archives as part of the ongoing efforts to preserve, elevate, and document the stories and history of the LGBTQ+ community in South Carolina. Jenny Lee Turner (pronouns: She/Her/Hers) speaks of growing up in West Virginia and Virginia, attending the University of Virginia for her undergraduate degree and obtaining a master’s degree in clinical counseling at The Citadel and her professional life mostly in Charleston, SC. Her coming out as a lesbian was complicated by her rural, religious and working class background, and she was shocked coming to Charleston in 1979, which seemed less sophisticated than Norfolk since Mt. Pleasant “didn’t even have sidewalks.” She worked in counseling at the Department of Social Services, got to know gay men and lesbians in the community, attending some bars and social events. As a White professional, she was dismayed by prejudice aimed at, and poverty she discovered in, the Black Gullah community. In private practice, she volunteered with Palmetto AIDS Life Support Services (PALSS), working with gay men with HIV, helping to set up the buddy program, and becoming friends with many who lost their lives to the disease or to suicide. She describes the fear and backlash AIDS prompted and much of the interview focuses on Corey Jerome Glover, the young Black child with HIV she and her partner, a physician, fostered as an out lesbian couple, even when state laws forbade that. She describes Glover’s short life and death (in 1994 before the age of three) in vivid detail and notes the depression that overcame her when she moved to New York. Returning to Charleston, she worked with the Medical University of South Carolina’s Institute of Psychiatry with teens with drug and other issues and she was injured when attacked in a charter school in North Charleston. Retiring in 2003 with post- traumatic stress disorder and osteoarthritis, she worked with therapy dogs and focused on her long-term relationship with Patricia Graf whom she married in Seneca Falls, NY in 2014. She talks about her own maturation and that of the local LGBTQ community, mentioning the NAMES project and Lynn Dugan’s founding of the Pride parade and the Charleston Social Club for lesbians. Noting the changes in Charleston, she calls it “a whole new world, and I’m wondering if the kids…these days…realize they are standing on the shoulders of others who have died for them….” Before the interview concludes, referring to the new less-closeted world of her youth, she states, “I’m delighted to be alive in it, and to see how far things have come, especially in Charleston….”
Oral history interview conducted by College of Charleston Libraries Special Collections and Archives as part of the ongoing efforts to preserve, elevate, and document the stories and history of the LGBTQ+ community in South Carolina. James Moskow (pronouns: He/Him/His) discusses growing up in Charleston, SC, his birth family, and his time in the foster care system. He talks about moving around as a small child before moving to Charleston, SC at five or six years old, and discusses his time in the foster care system from the age of eight to fourteen. During his time in foster care he lived with relatives, in group homes, and ultimately was adopted by a single gay father. James talks about his biological family, their religious beliefs as Pentecostals and being adopted by a Jewish father. He discusses LGBTQ life in Charleston, attending a Pride festival in Summerville, SC and his friendship with Charleston drag queen Melody Lucas. He discusses his time at West Ashley High School and meeting a clique of friends in high school that he remains close to. Moskow recalls moving to Alaska and living on the Kenai Peninsula before the COVID-19 pandemic forced him to move back to Charleston.
Oral history interview conducted by College of Charleston Libraries Special Collections and Archives as part of the ongoing efforts to preserve, elevate, and document the stories and history of the LGBTQ+ community in South Carolina. Joe Hall (pronouns: He/Him/His), living in Washington, DC, after years of international work for the National Democratic Institute (NDI), discuses growing up gay in Greenville and Bennettsville, SC, overcoming alcoholism and leading an early AIDS service agency in Charleston, SC. With an accepting family, he embraced his sexuality; he describes gay life in Atlanta, after high school, describes a gay bar in Florence, SC, mentions living in New York, and Washington, DC before settling in Charleston where he got sober. He enrolled at a program at Fenwick Hall in 1983 and later at the Palmetto Center in Florence. He describes bars in Charleston and the founding of its gay Alcoholics Anonymous group. After being counselor in a treatment center, he became involved with the Palmetto AIDS Life Support Services (PALSS) agency, founded in Columbia by Bill Edens. He details the organization’s evolution, mentions the earlier group Helping Hands, and names leaders and supporters in HIV education and response, while discussing issues facing those with HIV. He speaks of being “defiantly” gay, coming out on local TV, and the difficulty of separating the Lowcountry PALSS organization from its Columbia base, it becoming a separate entity (later renamed Lowcountry AIDS Services), and the impact it had on his friendship with Bill Edens and others. He recounts the growth of the organization, services provided, and challenges faced, catering to various constituencies, including elite gay white men and African American religious groups, among others, while emphasizing the major contributions of lesbians. He gives vignettes of certain actions, including a demonstration by ACTUP in Columbia, SC, coordinating with the SC Department of Health and Environmental Control (DHEC), protesting the policies of Governor Caroll Campbell, and the successful fundraising program Dining with Friends. He lists those who gave of their money, time, and services, and addresses the work’s impact on LGBTQ visibility as well as on his personal life. After working for another AIDS agency in another state, he travelled the world, eventually working for NDI in places such as Palestine, Azerbaijan, Sierra Leone, and Beirut, where he met his husband, André Saade. He and Hall moved to Washington, DC in 2012 and married. Saade became an American citizen in 2017 and Hall was working with an organization focused on international security when he died suddenly of an asthma attack during the COVID pandemic in 2020.
Oral history interview conducted by College of Charleston Libraries Special Collections and Archives as part of the ongoing efforts to preserve, elevate, and document the stories and history of the LGBTQ+ community in South Carolina. Terry Fox (pronouns: He/Him/His) co-founder of the Charleston Arts Festival, long time board member of the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art at the College of Charleston, and involved with many arts projects and organizations, speaks of his life as a “fairly openly gay man” since arriving in Charleston, SC in 1968. He was born near Lenoir, NC, and raised in the town of Hudson and had a loving upbringing. Majoring in English at UNC-Chapel Hill, he began to participate in gay life; after an unhappy year at graduate school at USC in Columbia, he moved to Charleston, which, compared to today, was “shabbier, sexier, more romantic.” A white man, he taught in the all-Black W. Gresham Meggett middle school on James Island the last year of its existence. A party he held for some of his students got him evicted from his downtown apartment; he later taught at a middle school in Mt. Pleasant, SC and then at the county’s first alternative school, Freedom School, for students with drug issues. His interest in emotionally disabled children led him to the position of educational therapist at Southern Pines, a private psychiatric facility in Charleston, with later stints as director of student life at Johnson and Wales College and the Art Institute of Charleston, while also founding the Marble Arch, an artist co-op. In his narrative, he also discusses gay life in Charleston, mentions some bars, such as the Bat Room, Streetcar, the Orvin Court bar, the Garden and Gun Club, where he worked as a bartender, and Les Jardins. He gives brief portraits of Richard (Dick) Robison of the Garden and Gun Club, bar owner Bobby Tucker, and describes his friendship with his neighbor early transexual Dawn Langley Simmons (1922- 2000) who “charmed, puzzled [and] fascinated him”. Never having felt “marginalized or treated unfairly” for being openly gay, Fox also served on the local HIV/AIDS agency Lowcountry Palmetto AIDS Life Support Services, describing the fundraising projects Affair of the Heart and Dining with Friends. He goes into the history regarding the long running PechaKucha program he co-founded and manages and gives details, as well, of events and successes of the Charleston Arts Festival. A modern art collector, he gives his assessment of the Charleston art scene, and notes, with disappointment, how Charleston has become more crowded and less of a “pleasurable” place to live than it once was.
Oral history interview conducted by College of Charleston Libraries Special Collections and Archives as part of the ongoing efforts to preserve, elevate, and document the stories and history of the LGBTQ+ community in South Carolina. Jacoba Wilhelmina Anneke Hein, known as Wilhelmina, (pronouns: She/Her/Hers) discusses her life and experiences before and after sex reassignment surgery; she also reflects on her six years as a minister in Charleston, SC from her home in Almelo, the Netherlands. Born nearby in Enscede in 1947, she was raised in a very strict evangelical family, emigrating to Australia when she was ten. She kept her interest in men and in women’s clothes secret, instead following religious expectations of community by marrying and having a child. Only upon reading transsexual Jan Morris’s book, Conundrum, did Hein discover her true self. Divorce followed, and when her sex reassignment surgery in Australia stalled, Hein lived as a gay man before completing the reassignment program in New Zealand at age 47. Having served as a pastor in the Metropolitan Community Church (MCC) in Australia, New Zealand and in Toledo, OH, Hein came to Charleston’s MCC in 2000. She found the weather “tropical” and her congregation, evangelical in spirit while cleaving to traditional liturgy, “almost schizophrenic.” She feels she made her congregation uneasy with her willingness to examine scripture and its context. Faced with church politics and vague allegations, she soon fell ill with diabetes and heart problems. When members of the congregation left the church soon after, they sought her leadership, and Open Door Christian Church was formed. Hein describes both congregations, their outreach and social justice efforts and her work as a minister and counselor in the greater community where she found acceptance. She notes that her Australian accent garnered more attention than her trans status. When her interest in Judaism lead to her attending Kahal Kadosh Beth Elohim synagogue, studying Hebrew, and considering conversion, she informed her congregation that she planned to resign in six months. But the board immediately dismissed her, and although she wanted to remain in Charleston for conversion, developments in the Netherlands allowed her to retire there immediately. She left in 2006. Hein speaks of her work in Charleston, its racism, her development of a local LGBTQ radio show, and her happiness and satisfaction there. Identifying as a heterosexual woman of faith, conversant with LGBTQ and spiritual issues, she does not feel that there is a need any longer for separate LGBTQ religious spaces since “ultimately the issue is to live in broader society.”
