The NC House speaker and the moral low ground

Let’s start off by establishing that we don’t generally like to get involved in the personal lives of our elected officials. Just like all the rest of us, they’re not perfect. We prefer to report on their decisions, the policies they embrace, the people they make deals with. And we find their romantic foibles particularly tiresome. Yes, powerful people tend to have a lot of sex, and sometimes it gets weird. Yawn.

But every so often an item about a powerful person’s sex life bubbles to the surface for public consumption so sinister and perverted that it cannot be ignored.

That happened Monday morning, when the alienation-of-affection lawsuit against North Carolina House Speaker Tim Moore (R-Cleveland) dropped.

As your iPhone might say, it’s ducked up.

NC is one of just six states that allows for lawsuits of this type, which put a dollar amount on damages caused by marital affairs. Judgments are paid by the cheating spouse’s illicit lover, which in this case is the speaker of the NC House.

The lawsuit alleges — with photos! — that Moore conducted an affair with the wedded partner of a minor political figure in Apex. He is currently an assistant principal whose spouse works in a state department over which Moore held considerable sway.

According to the document, Moore “aggressively pursued a sexual relationship” with the plain-

Jen Sorensen

tiff’s partner in an affair that lasted three years. Besides their own dalliances, the plaintiff’s partner admitted to “group sex with other individuals seeking Defendant Tim Moore’s political favor” and that she “could not end her relationship with Defendant Tim Moore for fear of retaliation” even after the plaintiff had confronted Moore. And when Moore found out that this suit was coming, it alleges, he had an agent install motion-detector cameras on the plaintiff’s property to monitor his comings and goings.

This one scratches a lot of itches. He’s a powerful political figure who is at least partly responsible for flooding our streets with guns, restricting abortion access, gerrymandering districts to the disadvantage of voters in the state and all sorts of other things we hate. If the suit is to be believed, he was not reluctant to leverage his position for sexual favors. And then there’s the whole group-sex business, which is exactly the kind of thing Madison Cawthorn tried to warn us about

Plaintiff asks for just $25,000 against his losses — a fairly trivial sum for political power players in the state. The damage to Moore’s career could cost a lot more. Or will it? After Trump, hard-right voters are willing to forgive a lot more than they used to. Which means Moore can either deny it — photographic evidence notwithstanding — or lean into it. But as of press time his strategy has been to keep silent until he figures his path to daylight.

John Cole Courtesy of NC Policy Watch

Winston-Salem’s Pride won’t be marked by hate

by Vikki Vassar

Allowing last week’s TCB article to be the period on the sentence of Winston-Salem during Pride Month left a bad taste in my mouth.

Having been able to observe all of the events after the Radar Brewing Drag Brunch in real time, including the actions of the community afterward — all of the phone calls, the messages, the texts — I knew something needed to be said about the citizens of Winston-Salem.

After the Triad City Beat article, communication bloomed across Winston-Salem. Friends started calling, texting, telling them about what happened at Radar Brewing and asking those friends to not only attend these events going forward, but to keep their eyes open and their phones ready to dial the non-emergency line of the Winston-Salem Police Department for assistance.

At Camel City Playhouse, they donned coordinated T-shirts and offered escorts to attendees to and from their vehicles.

“I felt very aware, but very safe,” says local drag performer CC LaBrie “I’ve lived in large cities and always been very aware of my surroundings. My guard has been down for the past few years, and last Saturday brought it back up, so it was good to have that community support from invisible eyes. The majority of those who attended to protest the Drag Brunch at Radar Brewing weren’t even from here. I feel like that really said something about the community of Winston-Salem, that the anti-drag protestors had to come from hours away. The outpouring of love and support from the Winston-Salem post-drag brunch has been great.”

LaBrie explained how after TCB’s article came out, the owner of Joymongers sat down with her after her drag show at the business and asked her how she was… It’s the same love and support she saw during Art Crush, LaBrie says.

“All of the love from the community reminds me of why I continue to perform and why I know there is still a lot of work to do,” she says. Drag performer Anna Yacht reflected on the aftermath of the Proud Boys coming to town, too.

“It brought the community together and helped shine a light on how the togetherness of the local community can make a difference,” Yacht says. “Pride is all about being the best version of yourself that you can be. Coming together and celebrating each other in love. People love to obsess over these little short headlines and soundbites and miss the larger, better things that happen. People always want to rewrite the narrative to be something worse than it is.”

Despite the fact that right-wing conservatives have begun to villainize drag culture, saying it preys upon children, nothing could be further from the truth.

“My idea of being able to use drag to make some changes and find other talented people and give them a platform to do their art, in an accessible and fun way, is my main goal with my drag. I am trying to give the community my best as a leader,” Anna Yacht says. “Presenting as a woman is seen as an inherently sexual thing, whether you are acting sexually or not. I do drag to embrace the female energy I’ve found within myself, as a performer and an entertainer and it makes people uncomfortable, but there is nothing sexy about being in a corset for eight hours and taking it off, and looking like you’ve been roasted on a George Foreman grill. You are not sexy after performances.

“Drag is not about the controversy and we don’t want to alter our interactions with the community based on the threat of something bad happening,” Yacht continued.

Instead, Yacht says that increased visibility of the LGBTQIA2S+ community is what the hard right is threatened by.

“Because LGTBQIA2S+ community members are different, because they’re not cis white men that everyone is so used to seeing at the forefront of everything, now that things are changing, some people are feeling threatened and are struggling to keep the world as something they understand, instead of learning about the changes,” she says. “They choose to threaten people’s safety instead of letting folks just be the people they are.”

I had a phone call with my parents immediately after I left Radar Brewing, two folks from the silent generation, who recounted the time members of the KKK visited my ancestral hometown generations ago. The event feels like a throughline to what took place a few weekends ago at Radar Brewing.

“This sounds very similar,” my mother said. “Your great-grandfather told them they should be ashamed of themselves for terrorizing the community.”

But the best community support is the community itself.

And Winston-Salem has shown that we are not only supportive of the LGBTQIA2S+ community, we ARE that community.

“The community coordination and presence is something above and beyond what we ever could have asked for,” Yacht says. “The fact that the community coordination all came from a place of genuine concern, not looking for acknowledgement, is a statement to the love folks have for their neighbors in Winston-Salem. The counter protests, the pro-LGBTQIA+ allies, are so important…. These anti-LGBTQIA2S+ protestors who are so angry, showing up and wanting to hurt other people, emotionally or physically, should not feel that they have enough power to possibly set any plan into action.”

The community of Winston-Salem has made its voice heard, loud and clear. Intolerance is not welcome here. So, if you’re with us, come out to Pride Winston-Salem on Saturday, June 24 and celebrate, because we all belong here.

‘Just getting started’: Q&A with David Bower, organizer of Rainbow Rave, a queer music and arts party in Winston-Salem

Rainbow Rave Chief Artistic Director David Bower

PHOTO BY KEVIN M @CZYKYOSELF