This City Had Quietly Celebrated Pride Before. In 2023, That Was Not an Option.
As dozens of cars snaked their way onto the grounds of a refurbished horse farm on a sweltering June afternoon in Franklin, Tenn., a few volunteers stood at the entrance, cheerfully welcoming visitors to the local Pride festival.
The greeting, the volunteers said, also gave them a chance to spot any person who didn’t wave back or smile, someone who might harbor more malicious intentions.
There were bag searches and scans with a metal detector. Across the street, a man in a white nationalist fight club T-shirt carried a poster with a homophobic slur. A SWAT team waited on the outskirts of the celebration.
The layers of precaution underscored what had become an unexpectedly volatile situation not only in Franklin, a city 20 miles south of Nashville, but also across the country as right-wing activists have assailed established Pride celebrations and commemorations as a threat to children.
In Franklin, permission to hold the 2023 Pride event came only when the mayor, Ken Moore, chose to break a tie in favor of the festival. His vote capped a vitriolic debate over drag queens having performed in front of children the previous year, an issue that left the city’s governing body deadlocked and exposed painful divisions in the community.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/24/us/politics/franklin-tennessee-pride.html
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