I live in Raleigh, NC, which, while firmly in the bible belt, is a fairly urban place and is plagued with the redneck community much less than the surrounding area. At the same time, it is unabashedly southern, which tends to mean, at least in this case, that there is a lot of reasonably conservative Christianity.

I don't really have a very strong handle on the community at large, as it is very eclectic, ranging from native southerners to transplanted Yankees (that's northerners, to all you damn furriners ), so I'm forced to simply give you a few examples.

First off, I'd like to introduce you to my mother. She's 66 years old and grew up in and around Raleigh, which didn't acquire many outsiders until the late 60s, when IBM started up a plant near here and sent a lot of New Yorkers down. She grew up in a fairly affluent family, though, (her father owned the local Studebaker dealership) so she was never redneck-y. She's a proper southern lady. (Thinking about the older women in ``Steel Magnolias'', if you've ever seen that movie, will get you pretty close.) Around 1990, her husband, my father, a man she'd been married to for twenty years or so, realized or admitted that he was gay. (I believe -- no one's ever come right out and told me.) I don't believe that she can talk about it. I remember one time that she tried to tell me, and just sobbed and couldn't get it out. I'm not sure whether that had to do with the homosexuality, though, or the embarrassment of having wasted 20 years of her life in a lie. The interesting part of this story is that she now has a reasonably close male friend who is gay, or who she assumes is gay, at any rate. He owns a fairly ritzy local restaurant or two. She mentions it occasionally. And it elicits from her, more than anything else, tittering. She seems somewhat amused by it. I think she's too genteel to ever bring it up in conversation with him, but it doesn't seem to offend her in any way. Which I think is pretty impressive, given what my father, who was always, in my experience, a jackass, regardless of his sexuality, put her through.

My other story is much less personal. I happen to have grown up in a Southern Baptist church. The Southern Baptist organization was originally founded around the concept that each member and each church was autonomous, and that the organization existed to create a large front. That is, moneys collected by hundreds of churches were better distributed than piecemeal, one church at a time, and other similar concepts, rather like why it's better to be in a group healthcare plan than to be insured on your own. This organization was to deal with external society, not really something to homogenize the churches. (In the last 15 years or so, this is much less true, though, as the Southern Baptist Convention becomes more and more fascist. No offense intended, revlmwest.) Back in 1992, Pullen Memorial Baptist Church's pastor decided to marry a gay male couple, and put it to the church's board of deacons, who, in turn, put it to the congregation. There was a lot of debate on the matter, but the church voted, by something like 65% to perform the marriage, based largely, as I remember, on the fact that one of their self-stated issues was to provide service to the community. The marriage was performed, and the church was ousted from the Raleigh Baptist Association, the North Carolina Baptist Convention, and the Southern Baptist Convention. Also, many of the church's members were ostracized in their workplaces and communities, as were the couple's parents. Interestingly, most of the significant minority in the congregation who voted against the marriage remained members. The only conclusion I can draw from this is that Raleigh is a quite fractured community on this issue.

A third minor point is that Raleigh's mayor during the early 90s was, according to people in the know, quite gay. Yet he openly spoke against the gay community.

Also, there are three or four openly gay nightclubs in Raleigh that I'm aware of. One of them was going to lose their liquor license if they didn't stop their drag queen competition. They stopped it and kept their license, apparently not bothered again. Which I find odd.