On May 8 of last year, Anna Massey and Chris Denton sat at a picnic bench at Rhea County’s Cedar Point Park, munching sandwiches of white bread and processed cold cuts. A high school junior and freshman, respectively, the two had just returned from a food run for one of the organizer’s of the county’s first Gay Day.

On the stage underneath the park’s picnic shelter, two hairy men in dresses sang songs and juggled. For one day at least, surrounded by a few hundred gay men and lesbians, the two high schoolers were not part of the minority. They were also probably not who the county commission had in mind when they passed a muddled resolution in March of 2004 criminalizing homosexuals.

Denton had told a few people he was gay about a year before. “I was just tired of being someone I wasn’t,” he said. “I sort of threw up my hands and told a couple of people. It got back to my grandfather and he made me come out of the closet to my family. He’s very judgmental and he hates faggots.” Denton added that his grandfather hadn’t disowned him, he just didn’t like to talk about it. “He loves me still.”

Massey had come out two years earlier, at the end of her freshman year.

Her friends had been supportive, while other students had ignored her orientation or been hostile to her. “I’m probably one of the most openly gay students at my high school. I still get called faggot. I look past it,” she said. “My dad ignores the whole idea. He still says, ‘When are you going to bring home a nice boy who will work on the car?’ My mom is getting better. She wants to be involved in my life.”

The leader of the church youth group Massey was active in didn’t like it much either, but didn't criticize her, she said. “He said, ‘You know it’s wrong but I’m not going to judge you.’”

Did Massey believe being gay was wrong? “I believe it is wrong,” she said, “but God created everybody to be who they are so why would he create gay people but say it’s wrong?”

On March 16, 2004, the Rhea County Commission was wrapping up its monthly meeting, having just voted to remove televisions from all county offices. Then Commissioner J.C. Fugate asked for the floor and began to talk about gays and lesbians. “I’d like to make a motion that those kind of people cannot live in Rhea County or abide in Rhea County,” he said, according to a recording of the meeting. “If they’re caught in Rhea County living together as such, that they be tried for crimes against nature.”

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