What’s happening for LGBT folks in the state’s neighboring Minnesota? Each week, we will recap the news from Wisconsin, Iowa, South Dakota and North Dakota as it relates to the struggle for equality.
Iowa
Marriage equality appears to be a permanent thing for Iowa. The Iowa Poll, conducted by the Des Moines Register, found that 62 percent of those polled are either proud the state has marriage equality or don’t care.
A gay man in iowa is noted for his contributions to civil liberties, though for most of his life, his relationship remained in the closet. From the Des Moines Register:
[Dan] Johnston is most noted for winning Tinker v. Des Moines in 1969. He successfully argued the First Amendment free speech rights of two Des Moines public school students were violated when school officials suspended them for wearing black armbands to protest the Vietnam War.
The U.S. Supreme Court famously ruled that students do not “shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.”
He told the paper, “I always knew that the civil rights that were being extended to women and minorities would eventually come around to gays, but I didn’t know if it would be in my lifetime,”
Rep. Steve King was mocked by Comedy Central’s Steven Colbert for saying he’d like to see proof of gays’ relationships, so Colbert started a drive for people to send him proof. But, King says he didn’t receive any.
Wisconsin
A marriage equality lawsuit continues in the Badger State, which is surrounded on three sides by states where same-sex couples have the right to wed. A judge denied a move to to bar the state from enforcing its same-sex marriage ban, but promised to expedite the case. With assurances that the case will be quickly decided, the ACLU has promised not to seek the injunction that would bar the state from enforcing the law. The Gazette profiled two of the women suing for the right to marry in Wisconsin
LGBT artists are making great contributions to the eastern part of the state.
A Milwaukee theater company has produced a play about the Mattachine Society, one of the first LGBT organizations in the country. From the Wisconsin Gazette:
“Theatrical Tendencies, Milwaukee’s LGBT-focused theater company, hopes to enlarge historical knowledge of the LGBT civil rights movement withThe Temperamentals, a play about the birth of the Mattachine Society and the romance between founders Harry Hay and Rudi Gernreich that’s at the heart of its founding.”
Melinda Stephan’s film “Platonic Solid,” screened at the Wildwood Film Festival in Appleton highlights same-sex relationships in the state. “The short film follows two would-be lovers as they explore and embrace same-sex relationships, and is based on Melinda’s own experience while living in Wisconsin,” the Appleton Post Crescent reports.
North Dakota
Jasmine Maki, writing for the Grand Forks Herald, reviews Grand Forks’ burgeoning drag scene in “DRAG: Another type of performance.” The piece walks the reader — mainstream North Dakotans, through the art-form of drag and the cultural significance of the practice.
South Dakota
In the Black Hills Pioneer, Daniel Elsasser tells his story of coming out gay, moving to Minneapolis, and then back to western South Dakota. He notes that life there is good for him as a gay man, but:
South Dakota shoots itself in the foot by sticking to extremely conservative agendas, then it wonders why all its students move away, why others won’t move here, and why there’s no real economy here outside agriculture — and in the Black Hills, three months of tourism.
The world has changed and the states around us are changing to reflect that. And when people in those states read about South Dakota in their newspapers, they’re reading about some new ill-begotten Jim Crow agenda. It’s embarrassing. It’s a shame when I go to another state and people ask me where I’m from that I’ve come to expect a negative reaction when I say South Dakota. It’s embarrassing when people ask me how I survive here.