south carolina funded nearly 180 arts groups and said no to exactly two. you will never guess which two.

via the Post and Courier, Greenville News, The State, the SC Daily Gazette and WSPA

The ask was $13,050. That is what the Greenville Gay Men's Chorus requested from the South Carolina Arts Commission, the Post and Courier and Greenville News report. Spartanburg's Proud Mary Theatre Company asked for just under $4,000. Together it is less than a used Honda.

On Thursday, Oct. 1, the commission's board said no to both. It met by Zoom only, in a special called meeting, split the decision into one motion per group, and voted 5-3 each time, according to the Post and Courier, the Greenville News and the SC Daily Gazette. Commissioners Russell "Rip" Parks, Jessica Rourke, Linda Stern, Bhavna Vasudeva and Danielle Thompson voted no. The Post and Courier says the whole meeting lasted 20 minutes.

why only these two

Nobody said, at least not out loud. "No explanation of the board's 5-3 vote was given Thursday," The State reported, and WSPA and the Gazette say the same. The grants for nearly 180 other arts organizations were approved weeks ago. These two were the only ones held back, the Post and Courier and WSPA report, after the board froze operating grants in June and then released everyone else's in August.

The reasons are in writing anyway, in commissioner emails obtained by the ACLU of South Carolina and the Post and Courier. Parks wrote that "it is not the role of a state funded agency to promote" the groups' agendas, and that he "could not defend these programs to concerned legislators who could pull funding for the entire Commission over support of these organizations," per the Gazette. Rourke wrote that "commission funding should not be directed toward organizations structured around specific sexual orientations, nor should public funds support drag performances," the Gazette and The State report.

The legislators he was worried about exist. At a confirmation hearing in March, Senate Majority Leader Shane Massey warned that "those types of awards are the things that get funding stripped," according to The State. Board members are appointed by the governor and approved by the Senate.

In August, Parks put it another way: "What we question is the artistic merit of these two programs." A men's chorus. In the South. Questioned on artistic merit. Every church choir loft in the state just felt a chill.

what the chorus says

"I didn't think anyone in a leadership position would be this blatantly homophobic and discriminatory," Mary Adam, the chorus's executive director, told the Post and Courier. To The State she was simpler: "If you're going to fund the arts, that includes us."

Both groups had received commission funding in past years "without issue," the Greenville News reports. Both are now weighing legal action, according to WSPA and FOX Carolina.

And the gays did what the gays do. The chorus's GoFundMe had raised more than $21,000 as of Oct. 1, the Greenville News reports, which is more than $13,050 by a margin we will be reading aloud at the holiday concert. We wrote last month about Harriet Hancock, who spent 46 years building queer South Carolina a place to belong. The building, it turns out, is still going.