The South Carolina Arts Commission Board Thursday denied two Upstate LGBTQ+ arts organizations' requested grants that had previously been recommended for release.
After an about 40-minute virtual meeting in which board members spent half of in a private executive session, the Greenville Gay Men's Chorus and the Proud Mary Theatre Company in Spartanburg walked away with no state funding and no explanation as to why the funding requests were denied.
Grants for each organization were voted on separately, but both votes were split 5-3 with no member flipping on their answer.
The chorus will now head into the next fiscal year with about $13,000 less than it thought it would have for general operations. And the theatre was denied about $4,000 it was set to receive.
Both organizations have said performances will continue, but they now look toward the community to make up the loss in funding. As the groups experiment with ways to keep cash flowing, they also look for an answer as to how a typical grant request with the commission, which they both had been rewarded in previous years to varying amounts, turned into a monthslong endeavor.
Greenville Gay Men's Chorus Executive Director Mary Adam said the group would push through and continue with its upcoming Dec. 9 performance. She was genuinely shocked by Thursday's results.
"I think maybe I'm naive to how commonplace and acceptable blatant homophobia is," she said in a phone call with South Carolina Public Radio. "I think maybe that is my problem. And I'm shocked that people in broad daylight in a meeting, with their faces on the screen, would vote that way."
The road to denial
Thursday's special meeting came about four months after grants were initially set to be voted on.
In June, board members mulled a vote of about $3.7 million worth of grants over concerns that some approvals could violate a President Donald Trump executive order on "gender ideology."
The commission said in a July 7 release that it was pausing its rolling grant programs to ensure compliance with "federal and state requirements." The next meeting in which the grants could be approved was set for Aug. 20.
But some board members had already identified the chorus and theatre as programs they did not want to fund.
Board member Russell “Rip” Parks had shared his concern with the organizations in private. He said the two groups were inconsistent with what the arts commission wishes to promote.
In a June 12 email sent to outgoing Executive Director David Platts and Interim Executive Director Ashley Brown, Parks said he was alarmed to see the two requests. The emails were obtained by the ACLU of South Carolina and shared with South Carolina Public Radio.
"While these organizations have every right to promote their agendas privately, it is not the role of a state funded agency to promote them. I cannot support these requests. In the future, I would appreciate your bringing controversial requests to the commissioners’ attention in advance for discussion. What if I had not seen these two line items and had approved them? I could not defend these programs to concerned legislators who could pull funding for the entire Commission over support of these organizations," he said in the email.
Board member Jessica Rourke of Columbia emailed the directors with a likewise sentiment just about two hours before Parks had sent his message.
"My decision is based on a personal and governance principle that commission funding should not be directed toward organizations structured around specific sexual orientations, nor should public funds support drag performances," she said in the email.
Senate Majority Leader Shane Massey, R-Edgefield, said earlier in the year that the commission needed to be mindful of how taxpayer dollars were being spent, even through the subjectivity of art. The commission's main source of funding is state tax dollars. Grants from the National Endowment for the Arts are a secondary flow of funds.
When the board met Aug. 20, grants were approved for about 180 organizations. But just the choir and theatre were told to wait.
They'd have to prove their artistic merit in October.
Ideology and art
The commission, too, released a resolution in August that said grant recipients could not "promote any ideology without regard to what that ideology might be."
"The Commission may require grant recipients to certify, as a condition of grant funding from the Commission, that no grant funding received from the Commission shall be used to fund expression that promotes an ideology," part of the resolution said.
And listed in the resolution, advocacy and promotion of ideologies were said to not be components of artistic merit. Essentially, if art explicitly expresses a certain type of "ideology" and nothing else, it is seen as promotion and not art.
Adam said the Upstate chorus may be a safe space for gay singers, but the art is about more than sexual orientation. She said ultimately, it is encouraging to see a slew of public support, even if she believes the circumstances are unfortunate.
"We're not trying to be against anybody or band together up against anything," she said. "We're just doing our thing. Just wanted a little bit of funding."
The organizations had already made it through an agency application process in which artistic merit, artistic excellence and public participation were evaluated. In an application document Adam shared with South Carolina Public Radio, the Greenville Gay Men's Chorus received an average of 29.3 points out of a set of 35 in evaluating artistic merit.
Before Thursday's vote, Interim Executive Director Brown reminded the board that the chorus and theatre had already been recommended to receive funding. The reminder made no impact.
SC ACLU Executive Director Jace Woodrum said a state with the power to police ideology in art
"Once you allow the government to censor one organization, one person, you've given it the power to censor you. To censor any organization," he said. "And that's what we saw here today. With no discussion, with no debate, the arts commission, which is a government actor given authority within our laws, selectively defunded organizations based on their speech."
The groups were given the opportunity to defend their potential funding. The choir and theatre were asked for budgets and if they participated in any "in-school" programming. Adam said she offered to provide videos of performances or the resumes of performers, but the commission simply sought answers to the budget and school questions.
The Greenville Gay Men's Choir listed salaries, rent and bookkeeping fees in its budget; in a meeting agenda packet provided to South Carolina Public Radio by SCAC Communications Director Jason Rapp, the choir had essentially listed an operations budget. The Proud Mary Theatre Company listed the cost breakdown of two upcoming performances.
The months of email and delays culminated into a need for the groups to expand their creativity beyond the stage and into the budget book.
