One day in 1986, Wib Gulley ’70 sat down in Bullock’s Barbecue, a favorite lunch spot in Durham. The city’s mayor, he was in the midst of a firestorm. Gulley had signed an anti-discrimination proclamation and endorsed an upcoming Pride parade – two rare events in the sleepy Southern city. He had publicly supported Durham’s LGBTQ community. Evangelical preachers and editorial writers were calling for his removal from office. A recall movement was gathering signatures.
Out of the corner of his eye, Gulley saw four men in Coca Cola Bottling Company uniforms get up from their table. They passed by the mayor’s table and one of them, without looking, dropped a napkin on Gulley’s table.
“It said, ‘Thank you so much, Mr. Mayor, for what you’re doing,’” Gulley says.
A new exhibit at the Museum of Durham History tells the story of Durham’s first city-sanctioned Pride parade in 1986. There had been an earlier march in Durham in 1981, a protest after a sunbather at nearby Little River was killed by men shouting homophobic slurs, but five years had passed. Local organizers wanted the 1986 parade to have momentum, to continue. And it did: It’s the direct ancestor of Pride: Durham, NC, an annual Bull City tradition that consistently draws enthusiastic crowds. Nowadays, businesses and churches readily throw their support behind Pride: Durham, NC.
Four decades ago, though, Durham’s mayor risked his career to do so.
“It's hard to picture in Durham today the kind of controversy that grips, say, two-thirds of the community,” says Gulley.
Gulley teamed up with Andrew Nurkin ’03, the Hart Associate Professor of the Practice of Public Policy at Sanford, to preserve the stories of this era, as many of the key players are still alive. The museum exhibit is based on Gulley and Nurkin’s ongoing research.
Nurkin was raised in Atlanta, but grew up visiting a grandmother in Durham regularly. It became home when he came to Duke as a professor in 2021. Nurkin and his partner bought a house not far from a beautiful spot on the Little River. When Nurkin learned it had been the site of the 1981 beating death of Ronald Antonevich, on the mere assumption that he was gay, he made the killing and subsequent march the subject of a summer Story+ project with his students. When Nurkin connected with Gulley, the research expanded to include the 1986 recall petition and Pride parade.
“I think the folks who organized the 1986 march were imagining, ‘How do we get that energy back, but make it not only about the grief of this violence, but a demand for more civil rights, more recognition?” Nurkin says. “That’s where they develop the political strategy to engage with [Gulley]. Very fortunately, they had a willing and excited collaborator and accomplice in that.”
When Treat Harvey, the Museum of Durham History’s director of development, arrived in Durham from New York City in 1995, she found the city already changed. In this era, living openly could cost LGBTQ people their careers, she recalls. Yet she and her partner at the time found a healthy out-and-proud community in Durham, with its own film festival and – yes – annual Pride parade.
“What people did in 1986 made it possible for me to come into this city and be welcome,” Harvey says.
When Jesse Huddleston ’10 arrived in 2006, Pride events in Durham were thriving. Huddleston could see the annual Pride parade from their Gilbert-Addoms dorm room on East Campus. Twenty years later, Huddleston is the director of development and community engagement for the LGBTQ Center of Durham and the organizer of Pride: Durham, NC. They have earned a nickname within the LGBTQ community: the Mayor of Durham.
“That’s been my posture lately with these queer narratives, learning from and meeting some of the people [from the 1986 movement] whose shoulders I ostensibly stand on organizing Pride in a town where now it’s so normal,” Huddleston says. “It’s beloved by the vast majority of people.”
In 1986, the recall movement was met by a counter-movement, with support-the-mayor tables setting up beside recall petition tables. The recall movement “didn’t even make it to first base,” Gulley says. He and Nurkin believe that the community supporting its first official Pride is at the roots of the Top-10-list city Durham became. It had been a sleepy industry town in the ’80s. There wasn’t the geography of San Francisco or the jazz of New Orleans to entice new residents. Gulley believes the creative class was drawn to Durham because it became a welcoming place.
“Young people in their 20s, early 30s, who are diverse in terms of sexual orientation, in terms of ethnicity, and very creative – they’re the ones who are starting new businesses,” Gulley says. “They’re the ones that come to existing businesses and provide them innovation and entrepreneurship. That is the key factor in urban economics.”
The other side of the story is the level of prejudice expressed in the 1986 letters calling for Gulley’s removal. This was a challenging part of the research, Nurkin says, in part because the prejudice hasn’t fully gone away. People no longer sign their names to homophobic letters to the editor, he notes, but they will comment the same sentiments anonymously online. Durham became more supportive of its LGBTQ population, he says, but did not magically become a haven. Accordingly, Nurkin wants the museum exhibit to communicate a sense of practical hope rather than blind optimism.
“You can change where you live. You can make something better than you found it,” Nurkin says. “If you really build relationships with other people, and you get to know them, [including] people who you have big disagreements with, and you work for a long time, you can actually make a difference.”
Safety was never promised, Huddleston says matter-of-factly. Being Black and queer in the South, organizing one of the region’s most visible Pride celebrations, they’re realistic about the risks of continuing the work toward equality that has been percolating since at least the 1980s. But they also know the risks people have taken for decades, here in Durham, to make it a more equitable city.
“You’re allowed to be afraid,” Huddleston says. “That’s what faith and courage are for.”