Known for its close proximity to both Zion National Park & The Grand Canyon, the citizens of St. George, Utah were lucky enough to find themselves near three other national treasures; namely, Bob The Drag Queen, Shangela, and Eureka, who arrived in town to film an episode of their heartwarming HBO docu-series We’re Here. Unfortunately, a number of the residents of St. George decided to take this opportunity for true inclusion and significant change to push some of the extremist anti-LGBTQ rhetoric that is cropping up in various areas of the country currently. According to The Spectrum, outrage from city residents was sparked by the location of the dressing rooms that the show would be using (a rentable space over a children’s museum after-hours), which seemed to speak a firestorm within the community, resulting in two emergency city council meetings.
The majority of the speakers strongly supported the LGBTQ community, with one speaker named August Carter taking their three minutes to publicly come out as trans to everyone in the room & watching online. Carter said,
“I understand that for you, being a city council member is a part-time job, but for me, being trans is something I have to deal with every goddamn day,” said Carter. “And I am terrified to stand in front of you and say that because there are people who want to erase people like me from this city, from this state, from this country, but like the HBO show says, we’re here. We have always been here. There is no world where you wake up one day and queer people no longer exist.”
In the end, shooting was able to move forward with a source close to production telling EW that close to 1,400 people RSVP’d to Friday’s drag show (which typically serves as the finale of the episode). The episode itself will detail the “fallout from an LGBTQ-adjacent incident at school”.
During Season 2, Shangela expressed to EW her feelings on a specific episode of We’re Here, which had the queens paying a visit to the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama over half a century after civil rights activists marched through that very same spot.
“Especially as Black people [and] as LGBTQIA+ people, we’re still fighting for equality, we’re fighting discrimination, we’re fighting for acceptance and equal treatment for all people”. She went on to say “Standing on that bridge as a Black gay person raised in the South, as someone who’d come to that town to help amplify the voices and find a community of support for the gays there, but also as a person that understood the significance of the moment, it was very powerful.”
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A Small Town Council Meeting Over ‘We’re Here’ Sparked A Shocking Coming-Out