I'm going to be here. Hello and welcome to Outward Slate's Podcast where we support all the new you's

you create in this new year as long as they are extremely deeply queer. I'm Brian Lauter and editor at

Slate and we've got a somber but I think really important share for you today

but before we get into it I wanted to offer just a quick content warning.

This episode will discuss suicide, not in any graphic detail, but just as a thing that happens in the world.

And so if that's not something that's for you, we hope to see you on the show next week. So last

November news surfaced of a tragic situation down in Smith Station Alabama. The

town's mayor and local pastor, F. L. Bubba Cop Copeland committed suicide after a week-long

campaign by a conservative news site to out Copeland as a trans woman. In the

aftermath my slate colleague Evan Urquhart was troubled not only by Copeland's death but by what this vicious right-wing assault indicated about where anti-queer and trans-conservatives, who are of course a growing force in this country right now, would like to take us.

He decided to write about it and look into the history of forced outings in America.

And the result is a sobering and essential new piece titled The Outing of Baba Copeland.

I had the pleasure of editing the piece and I have the pleasure of welcoming Evan back to Outward today.

If you need a refresher, in addition to being an Outward contributor,

Evan is Slate's Comments Moderator and he's also the founder and editor of Assigned Media.

We'll be back with oven right after the break. Welcome back. So as a starting place, why don't you just tell us what we know about who

Bubba Cookland was? You know, I mentioned that he was the mayor of this town.

And also maybe we can have a quick note about

pronouns here because you and I both were struggling a little bit with that in the writing process.

I'm kind of using he when we're talking about Bubba but as we'll see it gets more complicated than that.

Maybe they is more appropriate.

So you can speak on that too, but tell us a little bit about who we know Bubba was,

...