Bubba Copeland

April 4, 2024 7:23 PM

[CW: transphobia, suicide] Bubba Copeland was the heart and soul of his community—mayor, businessman. When a website exposed his deepest secrets, his life wasn’t the only thing that was destroyed. [Esquire]
posted by riruro (32 comments total)

Well I'm crying now. Fucking transphobes.

A wonderful beautiful person who did so much good, a life destroyed by people who didn't understand and didn't want to, driven to despair, hounded to death. My heart goes out to their family. May their memory be a blessing.
posted by Chrysopoeia at 8:00 PM on April 4 [10 favorites]

.

It’s a damn shame there aren’t more in this world like Bubba. I remember the initial reporting and I’m ashamed to admit I never looked past the headlines to see the people at the heart of the story. Thank you for sharing.
posted by kyleg at 8:01 PM on April 4 [5 favorites]

Well that's the most crushingly sad thing that I've read in a long time.
posted by merriment at 8:03 PM on April 4 [6 favorites]

This needs a CW for transphobia.
posted by Zumbador at 8:06 PM on April 4 [4 favorites]

Fuck the people who did this. All of them-- the guy who wrote the articles, the editor who approved them, the founder who, when confronted about the death of a human being could apparently do nothing but babble about triggering "the leftist community"-- what an astonishing, sickening lack of humanity. Certainly not a fraction of the humanity that, from what this article says, Bubba Copeland seems to have brought to life and to the people around him.

Rest in peace, Bubba. As depressing and infuriating as this was, I'm glad I read the article and got to know, in some small way, the human being and not just the headline.
posted by Method Man at 8:33 PM on April 4 [21 favorites]

.
posted by Pouteria at 9:14 PM on April 4

This makes me sad and angry. I wish Bubba could have found a safe place to be all of who he needed to be. We need more people like him.
posted by JustSayNoDawg at 9:49 PM on April 4 [2 favorites]

The story of the Internet is of tribes hurling rocks over the horizon at targets they cannot see, doing damage that they do not care to measure. In this case, those assumptions and that ignorance would make Bubba less a human being than an ideological target in a raging culture war, and the damage radiating through these towns is now plain for all with eyes to see.

Mostly I feel very bad for Bubba here (especially getting targeted for being a hypocritical bigot when he wasn't), but I did feel very creeped out at his murder fantasy and using pictures of real live people in town online. That last bit especially was not ok.
posted by jenfullmoon at 10:00 PM on April 4 [7 favorites]

but I did feel very creeped out at his murder fantasy

TBH my first thought about that part was "wait 'til those 1819 fucks read the shit Tom Clancy has written." But somehow of course if it's a straight white dude writing about straight white dude murder stuff, it's just bestseller fiction, OBVIOUSLY doesn't imply he as a straight wide dude is gonna go out murdering.
posted by solotoro at 10:57 PM on April 4 [12 favorites]

The story of the Internet is of tribes hurling rocks over the horizon at targets they cannot see, doing damage that they do not care to measure.

This is reductive, false, and only really incorporates the more recent history of the Internet.


The 1819 News guys should be done for murder.
posted by Dysk at 11:12 PM on April 4 [5 favorites]

.
posted by quazichimp at 11:16 PM on April 4

I could only make it part way through.

There's so much familiar in this that I recognize from my past in small-town US.

The curse is in the lies we repeat about what are acceptable ways to be human. The poison we inflict upon each other, to seep chronically back out and twist our lives out of shape.

Bubba deserved a life to be who she (presuming) wanted to be. Not a lifetime of pain and guilt and hiding.
posted by allium cepa at 11:55 PM on April 4 [7 favorites]

The Wikipedia article about 1819 News is a cesspit of scumbag conservatives. It started as the propaganda outlet for the Alabama Policy Institute, and is currently headed up by a former Breitbart reporter.
posted by JohnFromGR at 3:54 AM on April 5 [2 favorites]

I could barely stomach this. It was a hard, hard read, and a familiar one. It's a horror movie and you want to tell Copeland, get out of the fucking house, get to safety. It's in Esquire, nobody who needs to read it is going to read it, but you do wish for one minute someone sitting in a pew at some small southern church would take a look at it and think about just how many times the word 'stress' appears in it. You get the sense Copeland was one of those victims of medieval torture where they just keep piling the rocks on top of you. Imagine living a life where the best you're going to get is, "Sweetheart, he can't help it."
posted by mittens at 4:55 AM on April 5 [6 favorites]

I remember when this happened, and all the hypocrisy allegations thrown around to justify making someone's private life public. Now, we know the truth: Bubba was absolutely not a hypocrite and really had built an amazing loving community based on the best parts of Christianity in a small Southern town where that's very hard to do. The world is so much less because of the loss of Bubba.
posted by hydropsyche at 5:06 AM on April 5 [22 favorites]

When the people who persecuted Copeland face his Lord, He will say "I never knew you".

May God rest this dear soul and wake him to eternal life with the One he served.
posted by The Manwich Horror at 5:48 AM on April 5 [10 favorites]

What a horrifying story. The benign hypocrisy in Copeland's community (we love you, but there's a lot we don't want to know) was good enough under normal circumstances, but not enough under extreme pressure. What would they have expected of him if he hadn't killed himself?

Still, the blame goes to 1819 News and to the 1819 readers who attacked because of the articles.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 6:30 AM on April 5 [4 favorites]

Now, we know the truth: Bubba was absolutely not a hypocrite and really had built an amazing loving community based on the best parts of Christianity in a small Southern town where that's very hard to do.

there's more - i wonder if his actual practice of christianity was the reason for targetting him - crabs in a bucket ...
posted by pyramid termite at 7:51 AM on April 5 [2 favorites]

really not loving how people are glomming onto the 1819 news as the sole instigator here rather than, say, an entire worldview promulgated that it's better to hide who you are and that who you are is shameful

this article feels like a timewarp in certain ways as do the responses and i feel a little queasy about what this all portends.
posted by nixon's meatloaf at 9:04 AM on April 5 [5 favorites]

I think it's pretty natural to focus on the stormtroopers enacting that worldview on the front line in situations as extreme as this, and in this case that is 1819 News.
posted by Dysk at 9:15 AM on April 5 [6 favorites]

This is incredibly saddening, but I'm also feeling like there's something missing. Who was the tipster? I hope they feel great remorse for the consequences of their little sabotage. Seems like an odd thing to be in both spaces at once to be able to make the connection, and then leak to a right wing paper?
posted by jellywerker at 9:39 AM on April 5 [1 favorite]

to this, i would also like to link trans reporter evan urquhart's slate article on the topic, in which he speaks to two scholars, one gay and one trans, about the fear of outing and its effects.
posted by i used to be someone else at 9:47 AM on April 5 [6 favorites]

using pictures of real live people in town online. That last bit especially was not ok.

Yeah, that would be it. I think unfortunately it was that he had committed acts that would have lost him the trust of the community, and those acts were not cross dressing/being transgender.
posted by kingdead at 2:18 PM on April 5 [1 favorite]

are you implying that had the anti-trans hate not been a factor bubba copeland would still have died by suicide, or that copeland being outed as queer would not have cost him his social position in the community?
posted by i used to be someone else at 2:37 PM on April 5 [1 favorite]

The story of the Internet is of tribes hurling rocks over the horizon at targets they cannot see, doing damage that they do not care to measure.

This is reductive, false, and only really incorporates the more recent history of the Internet.


So you weren't there and listen to people tell you "it was SO much better before they let the AOL users in". Yeah, no...the old Internet was smaller, slower and not at all less full of shit people who found anonymity or the illusion of it a refreshing cover for exercising their worst impulses. The only thing different about the 'recent history' is that it's a shitload easier to find the on-line cesspool catering to whatever horror you want to inflict.
posted by kjs3 at 3:12 PM on April 5 [6 favorites]

Bubba lived a pretty complicated life and I think eventually hr might have had to face up to and own that. But 1819
News killed him as sure as if they had pulled the trigger themselves. My faith requires me not to judge their thoughts, because that is never as clear cut as it seems. But I think I'm allowed to have thoughts about the action they take because of those thoughts, and may God damn them to Hell.

And even if I'm not allowed to pass that judgement, well, I can live with that. That's between me and God.

I keep thinking about the assistant pastor at my church, still mourning the death of his husband and how much he has helped me through a very dark time of my life and I just get so pissed off I'm almost unreasonable.
posted by JustSayNoDawg at 3:23 PM on April 5 [3 favorites]

I think that Copeland was targeted because some of his behavior matched a narrative that 1819 wants to promote as unique to trans people. It isn't. He was probably going to lose his position of trust in the community, and not because he cross dressed or wanted in his heart of hearts to transition.

The whole thing reminds me of the "Catch a Predator" series where the whole point was to find people who had committed something that is incredibly difficult to forgive, just to get eyeballs. That ended in suicide, too.
posted by kingdead at 3:39 PM on April 5

or that copeland being outed as queer would not have cost him his social position in the community?

Not the OP, but this rings true. Being born and raised in the Deep South, I notice it's tolerable for your hairdresser or florist or interior designer to be queer, because that's an apropos profession for 'that sort of person'. But your pastor??? Unpossible. He would have been hounded out eventually.

Edit: sorry...I misread. You said "would not have" not "would have". Pls ignore.
posted by kjs3 at 4:12 PM on April 5

So you weren't there and listen to people tell you "it was SO much better before they let the AOL users in". Yeah, no...

I was there for a lot of the pre-web2.0 internet, actually. I'm not regurgitating second-hand opinions here, and would kindly ask you not to tell me what I think, feel, or have experienced. It's rather rude.

My contention is not that the Internet was better in the past, it is that at no point could the internet be accurately summarised in purely negative terms, now or in the past. The story of the internet is and was far more nuanced than "tribes hurling rocks over the horizon at targets they cannot see, doing damage that they do not care to measure".
posted by Dysk at 4:38 PM on April 5 [5 favorites]

kingdead: and not because he cross dressed

I guess I don't know what this means. We can say the sharks that scent blood in the water don't want the blood, they want prey...but it sure is the blood that draws them in.

The more I think about it, the more I'm sad he didn't have anybody to tell him how to hide better. I mean he shouldn't have had to hide. Nobody should. But if he was going to post stuff, for god's sake, someone tell him how to do it in a way he won't get caught. (Is that stupid? Maybe that's stupid. But he would've lived.)
posted by mittens at 6:25 PM on April 5 [3 favorites]

So sad.

So fucked up.

We all need more Bubbas

.
posted by Windopaene at 7:52 PM on April 5 [3 favorites]

.
posted by SageLeVoid at 3:25 PM on April 6