F. L. “Bubba” Copeland, Our Sibling Who Never Was

A Baptist pastor and small town mayor in Alabama was hounded into suicide by a right wing news site who discovered a secret online persona as a trans woman.

by Evan Urqhart

This is what it feels like to move backwards. It happens slowly at first, and then you look around and find unthinkable cruelty towards transgender people has somehow been normalized.

Today a small town mayor died by sucide after a series of stories in a conservative news outlet exposed the fact that he presented himself online as a trans woman.

F. L. “Bubba” Copeland was a Baptist pastor and small town mayor. Online, Copeland went by the name Brittini Blaire Summerlin and described herself (himself) as a trans woman. This secret was exposed this past Wednesday, November 1, by 1819, a conservative Alabama news site. 1819 was founded in 2021 as a project of the Alabama Policy Institute (a conservative “think tank”). Early this year it was spun off as an independent conservative media outlet.

Copeland reportedly had accounts on reddit and Instagram, where she posted pictures as Summerlin. Some of these were racy, but many were not. As Summerlin Copeland also wrote erotic stories, and interacted with others on reddit as a trans woman. The bulk of what Copeland posted in this manner seems to have been harmless, although one of the six stories posted on 1819 in the past three days included claims that Copeland had used names or pictures of friends and acquaintences without their permission, often in memes with fake before-and-after transition photos.

According to 1819 Copeland eventually admitted maintaining the social media accounts, and asked the outlet not to publish a story about them.

screenshot from 1819

In the mid-twentieth century, the Lavendar Scare resulted in scores of civil servants being outed,disgraced, and fired in the midst of a moral panic over homosexuality. Many of these are known to have ended in suicide. This time of closets, terror, and repeatedly hounding people to their deaths are remembered fondly by our current reactionaries as the good old days, and it’s this that they’ve sought to bring back into our current reality.

Copeland lived by the rules of small conservative Southern towns by presenting himself as a cisgender heterosexual in public and crossdressing in private. Then the rules changed. The same conservative culture that forced him (her) into the closet decided that wasn’t enough for them, so they forced him (her) to come out of it.

It all happened so fast, but also quite slowly. They’ve hounded one of their own, a queer sibling who hid in the life of a small town pastor, into suicide.

So we better fight like hell to stop them from reasserting this toxic culture on the whole country.