avatarJames Finn

Summary

Bubba Copeland, a Baptist preacher and former mayor of Smiths Station, Alabama, tragically took his own life after being publicly shamed for his private cross-dressing and creative writing activities, which were misconstrued as scandalous.

Abstract

Bubba Copeland, a man who held multiple public roles including that of a Baptist pastor, grocery store owner, and mayor, faced a devastating public exposure of his private life. He enjoyed cross-dressing and writing fiction about curvy women and trans women under a pen name. Despite not breaking any laws or harming others, the revelation led to intense public scrutiny and ridicule from both conservative and liberal circles. The media outlet 1819 News exacerbated the situation by republishing his private posts and fiction, framing them in a sensationalist manner. Copeland's suicide has prompted reflection on the destructive nature of public shaming and the need for empathy and understanding towards those who transgress societal norms in private.

Opinions

  • The author admits to initially finding amusement in the scandal surrounding Bubba Copeland, reflecting a personal bias shaped by past experiences with conservative Christian communities.
  • The author emphasizes that Copeland was not a hypocrite, as confirmed by his congregation and community, and that he was kind, gentle, and caring in his public roles.
  • The article criticizes the behavior of both conservative and liberal factions in the public shaming of Copeland, highlighting the harm caused by such actions.
  • The author points out the irony and tragedy in Copeland's death, as he was a loving family man who engaged in cross-dressing as a form of personal expression and stress relief, not as a malicious act.
  • The author argues that the media's sensationalist approach to Copeland's private life, particularly by 1819 News, contributed significantly to his mental health crisis and subsequent suicide.
  • The author calls for a reevaluation of societal attitudes towards gender non-conformity and the importance of supporting vulnerable individuals, drawing parallels to the treatment of transgender teens and other marginalized groups.
  • The author reflects on personal growth, acknowledging the need to forgive and understand human imperfections, and advocates for a more compassionate society that does not punish individuals for harmless personal expressions.

This Crossdressing Baptist-Preacher Mayor Should Be Alive Loving His Kids

What is this imposed shame that led a man to kill himself despite having broken no laws and harmed no one?

FL ‘Bubba’ Copeland, former mayor of Smiths Station, Alabama and former pastor of First Baptist Church in Phenix City, Alabama. (Photo from Copeland’s Facebook profile.)

Caution: This story contains a factual, non-graphic description of suicide that some readers will find distressing.

Bubba Copeland stepped out of his car last Friday after the kind of slow police chase we Americans have become accustomed to as entertainment. But no news-team helicopters beamed spotlights at Bubba as he pulled over and stepped out of his car. Nobody was watching. The police officers following him did not suspect him of a crime. They didn’t plan to arrest him. They just wanted to make sure he was okay. Somebody who loved Bubba, probably his wife, had called 911 worried he was going to harm himself.

That fear was well grounded. As soon as Bubba stepped out of his vehicle, he raised a gun to head and shot himself dead. He was 49.

I shudder imagining his despair. Reports indicate that his wife and three young children loved and supported him. Reports also indicate that Bubba was a kind, gentle man who never hurt anyone and hadn’t broken any laws.

I can’t know any of that for sure, because I never knew Bubba Copeland, not in his capacity as a Baptist pastor, nor small grocery store owner, nor small-town Alabama mayor. He filled all three public roles at the same time. He played another role in private:

Brittini Blaire Summerlin: a “transgender curvy girl.”

Bubba liked to dress as a woman and post photos of himself, sometimes with his wife, on a private Instagram channel. Sometimes he wrote fiction centered on curvy women and trans women, which he posted to Reddit under a pen name.

I don’t know if he identified as transgender. Possibly he did, in which case I’m using the wrong pronouns for him, but I don’t think so. I’ve poured over everything I can find, including his fiction, and I think his “Transgender Curvy Girl” Instagram account was camp, a light-hearted bit of fun — pulsing with erotic energy but not explicit or pornographic. He seems to have been very attracted to plus-size women, and he enjoyed cross-dressing as one.

If he actually identified as a woman, he never said so.

The conservative news outlet 1819 News first dug up and re-published some of Bubba’s private posts, complete with a lurid warning that photos of the (fully-clothed) pastor-in-a-dress are “explicit.” Shortly after that article broke, the pastor told his Baptist congregation he cross-dressed to have fun and “relieve stress.”

But I’m getting ahead of myself, and I have a confession to make before I finish telling Bubba’s story.

I’m ashamed to admit that last week, before he took his own life, I was finding the breaking scandal about him a little too fascinating, a little too … amusing. You see, I would have presumptively disliked and dismissed Bubba had I known he existed. I would have relegated him to a mental box of “Other” filled with labels like “conservatives,” “Baptists,” and “homophobes.”

Because?

My formative years in small-town Alabama taught to be wary of people who wore any of those labels. I was almost 14 when my family left the state after my dad resigned from pastoring a small Baptist church near Gadsden. In that church, I learned to despise myself for being gay. That self hatred traumatized me so much I almost took my own life when I was 18.

To complicate things, my dad left the pulpit and Alabama under a cloud of sexual scandal.

So, when I read that Bubba the pastor and mayor had been “outed” as a cross-dresser who might or might not identify as transgender, my initial reaction was, “Well, good, sounds like another Christian hypocrite got what he had coming.”

My mind flitted from one conservative-Christian sex scandal to another — to famous pastors caught with rent boys and IV drugs in grimy motel rooms rented by the hour.

I thought about fire-and-brimstone preachers condemning queer people like me from the pulpit while getting a little sumthin’ sumthin’ on the side — not caring who got hurt on the process, including their wives and children.

I don’t need to repeat the stories. Most of you know what I’m talking about and could name many names.

But I profoundly misjudged Bubba, for all the wrong reasons

So … my dad got caught having an affair with his part-time church secretary. Oh, the scandal that rocked our rural Alabama community! No more than a week passed before Dad left to work in booming Texas oil fields. My mom drove my siblings and me thousands of miles to live in the Midwest with her brother.

Everybody tried to keep the details from us kids, but as a resourceful 14 year old, I heard them all. I was so angry! At dad and at the “other woman” I had been very fond of. I was shattered that the father I idolized turned out to be merely human, subject to the same foibles and failures as anyone.

Two years passed before I started to listen and process his repeated apologies. Several more years passed before I truly forgave him. My mom, oddly or not, advised me to give Dad another chance, to understand that perfection is not a prerequisite for love, to accept that judging Dad wasn’t my job.

So why was I judging Bubba last week?

I wasn’t alone. X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, was a laugh riot over the whole “secret trans pastor” scandal. Sure, conservatives were having kittens, lambasting Bubba for being a bad Christian, a degenerate man, and a failure as a husband/father.

But that’s not what I mean.

I’m talking about how the Left yucked it up over having caught yet another hypocrite. “Gotcha!” was the comedic vibe of more tweets than I can count. I didn’t post anything publicly, but I reached out to a couple friends: “Oooooh, Mary Louise! Wouldja look at this? Another Baptist pastor caught with his pants down. And in Alabama OF COURSE. Die of no surprise? Somebody pass this old queen a cosmo!”

Then Bubba Copeland killed himself, reporters dug into the story, and I breathed in some shock and reality.

First, according to Pastor Copeland’s congregation, he was nothing like a hypocrite. Members have told reporters that Bubba didn’t preach condemnatory sermons. He didn’t hate on trans or gay people. He didn’t judge, and he didn’t mistreat people. They say he was kind, gentle, and caring — that he went out of his way to look after vulnerable people both as a pastor and as a mayor.

I don’t necessarily take all of that at face value. People are complicated. Nobody is perfect. But a theme that’s emerging strongly among the folks closest to Bubba is that he was loved and respected in greater than average measure.

Bubba’s close friend Larry DiChiara is the Phenix City School superintendent. He posted on Facebook that he was “so angry right now” and so “heartbroken.”

He says his friend was, “publicly ridiculed and crucified over the last few days.”

That’s an understatement. Bubba took abuse from two barrels at once, from the left and the right — and it was unrelenting and withering.

The night he died, 1819 News had just published a follow-up story in the same lurid tone as their first story. They included a few more photos, and they linked to Bubba’s fiction, which they apparently hosted on Scribd in case somebody removed the original posts. (Which did happen.)

Reports indicate that Bubba suffered a severe mental health crisis over the second article, that he was filled with shame over his writing.

I find that tragic. Let’s be clear. His writing is not good. It’s awkward, meandering, unfocused, and unskilled. Beyond that, many people would find it offensive as it tends to festishize cross-dressing and trans people. But … it’s also light-hearted, playful, and clearly not meant to harm anyone. There’s nothing malicious about it. This is just a guy who’s fascinated with plus-size women and is expressing his fascination to a limited audience.

1819 News claim they re-published the fiction because it IS harmful, supposedly to people and businesses that are “clearly identifiable” in Bubba’s fiction. I find that argument odd. First, all fiction writers draw characters from their own experiences, disguising them more or less successfully depending on who you ask.

A friend once called me up and said, “Hey, you got me all wrong in that novel.”

My response was, “Because that character isn’t you. It’s a mishmash of you, two other friends, and my own ridiculous imagination. Dude, I never helped the son of a Soviet Air Force general defect to Libya. Duh? It’s fiction!”

Second, almost nobody would have read Bubba’s fiction if 1819 News had not re-published it. If anyone is responsible for townspeople potentially feeling besmirched, they are.

And now we come to the nub of it. Bubba was shamed to death over nothing.

He broke no laws. He didn’t hurt anyone. He didn’t try to hurt anyone. All he did was dress up as a large, curvy woman for fun. Obviously, he had something of a sexual preoccupation with large women, whom he found beautiful and desirable. He found creative outlets that apparently made him feel good about his interest. Instead of cheating on his wife, he shared his creativity with her.

All the while, he was doing a great job as mayor and pastor, if you believe the reports coming in.

He was shamed to death over nothing.

People on the right shamed him. People on the left shamed him.

He saw his entire life crumbling around him, so he ended it. I wish he’d hung on. I wish he could see the outpouring of support he’s receiving from all over, including from the fairly straight-laced Alabama Political Reporter, not known for liberal viewpoints.

They wrote in an editorial yesterday that:

Bubba Copeland should be alive today. That he’s not should be a sign to everyone, and especially to Alabama lawmakers and leaders, of just how fragile life can be. It should be the clearest example yet of just how vulnerable some people who live among us truly are.

They noted that Bubba broke no laws and harmed nobody, and then they took a logical leap I didn’t expect, suggesting it’s time to pull back from attacking vulnerable teenagers:

It’s the same end we’re bringing to transgender teens and other at-risk kids who we’ve ostracized and marginalized, who we’ve removed from sports teams and banned from receiving approved medical care and who we’ve told that books that simply portray their lives accurately are too perverted for libraries.

Too perverted.

That hits the nail on the head, doesn’t it? I don’t think Bubba identified as trans, but he certainly transgressed gender-presentation norms in private. When that became public, he was castigated as a “pervert” both explicitly and implicitly.

Look how I jumped to the conclusion that he was just another conservative pastor engaged in illicit, harmful, likely illegal conduct. I didn’t go after him for it, but I ASSUMED it.

Was that me reacting to childhood religious trauma I’ve never been quite able to tame? Or was that me expressing internalized sexual judgmentalism I would swear I don’t possess?

I don’t know. But I know this. A man wearing a dress for fun should not be scandalous. A man’s life should not be destroyed because he celebrates sexuality.

My mom urged me to re-establish a relationship with my dad, and I’m glad, even though he really did hurt people, including her and me. She was right. People aren’t perfect, and if we expect them to be, we’ll always be disappointed.

I forgave my dad for for his affair, and I eventually forgave him for putting me in a tortuous position as a gay kid in a Baptist world. I had to work at that, hard.

But what do we have to forgive Bubba for? How did we get to a place where a man putting on a dress is so scandalous that he believes suicide is his only option?

We have to do better than that. All of us, no matter what labels we wear.

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