North Carolina Wants Less Gay? We'll Give It Less Gay.

I haven't been able to find information about whether or not other writers are joining Stephen Schwartz's boycott of North Carolina. I hope they will. Some of us might be boycott weary -- I know I felt like we jumped the shark with Target -- but this one is, I think, perfectly targeted and worthwhile. (I don't have any prospective productions in North Carolina, so I haven't been faced with this decision.)

This is serious stuff. It doesn't just mean the Broadway tour of Wicked -- which alone is huge, since those tours bring tons of jobs and revenue to cities. It means no high school productions of Godspell. No community theater stagings of Pippin. Stephen Schwartz's shows get produced a lot.

I feel for the commenter on this blog, a North Carolina theater producer, who says the boycott unfairly targets theater people, who are "compassionate of and fight for the equal rights of everyone." I'm sure it sucks for them to be the target of so much vitriol right now, and to be worried about the financial effect of a boycott on their institutions. But then he says later, "There are more compassionate, educated people in North Carolina than there are morons who want to set the state back fifty years." If that's true, then a boycott is asking you to prove it.

Seeing a boycott through the lens of who is being punished misses the point. Boycotts are not punishment, they're a call to action. They're meant to put pressure on people to change things. All you "compassionate, educated people in North Carolina": write letters, make phone calls, protest. And vote the morons out of office. We can't do that from here.

The comparisons to South African apartheid and Jim Crow are dramatic. Some may find them over-dramatic. But I doubt it seems that way to transgender people in North Carolina who are by law now prohibited from using public bathrooms.