Carrie Evans has gotten so many calls in the past few days that a friend is helping her transcribe all of them. When she spoke over the phone Wednesday, she estimated that she had received “thousands” of voicemails, texts, emails, and Facebook messages in just the past 24 hours. “All but four of them have been amazingly supportive,” she said.
Evans has started posting them online, not only because she wants to preserve them but because she wants to show that the “voices of love and kindness are absolutely deafening.”
“I was hearing from people, especially in Minot and in North Dakota, who just said, ‘I’m so sorry, I’m so ashamed of my neighbors,’” she told them. “I didn’t want that to be the taste that was left in the mouth of everybody. I wanted people to see the city, the state, and the country that I love that is not like this.”
Evans, a 50-year-old city councilmember from Minot, North Dakota, went viral earlier this week after standing up to a homophobe during a debate over the rainbow Pride flag. After Pride month was delayed due to the coronavirus pandemic, the local LGBTQ+ group Magic City Equality held a week-long festival of events that kicked off with a flag-raising ceremony at City Hall on September 2.
Opponents of LGBTQ+ equality were furious, with locals claiming at a Tuesday meeting that the city government’s decision to fly the Pride flag is “disrespectful” and will result in pedophilies being “glorfied.” Others likened the LGBTQ+ community to a “special interest group.”
Evans, who was elected to the Minot City Council in June, wasn’t having it.
“If you’re not aware, and I think a lot of people in this room are not aware and have come here just because this was a ‘gay issue,’ I am proudly the first openly elected lesbian in North Dakota,” she told a speaker who kept attempting to cut her off. “We, the people. I’m the people. I live in Minot. I am a taxpayer. I am a person. I get to see myself represented on that flagpole.”
“The city is big enough for the all of us,” Evans added. “Me having a flag flying doesn’t take anything from your rights and freedoms.”
The brief, 90-second rebuttal quickly attracted national attention, covered in outlets like NBC News, Daily Kos, and The Independent. Evans said the majority of respondents reached out to her right after watching video of the exchange; many of them were crying. She added that a number of them were young people from across the country who said they are bullied and harassed in school for being LGBTQ+.
“They’re calling from all over,” she said. “They’re not just kids growing up in small towns in the Midwest. They’re calling from Portland and the East Coast and saying, ‘Oh my god, that is the first time I have seen anybody stand up for me and for us.’”
But while media coverage has framed her fiery response as a “coming out” moment, that’s not exactly true. The Bismarck news station KXMA noted Evans’ historic election to the Minot City Council in a June profile, and her campaign website mentioned her previous work with the Human Rights Campaign, Equality Maryland, and the National LGBTQ+ Task Force.
