The closest thing to a gay bar that can be found in Tyler, Texas, is the one evening a week a local watering hole hosts a “mixed clientele” night, when gays are “more welcome than usual” in the notoriously conservative bastion of the country. However, if you happen to find yourself driving through the vast region of the Lone Star State that is commonly referred to as East Texas, you will find, prominently displayed along U.S. Highway 69, a sign that reads, \u201cADOPT-A-HIGHWAY, NEXT 2 MILES, TYLER AREA GAYS.\u201d<\/p>\n
As innocuous as it seems on the surface, the simple sign represents a gigantic step forward for a region of America where homophobia is so prevalent that just a few short years ago a local AIDS service organization censored an ad from the then-fledgling Project TAG (Tyler Area Gays) — which is responsible for the Adopt-A-Highway sign — simply because the text of the ad mentioned the words “gay” and “lesbian.”<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve lived here [in Tyler] for about three and a half years and I\u2019ve never lived in a place that was so homophobic,\u201d Project TAG chairman and founder Troy Carlyle told Advocate.com. \u201cThis organization, Project TAG, was taking out an ad with a fund-raiser for an AIDS service organization here. They have an annual dance and they have a program and we took out a full-page ad in the program to introduce the community to Project TAG\u2026 to let them know what we\u2019re all about, [and] they removed the words ‘gay’ and ‘lesbian’ from [the ad] because they thought they were offensive.\u201d<\/p>\n
The actions of the organization so incensed Carlyle, an East Texas transplant, that he felt something had to be done to make gays and lesbians more visible in his newly chosen home. It was that righteous indignation, along with a desire to create a sense of community in a town that is perhaps best known as the place where a young gay man named Nicholas West was abducted by three straight men and brutally murdered in the mid 1990s, that inspired Carlyle to launch\u00a0the website<\/a><\/strong>\u00a0that would later give birth to Project TAG and the highway sign that presently has all of East Texas buzzing.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re a very backwards community,” says Carlyle. “So it was clear to us that we needed to get the word\u00a0gay<\/em>\u00a0out there so that people can see it and we can start to desensitize people. And what better way to do that than to get an Adopt-A-Highway sign. We may be one of the last places in America to allow gays to live relatively free of hatred, but we were the first to insist that our roads be free of litter.\u201d<\/p>\n Despite his enthusiasm, however, Carlyle recounts that he was initially warned not to proverbially rock the boat in sleepy East Texas by some of his newfound gay friends in Tyler who feared a backlash.<\/p>\n \u201cI was told when I started doing this — when I started out with the online community which evolved into Project TAG — that I would be assassinated within months of starting the website,” Carlyle offers matter-of-factly. \u201cI had friends who would come over\u00a0and they would break down in tears, begging me not to do this because\u00a0the gay community [in Tyler] was so fearful that we had to remain\u00a0invisible. A lot of our problem is within our own population. We\u2019ve\u00a0been so beaten down\u2026that we\u2019ve come to believe some of the antigay\u00a0rhetoric, so endemic is very low self-esteem [among gays] and a\u00a0tremendous amount of fear to the point of [paranoia]. Very few people\u00a0are out of the closet in this region.”<\/p>\n In fact, there are so few\u00a0openly gay people in Tyler that when Carlyle moved to the city a little\u00a0over three years ago he says he was told that there were \u201cno gay people\u00a0in Tyler.\u201d However, that bit of information turned out to be the\u00a0furthest thing from the truth. As incredulous as it sounds, Carlyle soon\u00a0discovered that there were gay people living right next to each other\u00a0who didn\u2019t realize that their neighbors were gay because they were all\u00a0in the closet.<\/p>\n Asked why he and his compatriots made the unusual\u00a0choice of an Adopt-A-Highway sign to herald Project TAG\u2019s message about\u00a0being out and proud in East Texas, Carlyle says, \u201cWe wanted to do\u00a0something that was community service\u2013based that let people know that\u00a0gay people care about the environment and that we\u2019re active\u00a0contributing members of society and that we\u2019re people just like\u00a0everybody else. The Kiwanis club has their Adopt-A-Highway sign and\u00a0Tyler Area Gays has theirs too. We both care about the community. We\u00a0wanted to show people that and to get the word\u00a0gay<\/em>\u00a0out there. If it\u2019s\u00a0too offensive to put in an AIDS benefit program, then, my goodness, people\u00a0need to see that word more often.\u201d<\/p>\n Listening to Carlyle talk,\u00a0it\u2019s clear that he is at once a fighter by nature in addition to being\u00a0a deeply committed advocate for LGBT rights. In fact, for Troy, a\u00a0former Air Force officer who was court-martialed in 1994 for being gay,\u00a0fighting and overcoming obstacles seems to be a way of life. Though he\u00a0says he moved to Tyler basically to die, Carlyle is beating the odds\u00a0in more ways than one and making a difference in East Texas, however\u00a0haphazard his arrival in the homophobic region might have been.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u00a0didn\u2019t know it was going to be this bad when I moved here,\u201d Carlyle says\u00a0with a laugh. \u201cI have family here and I was dying of AIDS, so I came\u00a0here to be close to my family\u2026basically to die. But then I got here and\u00a0got on a good [anti-HIV] regimen and gradually started getting better. It was\u00a0then that I realized where I was. I didn\u2019t realize when I moved here\u00a0that the area was going to be like this.\u201d<\/p>\n Whatever the reason Troy Carlyle landed in Tyler, it is clear that he and Project TAG are\u00a0changing attitudes about what it means to be gay in East Texas while\u00a0simultaneously empowering the local LGBT community. In addition to\u00a0getting their Adopt-A-Highway sign up in just about three months time,\u00a0Project TAG, which currently counts 170 members, has begun a number of community-based ventures. For a gay man who was kicked out of his choir, the\u00a0group has started a chorale so that gay people can have a place where\u00a0they can sing in Tyler. Likewise for a lesbian who was learning\u00a0to dance in a ballroom dancing group, Project TAG has started a\u00a0ballroom dance club.<\/p>\n And the list goes on.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is really a place\u00a0for people to be themselves and to get away from that discrimination,\u201d Carlyle says. \u201cWe\u2019re really hoping that in the process we\u2019re going to\u00a0be combating depression and low self-esteem and the kind of self-induced\u00a0violence that can lead to it.\u201d<\/p>\n Originally published at <\/span>Advocate.com<\/span><\/a>. To read this post and more by Duane Wells at the Advocate, <\/span>click here<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The closest thing to a gay bar that can be found in Tyler, Texas, is the one evening a week a local watering hole hosts a “mixed clientele” night, when gays are “more welcome than usual” in the notoriously conservative bastion of the country. 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