When the Proud Boys Came to Town
How a small town in North Carolina celebrated drag in the face of extremism
Masked men are marching up the street. Some cars slow down at the spectacle, but others zip away before the children in their back seats can see. It’s not exactly the sort of thing you want to run into on a sleepy Saturday afternoon in small town Albemarle.
Tiffany Dahle stands at the front of her business and watches the men swarm the sidewalks. She has her cell phone ready in her hand and stays close to the restaurant’s entrance. The men make it clear they are here for her. They are handing out flyers with her name on them to passers by. The people who take the flyers look confused, but most move away from the men all together.
The men are wearing gaiters, sunglasses, and hats to obscure their identity. “It’s just not normal to do that,” Tiffany later said about the face masks. “This is a friendly town, a family town. It’s like they were hiding, but trying to frighten us at the same time.” She wondered if she knew any of the men, under those masks. “Are they people who drop their kids off at school with me? Will I recognize them if I am in the grocery store checkout lane with them?” she wondered.
Fortunately, Tiffany is not alone. Two of her closest friends had just stopped by her bar and stand with her, making her feel safer. Her instinct is to call her husband, but she remembers he works the next county over and couldn’t make it here fast enough if something happened. She’s scared but moreover she’s feeling protective: She’s keenly aware that there are children in the restaurant behind her– some are here with guests and some are here with their parents who work here. It is by pure luck that her own children are not here — for years they have come to the bar and done their homework, played games, watched TV in the back rooms while Tiffany works. When they were tiny, she used to wear them in a papoose while she cooked for customers. Some of the children here today are playing a game — she hopes they are immersed in it and don’t notice the frightening commotion outside.
No child should have to see this, she thinks.
Tiffany Dahle had no idea something like this would happen when she decided to host a drag show at Tiffany’s at the Boardroom. It was a business decision, something she would try and see how it went. Since the pandemic had caused total havoc for small businesses like hers, she has been getting creative in rebuilding her clientele and bringing people back to downtown. “We had to pivot,” Tiffany explains about her business. “We had to become creative.”
So when she learned that a number of her customers would drive an hour away to the big city of Charlotte to attend drag shows, Tiffany thought:” Why should local people have to drive and bring their money that far away when we could just do that here?” She put up an ad for a drag brunch and the event sold out so fast she had to schedule a second show. People loved it.
And then the Proud Boys showed up.
Tiffany’s at the Board Room is a staple of downtown Albemarle, North Carolina. Countless locals have made memories at Tiffany’s, from birthday dinners to first dates to attending fundraisers for local charities. Tiffany Dahle has run the business for nearly a decade and its West Main Street address puts it at the physical center of public life in the small town. In an old turn of the century storefront, it’s decorated with historic black and white photos from around Stanly County, where Tiffany grew up. She loves it here.
Enthusiastic reviews of the restaurant are common: “My family always enjoy our dinners at Tiffany’s!” raves one Google review. “The food is great. The prices are great. The service is friendly. And we love all of the fun events she has lined up. We enjoy winning at trivia night and at music bingo, both of which are family friendly and so much fun! We also appreciate everything she does for our community. She is always open to new ideas and wants to help bring art and culture to our small town. She works with the local youth theater and allows them to host shows and fundraisers there. She supports other locally owned businesses by allowing them to use her space to offer their services.”
A gathering place, a community place, a charitable place, a family place, run by a well loved home town girl? Tiffany’s at the Board Room is small town North Carolina at its best.
Stanly County is a conservative county, sure. Born and raised here– and now raising her own family here — it’s all Tiffany knows. “I guess you always hear about “conservative” and “liberal” but I never knew which one I was,” she explains.
A friend who serves on the local town council as a Republican recently told Tiffany she was a liberal. “I kid you not, I wasn’t sure what it meant so I looked it up. I only knew it was a swear word!” she laughs. But in Tiffany’s experience, a difference of approach or how we think about politics doesn’t have to cause a problem in a place like Albemarle. “People don’t have to see eye to eye to be friends or to respect each other,” she says.
Because of the old-timey conservatism, she knew a drag show wouldn’t be for everyone. “I figured a few old ladies might not like it, but I figured they’d do what everyone does when they don’t like something around here… they just wouldn’t come.”
But others, she predicted, would be thrilled by the idea. Stanly County, just like the South, has never been a monolith. There’s all kinds of people here, young and old. It has a diverse population, people from different races and faiths and ethnicities, and it’s customary that you “live and let live.”
Obviously, this has not always been the case. Like many places, Stanly County refused to integrate schools until over a decade after Brown v. Board of Education, and a Confederate monument, installed in the 1920’s during the second rise of the Ku Klux Klan, still sits near the center of town. But the Stanly County that Tiffany, now in her late 30’s, grew up in was welcoming, kind, and moving forward. It’s where she always wanted to raise her kids.
The drag show at Tiffany’s at the Boardroom would be, as far as anyone can say, Albemarle’s first. But drag shows have been around for ages, even in sleepy small Southern towns. From ancient Greece to RuPaul’s Drag Race to Rudy Giuliani dressing in drag and receiving a kiss from Donald Trump, it’s been a part of various cultures as long as gender has. Drag shows are part and parcel to the entertainment circuit of any American town– mimosas are poured at dozens of drag brunches occurring any given Sunday morning all over North Carolina.
It wasn’t until 2022 that drag shows became the target of far-right extremists, not just here in Albemarle but all over the country. The synchronized rise in attacks and assaults hint that this isn’t an organic movement or a sudden lurch towards newfound religiosity or a surge in the need to protect children– but something more orchestrated and sinister. Something from outsiders, something top down.
Discomfort around the weakening of rigid gender roles isn’t new for the far right. Hitler and Mussolini both heavily reinforced paternalism in society and within the family in order to make the top-down structure inherent to fascism seem natural, desirable, and digestible. But while the extremist right has probably always been homophobic, just a few short years ago they weren’t panicking about drag shows and they certainly weren’t very concerned about children. What changed?
After January 6th, the far right had an image problem. Extremists had caused extensive damage to the Capitol and had fought with law enforcement, killing people along the way. For months after the 2020 election, right wing groups had caused havoc in cities and were often violent. Many North Carolinians were involved, including Proud Boys living in the counties surrounding Stanly.
Before the January 6th attack, right wing extremists had spent a little over a decade trying to clean up their image, with groups like National Socialist Movement changing their official logo which used a swastika to a more obscure Othala rune. Groups learned that to recruit a bigger base they couldn’t look like boot-stomping neo-Nazi skinheads anymore, so they grew out their hair, dropped their steel toe boots and showed up in Charlottesville in khakis and polos. Organizations like the Proud Boys pushed the few racial minorities they had in their ranks to the front, while having no problem that much of their base was made up of tidied up white nationalists and Nazis.
The violence of January 6th started to make regular Americans– including many, many conservatives– think this movement might be exactly what it is: Violent, extreme, and profoundly unAmerican. Groups like the Oath Keepers, White Lives Matter, and Proud Boys began looking for ways to legitimize themselves and inch closer to the mainstream. They first latched onto manufactured outrage issues like CRT, but it proved too abstract to really get people upset, so they looked for something people felt uneasy and confused about. That’s where they found a boogeyman in their LGBTQIA+ neighbors, especially trans people and drag performers.
Proud Boys call themselves “western chauvinists” and ban women from their gang. Their founder, Gavin McInnes, made a name for himself “joking” about rape and the club itself adheres to multiple misogynist tenets, such as believing women shouldn’t work or be in leadership. Given all this, rallying their troops around gender norms wasn’t a big leap for the Proud Boys, and it was an issue they knew they could use to brush elbows with conservative churches and garden variety homophobes for recruitment. During Pride in 2022, they were ready to jump all in.
None of this was a coincidence, all of it was by design. It was a strategy cooked up in some dark room somewhere, and that’s why Tiffany, who is deeply immersed in the daily life of her community and knows her neighbors, never saw it coming in Albemarle.
When the phone calls started, Tiffany was taken off guard. Some of them were harassing, others threatening. Some of the callers told Tiffany to “go back where she came from” as if she had brought something from the outside in. “Where I came from? That’s like 20 minutes up the road!” she remembers thinking. It was later that she discovered that most of the masked men marking around downtown Albemarle had driven hours to get there and the main guy who was local had only moved to town a few years before.
Pretty soon after Tiffany had posted an advertisement for the drag show, the Proud Boys began posting about it on social media and distributing Tiffany’s at the Boardroom address and phone number. They harassed her relentlessly online. Some posts insinuated violence others called her a pedophile or a groomer.
Tiffany considers herself pretty tough and unafraid, but it was being called a pedophile that sunk her heart: “That’s a hell of a thing to do to a mom,” she says. Like most moms, Tiffany spent her days and nights thinking about and worrying about her kids. The irony wasn’t lost on her: She’d had scares before, but her family being targeted by an extremist hate group was one of biggest things she has ever had to protect her children from.
The harassment went on for weeks, months. Tiffany and her business got lots of local support– friends and family checking in on her, customers defending her. But she finally decided she needed to speak out.
Tiffany went to the public comment period at her local city council. She was nervous– after all, she’s just a business owner trying to do her thing. She spends her days behind a bar or in a kitchen or balancing receipts in the backroom. She wasn’t trying to be front and center.
When she went up to the podium during the public comment period she was nervous. A group of Proud Boys, many in their gang colors, sat behind her, leering. She spoke about being a mom, she spoke about being a business owner, and she spoke about being from here– a small town called Albermarle in a small county named Stanly. Most importantly, she spoke about what she wanted her community to be.
The good news is that Tiffany’s community turned out exactly as she had hoped. Even though the North Carolina Proud Boys had announced a huge protest outside Tiffany’s at the Boardroom the day of the drag show, only a few managed to drive by. Instead, East Main Street’s sidewalks were flooded with supporters of the show– young people waving small rainbow flags, old folks in Love is Love t-shirts. Local businesses were jam packed with customers that day; the line at GloryBeans coffee shop went to the door.
A drag queen, big theatrical wig, pencil thin eyebrows, and a sequined dress, looked out the window on the second floor of Tiffany’s and waved to the crowd. Everyone cheered.
Albemarle was going to be alright.
The drag show at Tiffany’s at the Boardroom was such a success, Tiffany Dahle booked more shows throughout the fall and winter of 2022 and into 2023, making drag a regular feature in Albemarle. The shows continued to sell out. The Proud Boys tried to protest one or two more, but were unable to get the support they were looking for and things began to return to normal in the small town.
Unfortunately, the assaults on queer and trans communities didn’t stop elsewhere. For over a year, far-right extremists have been a constant menace all across North Carolina. Significantly led by Proud Boys, people, venues, events, families, and towns have been targeted. The Cape Fear Proud Boys showed up and banged on the doors to a preschool storytime in Wilmington terrifying the young children– all because a librarian read a book about acceptance and diversity to the families in attendance. Proud Boys and neo-nazis showed up to Hugger Muggers, another small town venue in Sanford North Carolina, trying to intimidate patrons. They marched through a Pride event in Fayetteville, filming the families participating. A window was smashed out at a bookstore in Charlotte the night before a drag event, and a community college Pride event in Johnston County was recently canceled after extremists banged on the windows of stores displaying the promotional flyer.
Last fall, right after Tiffany hosted the drag show, GLAAD reported that North Carolina leads the nation in the number of drag events targeted by protests and threats.
Protests, attacks, and harassment of LGBTQIA+ events have been happening across the country and increasingly are associated with explicit facism. In Ohio, skinheads did Nazi salutes outside a storytelling event in Wadsworth while others carried a banner reading “There Will Be Blood” outside a fundraiser for a LGBTQ youth center in Colombus. Dozens of members of the white national group Patriot Front were arrested with weapons in the back of Uhaul trucks as they headed toward a Pride event in Idaho. North Carolina made the national news when someone took down the entire power grid to Moore County, apparently to stop a drag show from happening, and cut off power to 45,000 customers, killing at least one.
State lawmakers have moved in lockstep with this extremism, introducing nearly 500 anti-LGBTQIA+ bills this year nationally; At the time of writing, 12 of these are in North Carolina. Recognizing the opportunity to create a cultural wedge issue out of new attention on gay and, in particular, trans communities, politicians have jumped onto the bandwagon. Some are putting most of their eggs in this basket, such as North Carolina’s GOP candidate for Governor, Mark Robinson, who has repeatedly called gay people “filth” and, while not a minister, sermonizes about how “God formed” him to attack LGBTQIA+ people and issues.
“Things have become political that didn’t use to be and don’t need to be,” says Tiffany. “People are trying to dictate how other people live their lives, and that to me doesn’t seem like what anyone wants.”
It’s true that the vast majority of people in North Carolina and the country don’t agree with the extremist agenda. A Fox News poll this spring found that 57 percent of respondents said these anti-LGBTQIA attacks are a major problem, while 26 percent said they are a minor problem. Just as Tiffany found in Albemarle, it’s not that the majority of people are homophobic or transphobic or against drag shows or personal expression, it’s that the small minority has a very loud megaphone. They have created out-sized attention on relatively small concerns and forced it into the political arena.
TIffany says there are ways to fight back. It’s about out-organizing and out-pacing the extremist minority. She demonstrated a way to do this in a small town: Stick to your guns and speak out. To do that at scale, however, it has to happen in a coordinated way in every small town. “It doesn’t seem like a time you get to choose not to be involved,” she says.
Tiffany’s at the Boardroom is closing. You can see the sorrow in Tiffany’s Dahle’s face when she says this. She has poured her heart into the business for nearly a decade and this wasn’t an easy decision to make.
Tiffany was already exploring selling the business long before the Proud Boys showed up– she just wants to be able to spend more time with her children. “My kids grew up in the restaurant,” she says. Her son planned on bringing his first date here. She’s aware, however, that she’s missed out on a lot– dance recitals, activities at school, the ability to have a weekend away. The Proud Boys didn’t make this decision for her as they might have wanted to, but they did help make one thing clear: Family is everything.
Tiffany saw the ugliness of the world when the Proud Boys showed up and is ready to throw down to make up for it.
Tiffany remembers the look on the face of one of her waitresses, a young woman who is a member of the LGBTQIA+ community, when the Proud Boys marched through downtown Albemarle last fall. She saw the fear in her eyes when the waitress asked if she could call her mom. It was gut wrenching. “The Boardroom wasn’t just a business, it was our home. When the Proud Boys showed up on the sidewalk, it was like they were on our front porch,” says Tiffany.
“My husband and I attempted to shield our kids from all the Proud Boy crap until a couple of weeks before the show,” Tiffany recalls. However, when Tiffany was interviewed on the news and went to city council, they sat the kids down and explained it to them. “We told them that even adults have bullies.”
As she works with a buyer, she is glad to say that all the harassment, all the threats, all the drama last fall didn’t damage the brand of her business. In fact, it helped make it lucrative and appreciated in town. Now Tiffany wants to make sure that the extremism that reared its ugly head in Albemarle doesn’t go on to hurt the town or community she loves so much.
Tiffany never wants her kids to leave Stanly County– she’s a mother and always wants them close. But she says her husband reminds her that the kids might want to leave, maybe to find opportunities elsewhere that they couldn’t find here and she knows she has to be okay with that. So she and her husband have agreed that no matter what their children decide to do, “we can work to make it a place they are proud to be from.”
A place to be proud to be from. This is what echoed in Tiffany’s mind as she became an accidental advocate for free speech and her community’s rights.
