Tag: Jonathan Cole

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Sports Sports Feature

A Hard Road

The Sheffield High School Knights

On a cloudy late May afternoon, the young men of the Sheffield High School Knights soccer team disembarked from the charter coach that carried them home to Memphis, after suffering a dramatic defeat at the state championships in Murfreesboro.

That devastating loss came after a game that ran into double overtime, but the boys still took tremendous pride in making it to the final four at the TSSAA Spring Fling, which features the top high school athletes in the state going head-to-head for state titles in everything from basketball and bowling to track and tennis.

The Sheffield boys dropped their travel bags on the pavement, retrieved their soccer balls from their equipment bags, and gathered on their home turf in drill circles. After a four-hour bus ride, their immediate inclination was to get right back into the game — not because their coach expected it, but because these kids live and breathe soccer.

Every boy on the team is a first-generation American whose family has relocated to Memphis from thousands of miles away — from Mexico or from various African countries, including Guinea, Senegal, and Mauritania. Passion for soccer is ingrained in their cultures.

Ibrahima Sow, a native of Senegal, began playing soccer when he was 5 years old. The starting player at Sheffield is known as “Ferrari,” a nod to his extraordinary speed on the playing field. “This was a big accomplishment for us,” Sow said. “This isn’t just a team; we’re a family.”

Despite the Sheffield players’ experience and prowess on the field, they nearly missed out on the season altogether because they didn’t have a coach. Jonathan Cole, a senior English teacher with no coaching experience, took on the challenge of trading in Shakespeare for shin guards, knowing it was the only shot these kids had at competing in the sport they love.

“I was kind of embarrassed to tell them I didn’t know anything, yet I was going to coach them,” said Cole, 39, who last played soccer as a kid in the 1980s.

He devoted his free time to researching soccer strategies and watching YouTube videos of soccer stars such as Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo.

Cole said his boys were at first skeptical of his coaching abilities, and some of them, particularly the seniors, questioned his knowledge.

“They were probably thinking, Who’s this white man coming in here and telling me how to play soccer, when I’ve been playing it my whole life? And there’s some validity to that,” Cole said. His research and growing passion for the sport paid off when the players slowly began to accept him as their leader.

Given his team’s talent, he wasn’t surprised when they made it to the state finals. But Cole and his boys were well aware they’d be the underdogs. These young men live in households where parents work multiple jobs, and the boys themselves work and often care for younger siblings.

“Our coach lives, like, 45 minutes away, and he would take us all in his jeep and drive us to practices and games,” Sow said. “He did whatever we needed.”

And their needs were plenty. Sheffield was up against affluent, predominantly white suburban teams from private schools in Knoxville and Chattanooga.

“The other teams have a lot of organization and money and coaches who really know soccer and have coached for many years,” Cole said. “Structurally, they’re managed completely different, but they don’t have the raw talent and passion, which is what took us so far.”

Cole’s wife, Meridith, launched a successful GoFundMe campaign to cover money for uniforms, equipment, and travel. But then the team suffered personal tragedies.

A car carrying four teenage fans crashed on the way to a game, killing one player’s sister and leaving his other sister in critical condition.

Another player lost all his belongings when his home caught fire. The team passed an envelope around the school to collect money for the player’s family, while Cole and his wife purchased new cleats and equipment for the boy.

This season has left an indelible impact on the players and their coach.

Cole, who said he will coach soccer again at Sheffield next year, tears up when he reflects on the season. “This experience has changed my life in so many ways,” he said. “These boys are family, and they’ve brought my own family closer together.”

Categories
News The Fly-By

Tennessee Equality Project Releases New Advocacy Agenda

There’s more to LGBT equality than gay marriage, even though it’s a bit hard to see that through all the news coverage surrounding the impending Supreme Court decision on that issue.

But the Tennessee Equality Project (TEP) has set its sights on those other issues in its new, five-year local government advocacy agenda. The agenda, which looks at everything from anti-bullying policies in schools to affordable housing for LGBT seniors, sets the stage for TEP’s lobbying efforts in local governments throughout the state through 2019.

This is the LGBT advocacy organization’s second agenda since its founding in 2004. The first agenda was focused on getting LGBT-inclusive non-discrimination ordinances passed in cities and counties throughout the state, and TEP has been largely successful in those efforts, including in Memphis and Shelby County.

“This agenda is different from TEP’s first agenda because we had to focus on ourselves in the first agenda. Now, because some local governments are banning discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity, we’re freer to work in coalition with them,” said TEP Executive Director Chris Sanders.

Here’s a rundown of what’s on the new local government agenda:

1) Domestic partner registries — These will only be needed if the Supreme Court doesn’t rule in favor of same-sex marriage next month. But if that happens, TEP will begin pushing for cities and counties to establish registries, which are often accepted by private employers as proof of a relationship for the company’s own domestic partner benefit programs.

2) Safe schools — Shelby County already has an anti-bullying policy that includes sexual orientation and gender identity, but TEP will push for other school systems across the state to adopt similar policies.

3) Gender transition health care for city/county employees — TEP will push for cities and counties to include gender-related health care, such as hormones for transgender people, in insurance programs for their employees.

“One thing that gets lost in policy discussions about LGBT issues, with marriage at center stage, is the work that needs to be done to make sure transgender individuals are able to live healthy and safe lives,” said Jonathan Cole, chair and president of TEP.

4) Building relationships with law enforcement and district attorneys to address hate crimes and domestic violence.

5) Funding for youth transitional housing — Nationally, about 40 percent of homeless youth are LGBT. And sometimes, privately run shelters, specifically those run by religious groups, can be discriminatory to LGBT kids. TEP is hoping to secure more funding for housing for all homeless youth, with the hopes that more LGBT kids would be helped in the process. Cole said this issue is among TEP’s top priorities in Memphis since the Memphis Gay & Lesbian Community Center is looking to expand services for homeless youth.

6) LGBT-friendly affordable housing for seniors — Sanders said TEP will be working with local housing authorities to ensure they’re applying existing Housing and Urban Development policies, which require LGBT inclusivity.

“A lot of seniors are going back into the closet when they go into subsidized housing or a senior facility,” Sanders said. “They’re afraid in those situations because they’re at the mercy of others.”

7) LGBT-competent staff at health facilities — TEP will work with local governments to makes sure county-funded health clinics are treating LGBT patients with dignity and respect.

8) Dignity/Inclusion/Nondiscrimination resolutions for small governments — This one wouldn’t apply to Memphis and Shelby County since there’s already such an ordinance in place. But TEP will push smaller governments to pass resolutions.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Redirecting the Mainstream

It is not to be doubted any longer. The massive success of the Tennessee Equality Project’s (TEP) “gumbo contest” fund-raiser, held Sunday evening at Bridges downtown, was one more indication that in Memphis as elsewhere, the LGBT (Lesbian-Gay-Bisexual-Transgender) community has achieved mainstream status.

Much of this is the result of the organizing efforts and skills of Memphian Jonathan Cole, the nonprofit TEP’s chair and president. Much, too, is due to the fact that in recent years the gay rights movement would seem to have made the quantum leap from merely seeking tolerance to establishing itself as an influential force. At least in the Western world, LGBT has achieved a status close to what the late former President Warren G. Harding meant to denote by his coinage of the term “normalcy.”

That was made obvious in the crowds that made the TEP event one of the most well-attended public events of the new year. And it was made especially clear by the number of politicians working the arena-sized meeting room at Bridges.

Most of these were Democrats, but there were Republicans as well, and judicial incumbents and candidates, whose formal status is nonpartisan. The TEP’s endorsement is a sought-after commodity these days, particularly in this year’s Democratic primary contests. Beyond that, well, there are votes to be had.

• One of the attendees at the TEP affair, as at most public political gatherings these days, except explicitly Republican ones or events on behalf of his ballot rivals, was Mike McCusker, a candidate in the Democratic primary for Criminal Court clerk.

This is the second attempt for the office by McCusker, a retired Army major who served in Afghanistan as combat advisor to the Afghan National Army and has been serving as an assistant district attorney general for the last several years. When he tried to file in the Democratic primary four years ago, he was denied the right to do so by a vote of the Shelby County Democratic executive committee.

The reason? After 9/11 prompted his Army service, McCusker — raised in “an Irish-Catholic Democratic family”— had what he describes as “a brief period” of voting Republican, more or less from what he saw then as support for the policy of his Commander-in-Chief. Once he returned from Afghanistan, he reevaluated his politics and, as he says, “returned to my Democratic values.”

After he was denied a petition in 2010 to run as a Democrat, McCusker says, local Republicans tried to get him to run for the same office under the GOP label, but he declined. “That wasn’t who I was.”

The current Republican incumbent, Kevin Key, eventually won the race.

McCusker has some stout opposition in the Democratic primary. Other candidates are City Councilmember Wanda Halbert, City Court Clerk Thomas Long, and Rev. Ralph White.

Key did not file for reelecton, so it’s an open seat. The sole Republican candidate and de facto GOP nominee is Richard DeSaussure II, who has served as chief administrator in the clerk’s office.

• Among the busiest local politicians last week — not unexpectedly — was Shelby County Commissioner Steve Mulroy, who is one of four Democrats seeking the nomination for Shelby County mayor to oppose incumbent Republican Mayor Mark Luttrell. (Luttrell, too, is a de facto nominee, having only the eccentric perennial candidate Ernest Lunati to worry about in the Republican primary.)

Among other things, in the past week, Mulroy has had two fund-raisers, attended every public non-GOP event in sight (political or otherwise), attended and played a major role in two meetings of the county commission, and continued his support of locked-out workers at the local Kellogg plant, to the point of camping overnight outside the plant, along with City Councilman Lee Harris, a fellow lockout opponent.

He also lent paternal aid and support to his son Quinn Mulroy, a White Station High School student whose team earned the right last week in a local mock trial tournament to to go to next month’s state finals.

Mulroy also continued, through the public fund-raisers and other means, to raise money for his campaign — somewhere in the neighborhood of $70,000 as of the weekend, he reports. A previous report for the filing period ending January 31st had him at $55,000, and this week he challenged the other three Democratic contenders — former County Commissioner Deidre Malone, Commission Chairman James Harvey, and Rev. Kenneth Whalum — to make public their most recent fund-raising information.

Mulroy telling his “Stop Thief” story at a fund-raiser at Mulan in the Cooper-Young district.

And, speaking of funds: Mulroy earned YouTube notoriety two years ago when, in the midst of an interview by WMC-TV’s Kontji Anthony in Overton Park, the commissioner was interrupted by a down-and-out panhandler, who persistently demanded two dollars and concluded his impromptu conversation with a threat: “If you don’t have two dollars tomorrow, I’m going to kick your ass!”

That sad story had something of a happy ending. The panhandler, tracked down by another Action News 5 reporter later on, was contrite and apologized.

But the two dollar figure seems to be some innate leitmotif in the Mulroy saga. The commissioner was parking his car in a Second Street garage last Thursday when he was approached by a man whom he took to be an attendant asking him for a $10 parking fee. Mulroy fished a twenty out of his wallet and handed it to the man, expecting change.

Instead, the “attendant” took off running, and Mulroy, realizing he’d been had, got out of the car and ran after him. (The commissioner is a regular runner and has almost regained the competitive racing level he maintained before donating a kidney last spring.)

The chase went in and out of alleys and ended up on Main Street, where Mulroy and three helpers — restaurant workers along the way, who happened to see what was going on and joined in — cornered the thief and, after convincing him that his escape route was blocked, persuaded him to return Mulroy’s money.

He eventually did, but only after first making the claim that the twenty had somehow gone missing and offering Mulroy — wait for it — two dollars, which he handed over. After the thief finally gave up and returned the twenty, he had a sudden thought and gave voice to it: “Hey, give me my two dollars!”

This story, too, had a happy ending. Everybody was reunited with his original money.

Categories
Memphis Gaydar News

Q&A with Jonathan Cole

Jonathan Cole

  • Jonathan Cole

Since 2007, Jonathan Cole has been fighting for equality in various roles with the Tennessee Equality Project, the state’s LGBT rights organization. From convincing the Memphis City Council to add workplace protections for city employees to lobbying against anti-gay bills in Nashville, Cole has done it all. He took out a few minutes to talk to Memphis Gaydar:

How long have you been involved with the Tennessee Equality Project?
I’ve been appointed or elected to a number of volunteer roles for Tennessee Equality Project since 2007. I was named co-chair of the Shelby County Committee in 2007 and later served as chair from 2008 until 2010. Anne Gullick is the current chair of TEP’s Shelby County Committee. I was elected to the statewide TEP Board in 2008. I’ve served as secretary, chair, and president and chair of the board. I currently serve as vice president. I’ve also served as a board member of TEP’s Political Action Committee since 2007.

What does your current VP role entail?
I coordinate TEP’s advocacy efforts in West Tennessee. I support the work of our steering committee chairs in Shelby and Madison Counties as we advance local campaigns (like last October’s employment non-discrimination ordinance in Memphis) and state-level efforts to engage the Tennessee General Assembly. Citizen engagement will be essential in opposing anti-LGBT bills in the state legislature in 2013. In the coming weeks, I will be helping to organize West Tennesseans for Advancing Equality Day on the Hill in Nashville on March 12th.

Before getting involved with TEP, what other sorts of activism were you involved in?
From 1999 until 2007, I served on and off the board of Integrity-Memphis, an LGBT advocacy group within the Episcopal Church. Most of my efforts were devoted to challenging the parishes, clergy, and the bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of West Tennessee to become more welcoming to LGBT people and their families.

My interests turned more secular when organizing local opposition to the Marriage Discrimination Amendment to the Tennessee Constitution in 2006. Voters were asked to enshrine discriminatory language in the state constitution that year in a referendum on the November ballot. While serving on the board of the Memphis Gay and Lesbian Community Center, I helped organize grassroots opposition to the Marriage Discrimination Amendment. We lost that battle, but the fight for equal rights for LGBT people and their families in Tennessee continues on other fronts.

You’ve become one of the most public faces in the local fight for LGBT equality. Did you ever imagine yourself in such a spotlight?
Not really. While I feel blessed that I can play a role in advancing equal rights for my community, my greatest hope is that new leaders will step forward to represent our diverse community. I can’t possibly represent the interests of my entire community.

How have you adjusted to that public role?
I can honestly say that nothing I’ve done would be possible without the love and support of my husband Paul. The political work that I do requires a lot of networking, community organizing, and engaging the media that happens after-hours outside my full time job. This has always meant time away from home and family. Paul helps me stay grounded in the simplest of ways whether it’s making dinner, folding my laundry, or telling me it’s okay to say “no” when that public role becomes too demanding.

What accomplishments are you most proud of from TEP?
I devoted more than five years to advancing workplace protections in Memphis and Shelby County. I am most proud of the LGBT-inclusive employment non-discrimination ordinance passed by the Memphis City Council on October 16, 2012.

We were very close to passing the ordinance in 2010, closer than most people realized. A consensus on the council was ready to pass an ordinance that would add sexual orientation to workplace protections for city employees and job applicants in 2010. But there were not enough votes to add gender identity. I knew then that we’d never get the council to add gender identity in the future if we compromised. We failed in 2010, but we came back again in 2012 to fight for an LGBT-inclusive ordinance. I’m proud that we stood together as a community until we could do the right thing.

I am also proud of the fact that TEP and its allies were able to defeat several anti-LGBT bills in the 107th Tennessee General Assembly when I was president and chair of TEP’s Board: “Don’t Say Gay,” “License to Bully” and the “Police the Potty” bills were the most prominent last year.

What is next on the horizon for the Shelby County committee?
The Shelby County Commission voted for a resolution in 2009 which offers some workplace protections for LGBT county employees and job applicants. County workers deserve the same level of protection in a non-discrimination ordinance that city employees now enjoy.

Interest is also building among city employees for domestic partner benefits for gay and lesbian couples (health insurance, family and medical leave, etc.). Our committee is ready to work with county and city employees and community supporters to advance these goals.

Memphis has come a long way in recent years, but are there areas where we still need work?
I would like to see more LGBT people running for office in local and state government in Memphis. In particular, I look forward to supporting an openly lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender African American for elected office. I’ll know that Memphis has arrived when that happens.

On a less serious note, what’s your favorite thing about Memphis?
The people of Memphis. Southern hospitality is alive and well in this city. Memphis is the biggest small town in America. I like the fact that people speak to one another here. That doesn’t happen in bigger cities.

Where do you take out-of-town guests?
Paul and I are big foodies. We proudly expose out-of-towners to the best food that Memphis has to offer. I make sure they stay away from what I call tourist BBQ. I tell them to try Payne’s, Cozy Corner, or Central BBQ before going anywhere else. We tend to take guests to places in Midtown or Downtown where we like to eat or drink: Alchemy, Sweet Grass Next Door, Cafe 1912, Bari, Young Avenue Deli, Rizzo’s Diner, Gus’s Fried Chicken, Mollie Fontaine. We also like Acre, Andrew-Michael and Hog & Hominy in East Memphis.

Where do you see yourself in 10 years?
Friends frequently ask me when I plan to run for office. I have no plans to do so. I think I am more effective influencing government and policy makers from the outside. I’m a social worker in my professional life who loves community organizing. I’ll probably be doing the same thing in 10 years.