Inside the atrium of Hattiesburg, Miss.’, Spectrum Center, Barcelona-based band Fuera De Sektor commanded a crowd of young Hattiesburg punks this past August from the makeshift stage at the room’s head. Though the room itself is no larger than a couple hundred square feet, the crowd—clad with denim vests, Doc Martens and an excess of sweat brought on by the night’s sweltering summer heat—slammed together that night into the mosh pit that formed in front of the center’s community closet: a small, windowed side room packed with racks of clothes that hung just a few feet from center stage.
The Spectrum Center hosted Fuera De Sektor and several other bands for a zine exchange they held on Aug. 7, 2024, one of several events the center has held in the year of their 10th anniversary. Alongside the slew of gatherings that the community center regularly holds, the Spectrum Center is celebrating the milestone by hosting 10 special events over the course of 2024.
The center is currently in the midst of Pine Belt Pride, the largest of these events. During this week-long roster of goings-on spanning from Oct. 9 to Oct. 13, the nonprofit invites the Pine Belt’s LGBTQ+ residents to hit the town and celebrate queer visibility with them through activities such as their pride community cookout, “queeraoke” and a drag brunch.
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To Spectrum Center President Mickie Stratos, events like these fulfill the organization’s mission of “making queer happiness a lasting reality.” Over the past decade, Stratos and the administrators that preceded them have organized events through the center that engage with the area’s queer community and promote LGBTQ+ visibility within the Pine Belt. The most notable of these events is the center’s annual drag show, which doubles as a major source of fundraising for the nonprofit.
Some programs act solely as community-building endeavors like the center’s LGBTQ+ book club, a monthly youth support group, and what the current executive committee has coined “Queer Night Out,” a monthly gathering where the Spectrum Center invites community members to join them in a night of fun that has previously included activities such as karaoke, trivia and bowling.
These community-building activities address the loneliness that many of the center’s volunteers recalled feeling before becoming more involved in the nonprofit.
Sav McMillan, a staff member of three years, first became involved with the Spectrum Center in 2021 because the center had organized a softball team to compete in a co-ed tournament through Hattiesburg Parks and Recreation. McMillan, who played softball at the University of Southern Mississippi, had recently graduated and was looking for a community to be a part of since they were no longer involved in sports. McMillan heard about the Spectrum Center’s team, began to attend their practices, and has volunteered at the nonprofit ever since.
“They were nice and everything, so I was like, ‘Alright, I’ll stick around,’” she said. “It was really fun. It was like the first time I’d had a community of people like me.”
McMillan—who in jest claimed during an interview that she felt she was “being gay all by herself” while attending USM—is but one of many LGBTQ+ community members in Mississippi who have suffered from what former Spectrum Center president Keenon Walker identified as a “lack of third spaces” for Hattiesburg’s queer community. Currently, the city does not have any explicitly LGBTQ+ social spaces (such as a gay bar), a void that causes many like Walker to feel isolated from the rest of their community.
“I remember feeling like I was the only gay person around here and that no one else is gay,” Walker said. “And there are like 12 people who I went to high school with who are out now, but you just don’t know. I truly felt there was no one else out there like me.”
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Through its various community-engagement endeavors, the Spectrum Center hopes to provide that third space for those in the Pine Belt who desire it. This mission is one that current president Mickie Stratos cited as one of the center’s foremost goals.
“Sometimes there’s no real way to list it in our programs and services, but I think a lot of the really meaningful and impactful work we do is about providing a community and a safe space for people to be,” Stratos told the Mississippi Free Press.
At times, the center is able to support the Pine Belt’s queer community during moments of financial need. While the nonprofit is limited in the amount of financial assistance it can lend to its visitors, the Spectrum Center regularly gives several hundred dollars a month from its mutual-aid fund to community members who are financially insecure. Stratos said that, while they will also assist with other expenses (such as medicine and rent), most of this year’s community assistance has gone toward paying utility bills for people who cannot afford them.
Earlier this year, the LGBTQ Fund of Mississippi bestowed a $15,000 general operating grant to the Spectrum Center, of which the nonprofit dedicated $6,000 solely to its mutual-aid budget.
“We were able to expand (the mutual-aid fund) significantly this year because of that grant,” Stratos said. “In previous years, we’ve just used extra revenue that we had from like the drag shows and from Pride and various other revenue-supporting things that we do.
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For the past five years, the Spectrum Center has also worked the Mississippi American Civil Liberties Union, perhaps better known as ACLU Mississippi, to encourage city officials to pass a non-discrimination ordinance in Hattiesburg, which would allow people legal recourse to sue if they are discriminated against on matters of identity or disability. The NDO, which needs approval from three out of five total city council members before being implemented, has reportedly lost attention to other significant pieces of legislation—such as Hattiesburg’s recent tax increase to fund the University of Southern Mississippi’s M.M. Roberts stadium.
Despite the city council’s inaction in passing Hattiesburg’s NDO, Stratos said that he and others at the center have felt significant public support for the legislation. Together with ACLU Mississippi, the Spectrum Center reportedly gathered close to 1,000 signatures on a petition supporting the NDO in their first year of work on the project.
Because of this public support and their continued effort on the project, the Spectrum Center executive team hopes that 2024 is the year that Hattiesburg finally codifies the NDO.
“We’re getting really close. It would be really cool to pass this in our 10th year.” Stratos said. “It’s ambiguous though. I feel like it’s going to be vague until it actually happens.”
‘How Those Times Have Not Really Changed’
L.B. Bell, a physiatrist at Hattiesburg Clinic specializing in physical medicine and rehabilitation, founded the Spectrum Center in 2014 with help from Kathy Garner, Susan Hrostowski, Zach McGee, and Bebe and Susan Mangum. Many from this original team were involved in securing marriage equality in Mississippi and even appeared in the 2014 documentary “L Word Mississippi.”
“Kathy had been the director of the AIDS Services Coalition, and Zach had, too. Bebe, at the time, was a pastor, and Susan was a businesswoman, so they all brought something very important to the table,” Bell said of the center’s founding team.
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Bell purchased the building, which was originally a daycare, entirely out of his own pocket. What drew Bell to this building in particular, he said, was its layout and location. Since he was founding a community center, Bell wanted a building with ample room for community activities. For its price, 210 S. 25th Ave. offered him the perfect setup.
“It was an excellent price and perfect for the needs of a community center,” Bell told the Mississippi Free Press. “It had a larger room, and then some extra rooms off to the side, so they could be utilized for various purposes.”
Today, these side rooms host a variety of resources that are open to the public, such as the windowed community clothing closet connected to the center’s main room. Pasted over this room’s window are three small square panels that tell the history of Patrick Kelly, a queer fashion designer from Vicksburg, Miss. Kelly, whose designs regularly challenged racist icongraphy of the American South, was the first American admitted to the prestigious French fashion syndicate La Chambre Syndicale du Prêt-à-Porter.
These panels on Kelly are part of a traveling display called “Magnolia Memories,” a collection of similar posters that cover the walls of The Spectrum Center and detail the history of Mississippi’s LGBTQ+ community. The Invisible Histories Project created the display in 2023 as part of its mission to archive and teach LGBTQ+ history within the Deep South. While the display normally resides within Mississippi’s libraries and universities, the Spectrum Center has hosted “Magnolia Memories” since October 2023.
“As of right now, we still have to send it back probably sometime mid year,” Administrative Assistant Bea Waller said.
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At the time he founded the Spectrum Center, Bell noticed that the region had several online information hubs for the queer community, but nothing directly based in Hattiesburg. Believing that a physical location where people could gather would unify and grow the community in ways that virtual spaces could not, he and the other founders opened the center in 2014.
“People actually need a physical space to go, to literally be in a space where they feel comfortable,” Bell said. Like the online sources he browsed beforehand, the Spectrum Center hosts a plethora of informational and historical sources for the Pine Belt LGBTQ+ community, along with tangible resources like free testing for HIV.
Bell garnered his belief in the power of physical spaces from his time working with Brenda and Wanda Henson at Camp Sister Spirit, a feminist retreat that operated for well over a decade in Ovett, Miss. Bell, who identified as a woman at the time, joined the retreat when he moved to Mississippi in 1993.
“Living there, it was extremely empowering to see how people could come together as a group and transform what seemed to be impossible to make it possible,” Bell said. “It seemed at the time so incredibly necessary. It’s no longer in existence now, but how those times have not really changed.”
When Bell founded the center, one of his long-term goals for the nonprofit was for it to eventually operate as a short-term, queer-inclusive shelter for displaced youth.
Back then, no such shelter existed in Mississippi, despite the LGBTQ+ community being starkly overrepresented in homeless youth populations. It is only recently that several organizations in Jackson came together to open the Jack Meyers House, the first queer-inclusive homeless shelter in the state. While the Spectrum Center does not yet have the capacity to operate as a shelter, the current executive team said that this is still something they hope to achieve within the next 10 years.
A Decade of Pride in The Pine Belt
Shortly after its founding, the Spectrum Center hosted Hattiesburg’s first recorded Pride celebration, an annual celebration that continues today as Pine Belt Pride. While many Pride celebrations take place in June, which is national Pride month, Bell thought it important that the Pine Belt’s Pride celebration occurred around National Coming-Out Day, Oct. 11. The Spectrum Center still observes their founder’s belief in the power of this date and has scheduled 2024’s Pine Belt Pride from Oct. 9 to Oct. 13.
“It was pretty exciting. You know, when we were putting all that together, it hadn’t been done before in Hattiesburg,” Bell said of 2014’s Pride celebration.
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Ten years later, Pine Belt Pride is thriving. The Spectrum Center has made a tradition of featuring a notable drag queen in several of their celebrations, such as past years’ Trinity K Bonet and The Vixen. This year, Jiggly Caliente, a contestant from season 4 of Rupaul’s Drag Race, is headlining Pine Belt Pride Week and will be a featured guest at Oct. 12’s Pride Afterparty. Spectrum Center Show Director Parris Du Noire Foxx, who is “a long-time fixture of the Hattiesburg drag circuit,” regularly connects the center with contestants from the hit reality-competition show.
Keenon Walker believes that highlighting drag performers like these can have a profound effect on people coming to terms with their sexual identities and gender expression. He recalled his own experience as a child affected in this way.
“The first time I saw a drag queen in real life, I thought it was just the coolest thing to see someone out there being who they were,” Walker said. “I was like, ‘Well, if I can, I want to live my best life and be visible and try to help people to not feel alone.”’
This solidarity is especially important in America today, where there were at least 33 hate-crime related killings of transgender people in 2023. Spectrum Center President Mickie Stratos said that this number is a minimum, as there have been past instances where victims have been classified under their biological sex rather than their identified gender. Regardless of the exact number, The Spectrum Center staff believe that LGBTQ+ visibility and solidarity are important for protecting the Pine Belt’s queer community.
Observing this belief, the Spectrum Center regularly holds demonstrations at the front of the University of Southern Mississippi campus, where participants are visible to much of Hardy Street’s traffic. Sav McMillan recalled her experience at one of these demonstrations, exhibiting the effect that events like these can have on the Hattiesburg community.
“A person actually pulled over and called me to their car and was like, ‘I’m so glad you’re out here because my sister was a trans woman and had got murdered on the coast and no one ever heard about it or anything.’” McMillan said. “So to me, (The Spectrum Center) is not just for our people and our community, but also for the people that are killing us and making these laws, to show them that we’re just human beings—we’re just like y’all. Just because we love who we love doesn’t make a difference.”
The Spectrum Center of Hattiesburg is open for community hours on Wednesdays from 5:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. and on Saturdays from noon to 4 p.m. During these hours, visitors can explore the nonprofit’s informational, historical and medical resources or simply mingle to connect with other members of the center’s community.
To volunteer at The Spectrum Center of Hattiesburg, visit tschburg.org and fill out the contact form at the bottom of their homepage. To donate, visit their donation page.
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