For the last few months, Portia Sabin has felt “disheartened” over what she sees as a country moving backwards. “I feel like we fought all these fights already,” she tells Billboard with a sigh. “I remember wearing my ‘Silence=Death’ T-shirt in high school, and now we’re right back in it. It’s ridiculous.”
Sabin is talking about the state of Tennessee’s recent legislative attacks on the LGBTQ community. Last month, the state passed a pair of laws that prevented people under the age of 18 from receiving best-practice gender-affirming care and banned drag artists from performing in public spaces, respectively. While the drag ban has been temporarily blocked until May 26 by a federal judge and the ban on gender-affirming care won’t take effect until July 1, Tennesseans are still concerned with the state of LGBTQ rights in their state.
As the president of the Music Business Association based out of Nashville, Sabin has had a front-row seat to watching the ongoing debacle unfold. “We are righteously indignant,” she says. “We’re very distressed, because you see these bills being introduced all over the country, so it feels like trans and queer people are under attack more than ever today.”
That distress was only further compounded on March 27, when three children and three adults were killed in a mass shooting at The Covenant School in Nashville. When three Democratic senators joined protestors calling on the Tennessee House to propose strict gun reform, two of them — Reps. Justin Jones and Justin J. Pearson — were expelled from the House in a party-lines vote.
With anti-LGBTQ sentiment and a fear of continued gun violence seemingly on the rise throughout the state, Sabin says she’s found herself reaching for solutions. “When stuff like this happens, your first reaction is, ‘We need to get out of here,’” she says. “But in the last few weeks, I’ve really started to have a different attitude. This is a great community, this is a wonderful town with wonderful people. It’s got a lot of queer visibility. I’ve really come around to the idea that we need to stay and fight.”
Part of that “fight” came in the form of a statement from the organization, where they called the ongoing attacks against the LGBTQ community in the state “bigoted actions” that were “especially concerning as we believe the intentional use of vague, inflammatory language will act as a gateway to encouraging acts of violence against the LGBTQ+ community.”
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But that didn’t entirely assuage ongoing fears — Sabin says in the last few weeks she’s received a number of calls from concerned Music Biz members worried about attending the organization’s annual conference running May 15-18.
“I think people are just afraid, and I understand why,” she says. “In terms of safety, what I can say is Music Biz is going to do the very best we can to make this a safe and welcoming conference for all of our members. But people have to make their own decisions at the end of the day if they want to come here or not.”
In the organization’s original statement, Music Biz said that “legislation like this threatens the safety of artists and others, and will force businesses to reconsider holding events in this state.” Sabin herself says that the Music Business Association has not ruled out relocating future conferences if conditions in the state don’t improve.
“I think that that is something that state legislatures need to take really seriously — when they have a thriving hospitality industry, a thriving conference industry, they have to think seriously about the laws that they make and how that’s gonna affect people who are coming in to their state and their cities,” she says. “But on the flip side, they’re passing horrendous laws everywhere as fast as they can. We as businesses can’t control the legislation that states pass, we just have to think about it.”
But, Sabin says that eventually, enough is enough. “At some point, businesses and consumers have to start sending messages to legislatures,” she say. “‘Keep it up and you’re gonna lose our business.’”
