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Few were present at the select board meeting in Littleton, N.H., last August when Carrie Gendreau, one of its members,
began to talk about a mural that had recently been painted on the side of a building downtown.

Until that moment, it had not attracted much attention. Its subject matter
— a blooming iris, dandelions, birch trees
— did not seem controversial.

But for Ms. Gendreau, 62, who was also a state senator representing northern New Hampshire,
the mural had set off alarms.
She was certain there were subversive messages in its imagery,
planted there by the nonprofit group that had planned and paid for it.

The group was North Country Pride,
founded four years ago to build more visible support for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people in the rural region.

“We need to be very careful,” Ms. Gendreau said at the meeting.

She urged residents to “research” what the mural “really means,” and called for closer oversight of other public art.

“I don’t want that to be in our town,” she said.

...

“I was friends with Carrie,” said Kerri Harrington, an acupuncturist who had followed local government and respected Ms. Gendreau’s diligent work on the local select board.

“I knew our politics were different, I knew she was religious, but there are a lot of religious people here.”

“This was the first time I realized she had that agenda,” Ms. Harrington said.

Ms. Gendreau, an evangelical Christian clung to her convictions.

“I told them, ‘I hope God opens your vision,’” she said of her detractors. “I told them, ‘I love you, and I don’t want to fight back.’”

Ms. Harrington, 52, had helped start North Country Pride and served as one of its leaders. The group had built on the area’s longstanding reputation as a welcoming destination for gay travelers, at a moment when the pandemic had infused Littleton with a diverse influx of newcomers.

...

When the board hired Jim Gleason as town manager in 2021, he was startled by the words Ms. Gendreau used to offer him the job.

“God wants you in Littleton,” he recalled her saying.

Not long after that, Ms. Gendreau began starting select board meetings with a prayer.

It had not been easy for Mr. Gleason to leave his home in Florida. His wife of 44 years, a teacher nearing retirement, had stayed behind.

They were still grieving the loss of their oldest son, Patrick, who died of pancreatitis at age 35 in 2016.

Mr. Gleason had embraced his son when he came out as gay at 16.

He had never expected open homophobia from elected leaders in New Hampshire.

Soon after Ms. Gendreau’s remarks about the mural, residents began flooding the local paper with angry letters.
A local bank asked her to resign from its board of directors, she said, pointing to the “hurt” she had caused;
she complied.

Encouraged by North Country Pride to raise their voices, hundreds of people showed up to condemn Ms. Gendreau’s views at select board meetings in September and October.

Many hoped she might apologize, or step down from the select board — or that the other two board members would publicly reject her views.
Instead, they said little, and Ms. Gendreau doubled down.

In October, in an interview with The Boston Globe, Ms. Gendreau called homosexuality an “abomination” and warned of “twisted preferences” she saw “creeping into our community.”

She also spoke out against a well-known musical about a gay couple, “La Cage Aux Folles,” that was being staged at the Littleton Opera House by a local theater group that had made the town-owned building its home for a decade.

Before the controversy, the group’s leaders had considered renovating the historic Opera House with grant money. Afterward, fearful of being censored, they resolved to build a new theater instead.

When a woman walked into Littleton’s town hall in October, echoing Ms. Gendreau’s concerns about the production and asking what would be done to stop it, Mr. Gleason did not mince words.
Nothing, the town manager said he replied — the play was protected by the First Amendment.
“She said, ‘What about my free speech?’” Mr. Gleason recalled. “And I said, ‘The way you protest is, don’t buy a ticket.’”
The woman called him “weak,” he said. Then she brought up Patrick, his son.
“‘I hope you’re happy he’s in hell,’” Mr. Gleason said she told him.

Two years into his new job, his move had seemed to be paying off. He had helped grow the town’s reserve fund and received positive performance reviews.

It was the redemption Mr. Gleason had needed after his last job, in Florida, ended badly, with a heated confrontation at a meeting and charges, later dropped, that he had been physically aggressive toward a councilwoman.

Now he wondered how long he could carry on,
working closely with a board member who had essentially condemned the son he had loved,
in a town where it appeared her public statements had encouraged others to unleash their own intolerance

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/28/us/littleton-new-hampshire-mural.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

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