Faces of Upstate SC Pride: An artist and rebel, Bex Miller witnessed Greenville transform

Faces of Upstate SC Pride is a series of profiles by The Greenville News sharing the stories of members of the LBGTQ+ community growing, living and thriving in the region.

For decades, Bex Miller has watched Greenville’s LBGTQ+ community transform.

“It's two different towns,” Bex, 47, said reflecting on the acceptance and representation of queer communities in the city since the late 80s and 90s.

Bex was born and raised in the county. They were a student at both Easley High School and the South Carolina Governor’s School for the Arts summer program.

Through art, Bex always felt they could express themselves authentically ― first through poetry and writing, and more recently, through photography and mixed media. The arts community at the Governor’s School gave space for Bex to fully accept their queerness.

Once that door opened, Bex participated in some of Greenville’s historic moments in the movement for LGBTQ+ liberation in the mid and late 90s. They joined in marches down Main Street and wrote letters to the 1996 Olympic committee after Greenville County passed its anti-gay resolution the same year.

Advocates successfully persuaded the committee to get torch runners to bypass parts of the county in protest.

Today, Bex looks at the new generations of queer Upstate residents with fondness, those who are now building upon those foundational moments.

“The amount of support, the amount of allies and people who are not going to stand by and watch someone be abused, the amount of awareness, it does my heart a lot of good,” they said. “It's a beautiful thing to witness, knowing where we were 30 years ago. We have a long way to go still.”

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Expression and professions through art at an early age

Bex grew up in a fundamentalist family. They knew being gay was “taboo,” but still recognized the difference between themselves and other kids.

“I remember when I was eight or nine how all kids, in my opinion, or at least all assigned female kids, naturally are led to the thought of a wedding,” they said. “I remember thinking how I hoped I would marry a man who would be okay with me wearing a tuxedo because I didn't want to wear a dress, and that was this, sort of, innocent difference.”

Growing up then, there was no media or television where Bex could see themselves depicted.

“When I became a teenager, the only kind of representation was very negative, the representation of gay people and trans people on TV” they said. “Watching movies, TV shows, commercials, in books there was nothing about me.”

It wasn’t until meeting other young artists from across the state at the Governor’s school, and the help of a close friend, that Bex learned it was okay to be queer.

Bex officially came out their senior year. When they came back to Easley High School that semester, they realized they’d fallen in love with their best friend. Tasked with an assignment to write an original monologue in an advanced drama class, they found a way to express it.

“The teacher said write about something that is so painful, write about something powerful, bring it from your life,” Bex said. “So, I wrote about my unrequited love for my best friend and put it in third person. And like, this is a character, certainly it's not me, you know?"

It turned out that the teacher loved Bex’s monologue. They went on to perform it in a statewide competition where they won a first-place award. Back in Easley, an enthusiastic drama teacher even pushed for Bex to perform it for a school assembly.

“I was terrified,” they said.

However, the morning of the assembly an assistant principal pulled Bex out of drama class to tell them the event would not be taking place.

“She was like, this is not appropriate for high school, you can't bring in this sort of material.” Bex said.

At first, they were devastated, then angry, then impassioned to find a way perform the piece somehow.

“I decided to take my original monologue and perform it in front of the administration building after school,” Bex said. “It looked like it was probably between, I don't know, 50 to 100 kids, I'm not sure. But that felt like a billion, right? All these kids looking at me, waiting for whatever I was going to say.”

Bex was suspended for their defiance, and at first was treated like a conquering rebel.

“Then I came back, and I was public enemy number one,” they said. “Those last six months were brutal. I constantly was threatened. I was the only person that was out of the closet. That doesn't mean there weren't other gay people, I was just the only visible one.”

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Finding queer spaces in Greenville and a fight for liberation in the 90s

Bex held on to their rebellious spirit after high school.

“I was like a soldier,” Bex said about being involved in marches and organizing for LGBTQ+ rights in Greenville in the mid-90s. “I was not the general in this army at all. I had a lot of fire, and I could make a lot of signs and write a lot of letters and scream a lot of Bible verses.”

Bex remembers when Greenville County passed its anti-gay resolution in 1996 and the community organizing that followed.

“It came out in the newspapers, was how we first heard about it, and we were furiously angry,” Bex said. “And the only way at the time that we were able to meet up with other gay people was at The Castle, which was the big, gay bar at the time.”

The Castle, once located off Pleasantburg Drive, closed several years ago and is now home to a storage facility. But Bex remembers the sense of freedom they felt whenever they went.

“I could be exactly who I was, and there were all these other people like me, suddenly it was so wild and wonderful,” they said.

It was at The Castle where Bex said the LBGTQ+ community started to organize in response to the resolution.

“We decided to start doing meetings briefly downtown, and we had to change where they were,” Bex said. “I know that sounds really cloak and dagger, but that's really how it felt. It felt dangerous.”

That summer, the 1996 Olympic Torch Relay was set to pass through Greenville on the way to Atlanta. Bex and others in the community began to write hundreds of letters to the Olympic Committee calling for action.

“In the nineties, email wasn't a thing, or it was for academic stuff,” Bex said. “I was one of the people writing letters and they were handwritten letters. We didn't type them out and print ‘em off. It was writing and writing and writing for months.”

Eventually they got word the Olympic Committee decided to shroud the torch through the suburbs of Greenville County during the relay, only allowing the flame to be seen as it passed through the city of Greenville.

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“The message is the Olympic committee is not going to back down to people who promote bigotry, intolerance and hate. It’s embarrassing. Greenville will look bad worldwide as bigoted,” Fletcher Smith, a council member during the time, said according to a 1996 article published in The Greenville News about the decision.

“I remember that feeling of like this bittersweetness, knowing that we had gotten some of what we were going for,” Bex said. “Life was still life at the same time. The Greenville County Council was still saying that we weren't welcome and that didn't go away for 20 something years.”

The county council didn’t sunset the resolution until 2020.

Carrying the torch for and with the next generation

Bex said they feel a sense of relief for today’s generation of queer youth, relief that they won’t have to face certain adversities they did growing up.

“I think that Greenville in the last ten years, and particularly in the last five, six years, has grown a support network that is remarkable from its own LGBT community,” they said.

Bex spoke about volunteering with Pride Link, a nonprofit that offers wellness resources, assistance with medical services and queer support groups, and reflected thoughtfully on when the group first launched in 2018.

“I started crying. I was thinking about teenage Bex,” they said about walking through the organization’s wellness center for the first time. “I was like, ‘What would my life be like if I had this?’ In that bittersweetness again, like I didn't have this, but I made this happen.”

Bex helped create a pathway for today’s generation of LGBTQ+ youth by being on the frontlines of protests in the 90s. Yet, they said in return Gen Z has given them the gift of language and the words to fully describe their identity as nonbinary.

“When I was 18, I didn't know a 47-year-old lesbian, I certainly didn't know 47-year-old trans person or intersex person,” Bex said. “It was completely taboo. I didn't even know, when I was 18, that you could be a trans man.”

Bex has been able to grow facial hair from a young age. For decades, they wouldn’t allow themselves to defy gender binaries and embrace a full beard until recently.

“I shaved my face for 20 years because of the rest of the world,” they said about the societal pressures.

Still, despite Greenville’s progress for LBGTQ+ communities, Bex recognizes the remaining challenges, particularly with the onslaught of anti-trans legislation put forth not only by the state legislature, but across the country.

“The shift has focused on trans people,” Bex said. “It's pretty understood and okay to be a lesbian or be gay or, you know, be homosexual, that has started to be really, really accepted and just understood. But being a trans person, we're still in that place where people don't get it. They don't understand.”

Today, instead of a soldier, Bex considers themselves more of a captain in the fight for LBGTQ+ liberation.

“Gen Z gave me the gift of being nonbinary, and my gift to them is to stay alive and to make these things happen with my 47-year-old grown up credit score and all this shit. You know what I mean? I've got the power now,” they said.

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Years of healing through art and creating connections

“I feel like my whole life has been a lesson in art,” Bex said.

Bex’s expression through art has expanded beyond their high school monologue into photography, mixed media, poetry and even improv, but remains deeply personal.

They've gone through years of work reaching stability and finding self-love. For a decade, Bex worked through struggles with binge drinking, depression and anxiety. Now, they’ve fully assembled what they refer to as their “health care team.”

“I don't feel like my life is falling apart. Now, I can really start digging into exactly who I am,” they said.

Bex describes their most recent piece of art, Luminous Flux, as one that represents a journey in their life through darkness to light.

“My life has been filled with dark, darkness and shadow. Being an LGBT person here, being someone who has gone through abuse. There's been a lot of darkness in my life,” Bex said. “And also, the invitation of light and recognition of it. It's this beautiful balance, working in art, working with all the things that I feel drawn to, allowing myself to branch and connect all those things that made me grow as a human exponentially.”

They said art makes them feel most authentic when it allows them to connect with others. They practice these connections even through their career as a realtor with Servus Realty Group.

“It's not my job to sell you a home,” Bex said. “What my job is, is to make sure you are comfortable, you are confident, that you know what we're doing as we move forward and that you're comfortable and confident as we establish trust.”

Bex said they make sure their clients feel seen, and that through the stress and questions throughout the homebuying process, they’re reminded of the positive impact they’re making for themselves and their families.

“To be able to look at a person, see them truly, authentically, genuinely, and remind them of their own humanity and their own strength,” they said. “It feels so good to have that ability to witness someone.”

“That's the bones of art, in my opinion,” they said.

Kathryn Casteel is an investigative reporter with The Greenville News and can be reached at KCasteel@gannett.com or on Twitter @kathryncasteel.

This article originally appeared on Greenville News: Upstate Pride: An artist and rebel, Bex Miller watched Greenville evolve