University’s Band Director Under Fire For Anti-LGBTQ Comments
Delta State University’s interim band director reportedly made transphobic comments as the co-host of a right-wing podcast.
The interim band director at a Mississippi university is experiencing backlash for co-hosting a conservative commentary podcast, in which he opined that pro-LGBTQ religious leaders should be stoned, and deliberately misgendered transgender people.
Steve Hugley was hired earlier in June as the interim band director at Delta State University, in Cleveland, Mississippi. Yet just over a month after his hiring, he finds himself at the center of a controversy regarding his comments on the “Always Right” podcast, which he co-hosts with Jeff Dotson, who previously worked in the registrar’s office at Delta State, according to Mississippi Today.
In one episode of the podcast, he gagged at a photo of Jamie Lee Henry, the first openly transgender active-duty U.S. Army officer, who was charged last year with providing the confidential health information of Americans working for the U.S. government and the military to an FBI agent posing as a Russian embassy employee.
“I do take a little joy in the fact that it’s the first openly trans person, I’m not even gonna lie,” Hugley, a Delta State alumnus who is also a minister at the Bolivar Church of Christ, said to Dotson in a clip captioned: “Man With No Loyalty to His Genitals Also Has No Loyalty to His Country.”
“And oh man, that picture, it’s haunting. Like, oh, I’m going to see that in my nightmares,” Hugley said, gagging again.
This kind of transphobic rhetoric is commonplace on the “Always Right” podcast. In another instance, Hugley called transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney a “flaccid man at best,” saying she doesn’t “get to cry when people make comments and [say] mean things about you.”
Hugley also called Admiral Dr. Rachel Levine, the Assistant Secretary for Health at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and the first out transgender person to be confirmed by the U.S. Senate for a federal office, “a dude.”
He continued with a rant against gender-affirming care for transgender individuals, saying transitioning should be illegal for everyone and if a parent helps their child transition, the government should “lock you up, we’re also gonna lock up the doctor, and then we take it the next step.”
When speaking about a preacher delivering a sermon in drag, Hugley’s co-host Dotson, said: “Every man in that building should have been talking over him and should have been pelting him with song books.”
When asked about his comments, Hugley told a Mississippi Today reporter that he couldn’t talk for long, because he was arriving at a recruitment event for the band. He said he had not heard anything from the university. But shortly afterward, he locked his Twitter account, and all the videos on the “Always Right” podcast’s YouTube channel were deleted.
Both Hugley and Dotson have declined to comment or provide context for their statements in the show. However, Dotson appeared to imply, in the podcast’s first episode, that the podcast served as a way for the co-hosts to vent and share their opinions on a variety of news stories about politics, pop culture, and philosophical topics.
“We felt our opinions were just too important to keep them to ourselves — that, and our wives got tired of listening to us,” Dotson said in the episode.
Some members of the university community are urging administrators to remove Hugley from his position to ensure the safety of LGBTQ students.
Jonathan Szot, a library assistant at Delta State and transgender classmate of Hugley’s, helped put together a Google Drive of recordings of the “Always Right” podcast, “which they reported to the university’s diversity, equity, and inclusion coordinator,” according to Mississippi Today.
“Imagine you’re an 18-year-old band kid, probably one of the queerer groups in Mississippi — not to stereotype the whole group but a lot of band kids end up somewhere in that alphabet — and now you’re going to college and you’re like ‘I’m gonna be free for once’ and you wind up with this,” Szot told the news outlet.
“If Steven wants to govern his own life by those rules, fine by me. It doesn’t affect me; it doesn’t bother me,” Szot added. “But he should not tell our students how they should behave, and based on his own podcast, I do not feel confident in his ability to separate his role as an educator in a university and as an evangelist.”
The person responsible for hiring Hugley, Kent Wessinger, the interim head of the university’s music department, did not clarify whether he knew about Hugley’s comments on his podcast before hiring him.
“I happen to believe that he can rise above and he can do something significant, not for himself, and not just for the university, but for every student that comes here that wants to major in music and be in the band,” Wessinger told Mississippi Today. “And so I’m not going to be the person that judges him for the positions that he takes, because everybody has positions that are adverse to other people.”
Thus far, the university has not publicly commented on Hugley’s podcast. He remains listed on the university’s website as interim band director. The school also declined to confirm whether Dotson still works for the university.
While some, including Szot, have called for the university to rescind its offer of employment to Hugley, it remains to be seen whether the school will take any action.
While Hugley’s statements on the podcast are a protected form of free speech that he enjoys as a private citizen, experts who study civil liberties in higher education noted that nothing bars the university from condemning the statements he made.
“The First Amendment doesn’t stop the university from putting out its own statement criticizing what the band director said,” Aaron Terr, the director of public advocacy at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression told Mississippi Today. “The university can use its bully pulpit in that way, if it chooses to.”
Szot said they hope that, for the sake of any students who might feel uncomfortable around Hugley, the university takes some form of action against him.
“If they don’t address [Hugley’s] views — his outspoken, public views — in some way, then yeah, it definitely will feel like a step back [for Delta State’s LGBTQ community],” Szot said.
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