At Friday night’s sold-out performance at the N.C. Museum of Art, Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros took a stand over HB 2—kind of.
As the band played its mega-hit “Home,” its production designer Jack Ryan and his husband, Dan Matthews, took the stage to renew their vows; you may have previously seen the Virginia-based couple before in a photo at the N.C. GOP headquarters after the state passed Amendment 1 in 2012. Pretty appropriate at the time, no doubt.
In a statement, frontman Alex Ebert says the band was “tempted to cancel the show, but decided at the last minute to rally the crowd instead by renewing the vows of our good friends onstage.”
Thanks for the support, but … that’s it? The band isn’t donating any of the proceeds from the show to any organizations fighting HB 2, at least according to statements so far. And the self-congratulatory tone of Ebert’s statement seems to misunderstand HB 2 merely as a gay issue rather than anti-trans, not to mention the harm it does to state workers who might face any sort of discrimination. It’s legal for a gay couple to get married in North Carolina; Amendment 1 went out the window in 2014.
It’s nice to have allies, but we’re calling hokey, feel-good PR stunt on this one. But hey, you can watch it all happen here.
