American men’s interest magazine Esquire has been honored with its first-ever Pulitzer Prize for the publication of an article mourning the death of a “transgender” mayor who had been posting photos of local women to porn sites. The now-deceased Smiths station Mayor, F.L. “Bubba” Copeland committed suicide in late 2023 after a damning expose was released by 1819 News which published the sick details of his secret online “transgender” double-life — one that included penning erotic fantasies of murdering a local woman.
Announcing the reception of the prestigious award on May 5, Esquire described their article, written by Mark Warren, as an “extraordinary, deeply moving account” of the “beloved” cross-dressing Alabama mayor Copeland, who “took his own life after a right-wing news website exposed private online activities he’d engaged in that involved transgender role play.”
“With great sensitivity, Warren, an author and a former longtime editor at Esquire, interviewed scores of Copeland’s friends, family, townspeople, and fellow congregants in order to render a heartbreaking account of the man’s final days, and to portray the full scope of the visceral, grief-stricken, perhaps counterintuitive response of a small southern town in all its rich complexity,” said the Esquire editorial team in their statement.
“In so doing, he illuminates how very much was lost when Copeland was driven to despair. The story explores themes of immediate, even urgent relevance: our evolving norms of gender and sexual difference, the brutal culture wars that have us tearing at one another often without thought or regard, the profound effect of social media on our lives, and the astonishing power of the Internet.”
The article, titled “Right-Wing Media and the Death of an Alabama Pastor: An American Tragedy,” lauds Copeland as “the heart and soul of his community.” It opens by depicting Copeland in his role as a pastor at the First Baptist Church of Phenix City, Alabama, on the last Sunday of October 2023 — just days before he would commit suicide.
“Bubba would often talk about how his life had been suffused with a grace that was beyond his comprehension. He believed that was the essence of God, and today he was telling his congregation that if God could love him—of all people—it was a sure sign that God loved everyone created in His image,” Esquire editor Warren wrote.
However, the bulk of the 11,000-word essay focuses on Copeland’s friends and family, with very brief mention of the disturbing behavior demonstrated by the former mayor revealed by women who came forward to disclose how he had stolen their identities or used them as props in fetish content.
Among the revelations were that Copeland operated multiple secret social media accounts where he had been posting transgender fetish content and graphic sexual narratives across platforms. Copeland shared photos of himself dressed to resemble a blonde woman, and in one of many disturbing short stories he published online, Copeland, who owned a local grocery store, wrote about watching women on in-store security cameras, then saving the videos for his “private collection.”
When engaging in erotic cross-dressing, Copeland used the name “Brittini Blaire Summerlin.” At least a portion of his cross-dressing alter-ego was stolen from the identities and likenesses of other women. Ansley Summerlin, who alleged Copeland appropriated her identity, told local news WTVM after his death that she had discovered her name and likeness posted to multiple porn sites.
“I had some people start sending me photos that were posted of me on multiple porn sites, that also had pictures of ‘Brittini’ as well. He proceeded to use my first and middle name on these sites. There are about nine sites now that have five or six photos of my face and my name across the internet,” Summerlin said.
Another woman who declined to identify herself stated that she had also been victimized by Copeland.
“It said my first and last name, and it was basically describing the way that I look — and intensified, I guess, as a porn star,” the unidentified woman told WTVM. “And it went into very graphic detail. I didn’t get past the first page because I honestly couldn’t stomach it.”
As previously reported by Reduxx, Copeland posted transgender fetish content on his Tumblr account, while promoting the use of feminizing hormones for men who wish to “become [a] whore.” The theme of “bimbofication” extended throughout his online persona, with Copeland expressing arousal and enjoyment at the thought of being reduced to a feminine sexual object for male use.
During his final public address to his church, Copeland responded to some of the revelations by saying his online fetish behavior was a hobby to relieve stress, and portrayed the article as “an internet attack.” “Congregation, church, Facebook, I have been an object of an internet attack.” Copeland said. “The article is not who or what I am. Yes, I have taken pictures with my wife in the privacy of our home in an attempt of humor because I know I’m not a handsome man, nor a beautiful woman either. I apologize for any embarrassment caused by my private personal life that has gone publicly,” he said.
However, at that time, the full extent of his twisted fantasies had not yet come to light. Nor had the several women who were personally impacted yet spoken out about being used in Copeland’s “private” and “personal” fetish content.
Shortly after his suicide, anonymous sources shed light on erotic stories authored by Copeland and posted to Fictionmania, a self-publication platform for erotic stories. Copeland authored at least four tales centered around becoming a woman. While his first story, titled Becoming Christine, was rated “G” for a lack of graphic content, all of Copeland’s subsequent stories were rated “XXX.”
In the two-part story “The Recruit,” Copeland weaves a first-person account about a young man who becomes a “she-male” in order “make it” in the porn business. The story opens with Copeland writing: “That feels so good! Deeper, deeper! Hit it, daddy, harder, ohhh yes! Yes! To you, it may seem a bit odd! Being fucked from behind like a dog, But it’s my job. Like you show up to work every day, I do too; however, my job is to be a sexy, hot receptacle for men.”
In many of Copeland’s writings, he presents feminization as being a “sexual punishment” or a “bimbo transformation.” The motivation for transition is described as being for sexual gratification, or in order to increase sexual access for the men he fantasizes about satisfying.
But Copeland’s fictional erotica took a dark turn in 2021, when he published a story titled “Dangerous Obsession.” In the story, Copeland describes becoming obsessed with a local business owner, who he ultimately murders to assume her identity. The woman murdered in the story is a real individual who was living in Copeland’s community at the time.
“In my cubicle I scanned her page. She posted a new picture! Excited I screenshot it to add to my ever-growing collection,” Copeland wrote. “To say I was a stalker would be a bit of an understatement. Every post she made I studied it, analyzing and taking notes of her daily routine. What she ate, what she drank, from her favorite coffee to her favorite alcoholic drink. Her life had become my obsession.”
“I wanted her life! Staring at her on the latest social media application, all I could think about was how amazing it must be to be her,” he continued. “At 29 years old, married, and due to gastric bypass surgery had lost a lot of weight, she looked on top of the world.”
Copeland’s narration describes undergoing dramatic plastic surgery to “become” a woman. He then pursues the victim on a cruise ship. After a violent struggle in which the woman screams and cries, Copeland pushes her over the rail of the ship.
Before murdering her, Copeland’s character steals the victim’s wedding ring.
Some of the photos and shared images featured on Copeland’s Tumblr blog had a theme of younger boys being transitioned into girls. While the images, which sometimes included photos of actual minors, were non-sexual in appearance, they were shared through “erotica” communities.
One meme featured a photo of a local brother and sister, at least one of which was a minor. Copeland had saved their images from social media accounts. “Take the shots, get implants, become the whore,” he captioned the meme, intending to imply that the young boy had been medically transitioned into a young girl.
The style of memes created by Copeland is referred to within online transgender erotica groups as “sissy captions.” They are designed to be sexually suggestive while not explicitly pornographic so that they may easily be shared online while avoiding censorship. Frequently, sissy captions feature young women or underage girls, though they may sometimes include young boys, as well. In some cases, boys are depicted wearing lingerie or dresses. In more graphic content, young women and underage girls are posed suggestively and text alongside the stolen images express an ostensible desire to be forcibly “transitioned,” sexually abused, or even raped and sex trafficked.
Copeland, while using photographs of minors to produce fetish content, was also active in Reddit forums where he encouraged several other participants to begin taking hormones. Following his death, Copeland was memorialized in a transgender Reddit community which focuses on those who begin to declare a transgender status later on in life.
“It’s easy to see that Bubba was wrong and crossed an ethical line in using the names and images of people he knew in his fiction and other posts,” Warren writes for Esquire. “But in this Alabama skirmish in a hellish culture war—over gender and speech and objective reality itself—with its dehumanized politics and competing conceptions of heaven, suffused with rage and loss and bereft of much clarity, two things are clear: First, 1819 News wanted the whole world to see Bubba’s posts, without fully understanding what they contained.”
Here, Warren neglects to highlight that Copeland’s posts contained personal information belonging to local residents, and further that the “gender erotica” content was published publicly for “the whole world to see.”
Warren continues: “Before posting its stories, the editorial team there also didn’t seem to know much beyond the few facts they had discovered, things they saw as sensational and repugnant. And second, Bubba Copeland was desperate for his hidden life to remain hidden and never intended for anyone other than perhaps his wife and the other pseudonymous members of his online community to see his posts. He was shattered at the sudden collision of his private and public identities and killed himself.”
Pulitzer prize-winners for an article in a magazine are handed a $15,000 payout along with a certificate verifying their status as a recipient. The Pulitzer Prize is funded via an investment income which was the endowment of newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer. The awards and funds are distributed through Columbia University.
As Reduxx has exclusively revealed, a prominent professor at Columbia University was influential in pressuring the World Health Organization (WHO) to depathologize certain sexual pathologies associated with what is today referred to as transgenderism. Dr. Richard B. Krueger, a sexologist and Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, urged the WHO to remove transvestic fetishism and sadomasochism from the the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11).
Krueger, who has served as Medical Director of the Sexual Behavior Clinic at New York State Psychiatric Institute, was a member of the American Psychiatric Association’s Paraphilias Subworkgroup, and responsible for the APA’s fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-5) entry for pedophilia.
During the DSM revision process, Krueger consulted with pro-pedophile activist group B4U-Act, which campaigns to have pedophilia recognized as a sexual orientation.
In 2023, Columbia University awarded a Pulitzer prize to a trans-identified male academic who claimed that his pornography addiction motivated his decision to “transition.” Andrea Long Chu, born Andrew, wrote a book titled Females, published in 2019, which argued that being penetrated during sex transforms one into a woman.
“Almost every night, for at least a year before I transitioned, I would wait till my girlfriend had fallen asleep and slip out of bed for the bathroom with my phone. I was going on Tumblr to look at something called sissy porn,” Chu writes. “Getting fucked makes you female because fucked is what a female is… Pornography is what it feels like when you think you have an object, but really the object has you. It is therefore a quintessential expression of femaleness.”
Long Chu penned an essay for New York Magazine last year which argues for “the right of anybody, at any age, to change their sex.”
https://reduxx.info/us-mens-magazine-awarded-pulitzer-for-article-memorializing-transgender-mayor-who-posted-photos-of-local-women-to-porn-sites/
