DailyWire.com – Charlotte Pride now says no one will be awarded the 2023 Harvey Milk award for exceptional “LGBT+” advocacy after the announced winner’s past as a convicted child sex offender came to light.
“We do not give every single award out every year. Charlotte Pride was originally going to do Harvey Milk, but upon further discussion, decided not to give out that award this year,” the leading Charlotte, North Carolina, LGBT organization told local outlet WSOC on Friday.
The group did not detail what led to the decision not to give out the Harvey Milk Award after all.
Chad Sevearance-Turner, a former music minister who served years in prison for sexually abusing a minor boy, was originally slated to receive the award this year. [His North Carolina Sex Offender registration reads “COMMIT LEWD ACT ON CHILD UNDER 16.]
Charlotte Pride had praised him as an “influential advocate for LGBT+ issues,” Reduxx first reported.
Sevearance-Turner, 45, is president and chief executive officer at the Carolinas LGBT+ Chamber of Commerce, a nonprofit that “supports LGBT+ and allied businesses” in North and South Carolina.
He was accused by three minor boys of sexual abuse in 1998 when he was 20, all three of whom he met through his position as music director for New Harvest Church of God in Gaffney, South Carolina, according to a 2000 report from GoUpstate.com.
The three boys’ accusations were tried in three separate cases.
The first case involved a 14-year-old boy who testified that he spent the night with Sevearance-Turner at one of the other victims’ houses and awoke to Sevearance-Turner fondling his genitals.
The boy also testified that Sevearance-Turner invited him to spend the night at his house, and when he did, Sevearance-Turner asked him how he would feel about a man performing oral sex on him.
“I thought he was joking,” the boy told the court at the time.
