Adam Graham had been mayor less than a month when he saw them: Two police officers from the next city over, the wealthiest in Oklahoma, stopping a Black driver in his middle-class community.
An Openly Gay Oklahoma Mayor Quits Citing Harassment and Fear of Police
August 1, 2022
Share
On July 18 Mayor Adam Graham cited harassment and violence that he faced in the short time he served as mayor of The Village, Oklahoma in his resignation letter.
View this post on Instagram
So, on that late May evening, Graham, 29, said he slowed to a halt in his black SUV, lowered the window and asked: “What are you doing, officers? Are you aware that you’re in The Village?”
What happened next fiercely divided this community of nearly 9,000, drawing international scrutiny that felt humiliating to some and cathartic to others as simmering frustrations burst into the open. Oklahoma lost one of its six LGBTQ elected officials when Graham announced this month he was stepping down, citing harassment and fear for his safety.
Before he said someone had followed him on the street, before he suspected someone had slashed one of his tires, before he said a man threw coffee at him and called him a gay slur, the police lights caught Graham’s eye.
“My gut, my heart — every part of me told me to do it,” he said in an interview at his ranch-style house. “My gut told me: ‘Just go over there and ask a question, Adam.’ ”
In a clip of body camera footage provided by the Nichols Hills police to The Washington Post, Graham can be seen pulling up in his Volkswagen Tiguan SUV across the street from what officers later described as a traffic stop.
“Excuse me?” asked one officer, a White man, apparently to Graham.
“You need to go on. Go on,” said the other officer, a Black woman.
A passenger in the stopped car appears to be saying: “I just want to go home.”
No other dialogue can be heard in the 32-second footage. “Nothing can be heard from Mr. Graham as he was too far away for the body cameras to pick up his voice,” Nichols Hills Police Chief Steven Cox said in an email. Some audio was muted, he added, to protect the privacy of the passengers.
In a second clip, the White officer walks to Graham’s car. Graham’s dog, a goldendoodle named Ralph, is visible first on the screen, his fluffy head protruding from the back seat window. Then Graham comes into focus behind the steering wheel. His expression is neutral.
“Okay,” the officer says. “Okay. Well, I appreciate your understanding of where we are because I know exactly where I am as well.”
“Okay,” Graham said.
“When I turn to stop somebody and they continue on from Nichols Hills into The Village,” the officer said, “I have a right to continue stopping them.”
“All right,” Graham said.
“Thank you, sir,” the officer replies. The footage ends.
View this post on Instagram
According to data shared by the Nichols Hills police, 30 percent of people who received citations and warnings in Nichols Hills from June 30 of last year to July 1 were Black, despite the city being less than one percent Black. Cox said officers don’t stop vehicles based on race or “any other reason than a violation of law,” adding that a diverse population drives through Nichols Hills, which borders Oklahoma’s biggest city.
“I see young Black men pulled over by the Nichols Hills police all the time,” Graham said. “I worry about them.”
As someone who began a slow process of coming out in his mid-20s, Graham said he understood the toll of discrimination. Getting into politics, he said, was his way of trying to protect the vulnerable. He won a city council seat in 2018 before his fellow members appointed him mayor, a title they voted on each year.
People yelled at him during the next city council meeting, saying he was anti-law enforcement and behaving in a way that embarrassed them. Graham’s sexual orientation never came up, but the intensity of the criticism was disturbing, said Tammy Conover, 59, an artist in The Village.
“If he was a straight man, nothing ever would have been said,” Conover said. “All the time people are saying, ‘We’re Christians,’ but we are so hateful. So mean.”
Graham told the city council that he did not want to comment. Privately, he felt the meeting had gotten too heated and worried saying more could fuel the fire.
The next week, he said, he discovered a four-inch gash in one of his tires. He suspected someone had slashed it. But Symes’s comments kept him from seeking a police report, he said.
View this post on Instagram
After that, he noticed a man in a plum-colored Toyota truck trailing him one evening while he was walking Ralph. Graham said he motioned for him to pass, he said, but the man just silently stared at him.
“I felt shock,” Graham recalled, tears welling. “To be followed while walking, I felt very vulnerable. I should have called somebody. … I just didn’t feel safe. I just wanted it to go away.”
