A 'Locally hated/Dyslexic Hairstylist' battles the Christian right in a Texas town

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Oct. 13, 2024 3 AM PT

GRANBURY, Texas — One might wonder how Adrienne Quinn Martin, a hairdresser, former belly dancer, mother of two and long-ago brand girl for a liquor distributor, a woman who celebrated her husband’s birthday on TikTok by swaying against him while listening to Al Green, became the lone-elected Democrat in one of the reddest towns in Texas.

“Oh,” Martin says, “I’ve had lives.”

Fluent in social media, she is an array of personas: a hard-to-quantify free spirit, who in one instant can offer fashion tips (“I’m having a Britney moment”) and, in another, analyze voter registration data. She is a fierce political operative, a guileless influencer and a relentless voice against the far right in this Christian, white, cattle-talking town of about 12,600.

A woman stands over a sink washing the hair of a second woman, who is reclining

“Wait,” she said, when asked to call up a Twitter post about a constable who once had ties to the militant Proud Boys. “I have that.”

Click, scroll, click.

“Here it is,” she said. “I have, like, 33,000 screenshots.”

She smiled and swiped through more images on her phone.

To the dismay of many here, Martin helped organize a Black Lives Matter protest and welcomed drag queens to town for an HBO series. She caused a stir two years ago when she attended a meeting of the Granbury Independent School Board and condemned conservatives who “rant and rave” about banning books on sexuality and LGBTQ+ themes. Her subsequent video post has been viewed millions of times.

Once underestimated by her enemies, Martin, a self-appointed watchdog tuned into the plots and players in a small, gossipy community, has found that her message is radiating beyond the fields and steeples of Hood County.

“I get furious about an injustice that happens to someone else,” said Martin, 46. “It’s a kind of a curse, to be honest.”

Martin was born and raised in Texas. She is intimate with its maps and vernaculars, and the way summer settles hard on the north-central plains along the Brazos River south of Horseshoe Bend near Granbury. But even a provocateur with polished nails and the best intentions — “I want to make this town a more friendly and inclusive place” — has to navigate the fissures and divisions in a time of cultural unease, religious fervor and battles over the nation’s identity.

She marshals the allure and immediacy of Instagram and TikTok with ease. She often appears in videos wearing big earrings, blond hair brushed to the side and falling long, inviting her followers into the confidences of a politically astute beautician. She offers advice on cropped-flair jeans, secrets about evangelical wives who hate their husbands, and warnings against the antiabortion movement. Her following — 50,000 on TikTok, 11,000 on X and 4,169 on Instagram — is not huge, but she knows the back roads and the fairways and has a widening degree of influence.

A blue dusk over the Brazos River in Granbury, Texas

“You can change society if you have a message, even if you’re part of a small community. But you have to watch your politics. Watch what you say,” said Martin, the elected chair of the Democratic Party of Hood County, who once described herself on X as a “Locally hated/Dyslexic Hairstylist.”

“This is Texas,” she aded. “Everybody is armed, so there’s always that in your mind. We have relatives we have conflicts with. Friendships have ended. ‘Oh,’ people will say, ‘She’s that Democrat bitch.’ My husband gets anxious when I go places.”

“I support everything Adrienne does,” said her husband, a native of Granbury who asked not to be named. The couple met more than 18 years ago on MySpace. “My head’s on a swivel whenever she goes out. I’m looking here, looking there, to protect her. You never know when someone will do something stupid.”

Martin has two children, six cats and a dog. She drives around in a golf cart to neighborhood garage sales. Her playlist ranges from Elvis to the Beastie Boys. Her social media posts, even those that nod to fashion and accessories, are authentic takes on life by a woman who is at once unabashed and earnest, a progressive who understands her gravity in the scheme of things. She hopes her 14-year-old son makes the basketball team and has posted angrily about a woman abandoning cats in a parking lot.

“I have everything in my phone,” she said the other day over coffee while scrolling for the town’s latest transgression, sitting in a cafe where eyes take notice when she enters. Even amid political furies, Martin, who looks like she stepped off the set of “The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills,” appears more amused than startled, speaking in the low, accented voice of a woman paging through a family scrapbook, pointing out histories and disappointments. “It’s amazing what I’ve been able to get away with.”

Martin became active in politics years ago when a family member was denied medical insurance for a preexisting condition. Many here see her as the embodiment of an America undergoing a cultural shift that threatens the heritage and political sensibilities of an old frontier town disquieted by changing times and suspicious of alternative lifestyles. A confidant to her gay friends since high school, Martin started Granbury for All, an LGBTQ+ support group that has about 300 members.

When even the most hardened political observers are becoming jaded, Martin, who does have her cynical days, is fascinated by the intricacies of power. She’s become an expert on the maneuverings in the state capitol, and she made the TV news in Austin recently after her Instagram posts on Texas’ confusing voter registration process went viral. Martin criticized the Texas secretary of state’s office, which suggested that prospective voters who had filled out an electronic form and hit submit were successfully registered. They were not. The form had to be printed and mailed into a registrar’s office.

“This is a voter suppression trick,” Martin posted on Instagram, noting that Republican lawmakers have long opposed online registration. Days later, the state updated its website to make the process clearer. It was a rare win and Martin was ecstatic. She posted a follow-up video, saying, “Oh, my God look at this . . . Victory.”

A man and young boy fish using small fishing poles while a younger boy watches

Much of Martin’s furor has been directed at the Granbury Independent School District, which was investigated by the U.S. Department of Education after it removed LGBTQ+-themed books from its shelves. The board had targeted more than 100 books to be purged, but only about eight were eliminated. Martin criticized Christian right-wing residents, some of whom have no children in school, for pressuring the district to limit access to gender and racial topics. At a 2023 school board meeting, she used the word “weird” to describe MAGA Republicans before vice presidential candidate Tim Walz turned it into a meme.

“Some community members have developed an unhealthy obsession with book banning,” she said at the meeting, suggesting that those calling for bans wanted to “prove [their] righteousness so that [they] can bring down the school district. Is that for the kids? Why the obsession with finding these books? Why is that your fantasy? It’s weird.”

Martin grew up in the Dallas suburb of Grand Prairie. The daughter of a business manager and a teacher, she has been a belly dancer at a hookah bar and a “promo-girl” for a liquor distributor. She moved to Los Angeles when she was 18 to study at the Joe Blasco Makeup Artist Training Center. She returned to Texas months later and worked on TV commercials and independent movies before moving to Granbury, which she describes as “a little place” with a racist tinge (”The N-word is rampant”) where the far-right Republicans have become “chaos agents. Deconstructionists. They’re so friggin negative it’s exhausting.”

Conservatives either get riled by Martin or pay her no mind. She is harassed online. She’s been called a “whore” and a groomer; someone threatened to burn down her house. Steve Biggers, former chair of the Hood County Republican Party, said: “God bless Adrienne, although we disagree on just about everything.” Another former Republican official said: “She can be very radical, but she’s in such a vast minority that people ignore her.”

“Republicans don’t like Adrienne at all. She gets in their face,” said Sherry Johnson, a retired teacher and president of the Texas Democratic Women of Hood County, which has about 70 members. “Adrienne has come into her own. She’s a force that got Democrats involved again. I remember when she became party chair. She was a young woman. Inexperienced. She was nervous about public speaking. That’s all changed. She’s a rock star.”

A woman wearing a Kamala T-shirt (written, ", La") joins others looking over pieces of paper on a table

A vastly outnumbered Democrat, whose progressiveness confounds even some in her own party, Martin keeps her gaze on the infighting between far-right and traditional Republicans. Her phone often glows with backbiting messages from Republican factions going after one another, notably in a recent intraparty skirmish over the appointment of a district clerk, which led to name-calling and a lawsuit. She follows the social media pages of both wings and occasionally supports traditional Republicans in key races.

“It’s more effective for Democrats and moderate Republicans to work together,” said Martin, who recently attended a local campaign kickoff for traditional Republican candidates, including a school board member who betrayed the far right by opposing wide-scale book banning. “This is Granbury. You have to take a small win over nothing at all. The far right wins on low-information voters. Just like Trump.”

A woman holds Harris-Walz campaign signs next to a vehicle

Her adopted home has a rural charm with a well-swept downtown visited on weekends by people from Dallas and Fort Worth. Granbury, which is overwhelmingly white, has become a popular retirement community with gated neighborhoods and second homes on the lake. It is the seat of Hood County, where rodeos and “cowboy tourism” are popular and preachers conflate Bible parables and politics. Jesus and former President Trump — who carried the county by 81% of the vote in 2020 — are often spoken in the same breath.

The town has a reverence for the past and a fascination for the slightly odd, including a museum with more than 6,000 dolls dating to 1868. Banners with photos of veterans and dead soldiers peer over sidewalks, and legend has it that Jesse James lived here in an age of stagecoaches and outlaws. A frontier attitude brims among older folks, some of whose grandchildren are homeschooled and whose enmity toward the government runs deep. Many here want to keep Granbury as it was, as if nostalgia, both real and invented, lay claim to the future.

“It was once a small town, and now it’s one of the fastest-growing counties in the U.S.,” said Jim Cato, who works with Martin on Granbury for All. In 2015, he and his partner were denied a license for a same-sex marriage by an ultraconservative county clerk, resulting in a lawsuit and settlement that ultimately granted the license. “The Hispanic population is increasing. People here are threatened by anyone who is not white, straight and Christian,” said Cato, adding, “diversity is coming.”

The sun sets behind a set of three crosses

Martin challenged that sensibility two years ago. On July 4, the same week her Democratic Party parade float was decorated with rainbow banners, which received boos and jeers from some, the cast from the HBO drag queen series “We’re Here” appeared in town. The series is a gender-fluid travelogue that visits American communities and stages drag shows. It landed in Granbury after the school district made national news over book banning.

Much of the town’s reaction was predictable: “Big city evil has been slithering into Granbury,” said one post on social media. Martin saw an opportunity to educate. Her politics and support of the LGBTQ+ community led to her being featured on the show, including the drag queen performance in which she dressed like Barbie and slipped on a plumed-out pink wig. She was in tears at the end. In a town less accepting than many, she had stood with those at the edges and found, for a moment, while her husband clapped, couples danced and a disco ball glittered, righteous exhilaration in a billiard hall.

A woman stands next to windows in a salon

“Things like racism and transphobia piss me off,” said Martin, who has a biracial nephew. “My mom said I was always like that. I didn’t go to college and it took me a while — years — to build up confidence. But you don’t have to be educated to get people to listen to you. I followed a need. I started thinking, ‘I’m good at this. I can help people.’ ” She added: “I know I’m privileged too. I’m a white, blond mom.”

That comes with its own liabilities. She said she has grown accustomed to sexism, including from men in her own party, one of whom refused to give her a key to the Democrats’ headquarters. A joke about oral sex was once told in her company by a fellow party member. Men have critiqued her videos on production and grammar, and one party man decided to write a newspaper column for her, believing she wasn’t up to the task. She turned him down and composed her own. “It was impacting how I did my job at the beginning,” she said. “Now, it’s just a nuisance.”

The county, she said, can be confounding. She drove the curved road the other day to the DeCordova Bend Country Club, which overlooks Lake Granbury. The air was calm and boats glimmered far off. “People think we’re ass-backward rednecks, but that’s not true,” said Martin, who ordered a salad and kissed her husband before his round of golf. “There’s good people here.” She added, though, that conservative agendas like the county clerk denying a marriage license to a gay couple in 2015 “start in Granbury and then spread.”

She looked across the dining room. Big windows shone in the noon light. A few men in from the fairways drank beer at a nearby table. Her phone hummed with messages. She has learned when to respond and when not; she knows the eccentricities and calibrations at play. “Two extremist candidates for the school board lost in the last election,” she said. “The Democrats helped make that happen by joining with the moderate Republicans for a common cause. That’s a win, no matter whether we’re in power or not. I like the fight. It gets me passionate.”

A woman stands with her hand over her heart, with several other women doing the same

Martin doesn’t mind silences, where a glance will often reveal more about a person’s politics than a raft of chatter, but she’s busy and likes to keep things moving. She recalled the most recent Fourth of July town parade when she waved from the Democrats’ float. She watched the cheerleaders and the veterans, the posse of sheriff’s deputies and the fire trucks, the passing faces in the crowd. A kid stood among them. The kid didn’t clap or yell, but she saw a shudder of recognition across his face, a slight smile of solidarity for LGBTQ+ rights, perhaps, she said, on the road to a town’s acceptance.

A ‘Locally hated/Dyslexic Hairstylist’ battles the Christian right in a Texas town

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