One would possibly marvel how Adrienne Quinn Martin, a hairdresser, former stomach dancer, mom of two and long-ago model lady for a liquor distributor, a lady who celebrated her husband’s birthday on TikTok by swaying towards him whereas listening to Al Inexperienced, turned the lone-elected Democrat in one of many reddest cities in Texas.
“Oh,” Martin says, “I’ve had lives.”
Fluent in social media, she is an array of personas: a tough to quantify free-spirit, who in a single prompt can supply style suggestions (“I’m having a Britney second”) and, in one other, analyze voter registration information. She is a fierce political operative, a guileless influencer and a relentless voice towards the far proper on this Christian, white, cattle-talking city of about 12,600.
Martin washes Rose Simpson’s hair at 4 13 Salon in Granbury, Texas.
“Wait,” she stated, when requested to name up a Twitter put up a couple of constable who as soon as had ties to the militant Proud Boys. “I’ve that.”
Click on, scroll, click on.
“Right here it’s,” she stated. “I’ve, like, 33,000 screenshots.”
She smiled and swiped via extra photographs on her telephone.
To the dismay of many right here, Martin helped set up a Black Lives Matter protest and welcomed drag queens to city for an HBO sequence. She prompted a stir two years in the past when she attended a gathering of the Granbury Unbiased Faculty Board and condemned conservatives who “rant and rave” about banning books on sexuality and LGBTQ+ themes. Her subsequent video put up has been considered tens of millions of occasions.
As soon as underestimated by her enemies, Martin, a self-appointed watchdog tuned into the plots and gamers in a small, gossipy neighborhood, has discovered that her message is radiating past the fields and steeples of Hood County.
“I get livid about an injustice that occurs to another person,” stated Martin, 46. “It’s a sort of a curse, to be trustworthy.”
Martin, proper, speaks throughout a Texas Democratic Girls of Hood County assembly at Spring Creek Barbecue in Granbury.
(Christina Home / Los Angeles Instances)
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Martin was born and raised in Texas. She is intimate with its maps and vernaculars, and the way in which summer time settles laborious on the north-central plains alongside the Brazos River south of Horseshoe Bend close to Granbury. However even a provocateur with polished nails and the very best intentions — “I wish to make this city a extra pleasant and inclusive place” — has to navigate the fissures and divisions in a time of cultural unease, non secular fervor and battles over the nation’s identification.
She marshals the attract and immediacy of Instagram and TikTok with ease. She usually seems in movies sporting large earrings, blond hair brushed to the aspect and falling lengthy, inviting her followers into the confidences of a politically astute beautician. She affords recommendation on cropped-flair denims, secrets and techniques about evangelical wives who hate their husbands, and warnings towards the antiabortion motion. Her following — 50,000 on TikTok, 11,000 on X and 4,169 on Instagram — will not be large, however she is aware of the again roads and the fairways and has a widening diploma of affect.
Nightfall over the Brazos River in Granbury, Texas. “I wish to make this city a extra pleasant and inclusive place,” Martin says.
“You possibly can change society you probably have a message, even in the event you’re a part of a small neighborhood. However you must watch your politics. Watch what you say,” stated Martin, the elected chair of the Democratic Occasion of Hood County, who as soon as described herself on X as a “Regionally hated/Dyslexic Hairstylist.”
“That is Texas,” she aded. “All people is armed, so there’s all the time that in your thoughts. Now we have family we’ve conflicts with. Friendships have ended. ‘Oh,’ individuals will say, ‘She’s that Democrat bitch.’ My husband will get anxious after I go locations.”
“I help every thing Adrienne does,” stated her husband, a local of Granbury who requested to not be named. The couple met greater than 18 years in the past on MySpace. “My head’s on a swivel each time she goes out. I’m trying right here, trying there, to guard her. You by no means know when somebody will do one thing silly.”
Martin has two youngsters, six cats and a canine. She drives round in a golf cart to neighborhood storage gross sales. Her playlist ranges from Elvis to the Beastie Boys. Her social media posts, even people who nod to style and equipment, are genuine takes on life by a lady who’s without delay unabashed and earnest, a progressive who understands her gravity within the scheme of issues. She hopes her 14-year-old son makes the basketball workforce and has posted angrily a couple of lady abandoning cats in a parking zone.
“I’ve every thing in my telephone,” she stated the opposite day over espresso whereas scrolling for the city’s newest transgression, sitting in a restaurant the place eyes take discover when she enters. Even amid political furies, Martin, who appears like she stepped off the set of “The Actual Housewives of Beverly Hills,” seems extra amused than startled, talking within the low, accented voice of a lady paging via a household scrapbook, declaring histories and disappointments. “It’s wonderful what I’ve been capable of get away with.”
Martin made the information after her Instagram posts on Texas’ complicated voter registration course of went viral.
(Christina Home / Los Angeles Instances)
Martin turned lively in politics years in the past when a member of the family was denied medical insurance coverage for a pre-existing situation. Many right here see her because the embodiment of an America present process a cultural shift that threatens the heritage and political sensibilities of an outdated frontier city disquieted by altering occasions and suspicious of different existence. A confidant to her homosexual mates since highschool, Martin began Granbury for All, an LGBTQ+ help group that has about 300 members.
When even probably the most hardened political observers have gotten jaded, Martin, who does have her cynical days, is fascinated by the intricacies of energy. She’s turn into an knowledgeable on the maneuverings within the state capitol, and he or she made the TV information in Austin just lately after her Instagram posts on Texas’ complicated voter registration course of went viral. Martin criticized the Texas secretary of state’s workplace, which advised that potential voters who had crammed out an digital type and hit submit had been efficiently registered. They weren’t. The shape needed to be printed and mailed right into a registrar’s workplace.
“It is a voter suppression trick,” Martin posted on Instagram, noting that Republican lawmakers have lengthy opposed on-line registration. Days later, the state up to date its web site to make the method clearer. It was a uncommon win and Martin was ecstatic. She posted a follow-up video, saying, “Oh, my God take a look at this. . .Victory.”
Austin Odgers fishes along with his sons Liam, 3, and Wyatt, 6, proper, in Granbury.
A lot of Martin’s furor has been directed on the Granbury Unbiased Faculty District, which was investigated by the U.S. Division of Training after it eliminated LGBTQ+-themed books from its cabinets. The board had focused greater than 100 books to be purged however solely about eight had been eradicated. Martin criticized Christian right-wing residents, a few of whom don’t have any youngsters at school, for pressuring the district to restrict entry to gender and racial subjects. At a 2023 college board assembly, she used the phrase “bizarre” to explain MAGA Republicans earlier than vice presidential candidate Tim Walz turned it right into a meme.
“Some neighborhood members have developed an unhealthy obsession with guide banning,” she stated on the assembly, suggesting that these calling for bans wished to “show [their] righteousness in order that [they] can deliver down the varsity district. Is that for the youngsters? Why the obsession with discovering these books? Why is that your fantasy? It’s bizarre.”
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Martin grew up within the Dallas suburb of Grand Prairie. The daughter of a enterprise supervisor and a trainer, she has been a stomach dancer at a hookah bar and a “promo-girl” for a liquor distributor. She moved to Los Angeles when she was 18 to check on the Joe Blasco Make-up Artist Coaching Middle. She returned to Texas months later and labored on TV commercials and unbiased motion pictures earlier than transferring to Granbury, which she describes as “a bit of place” with a racist tinge (”the N-word is rampant”) the place the far-right Republicans have turn into “chaos brokers. Deconstructionists. They’re so friggin destructive it’s exhausting.”
Conservatives both get riled by Martin or pay her no thoughts. She is harassed on-line. She’s been known as a “whore” and a groomer; somebody threatened to burn down her home. Steve Biggers, former chair of the Hood County Republican Occasion, stated, “God bless Adrienne, though we disagree on nearly every thing.” One other former Republican official stated: “She could be very radical, however she’s in such an unlimited minority that individuals ignore her.”
“Republicans don’t like Adrienne in any respect. She will get of their face,” stated Sherry Johnson, a retired trainer and president of the Texas Democratic Girls of Hood County, which has about 70 members. “Adrienne has come into her personal. She’s a pressure that bought Democrats concerned once more. I bear in mind when she turned occasion chair. She was a younger lady. Inexperienced. She was nervous about public talking. That’s all modified. She’s a rock star.”
Linda Peacock checks in for a Texas Democratic Girls of Hood County assembly in Granbury.
A vastly outnumbered Democrat, whose progressiveness confounds even some in her personal occasion, Martin retains her gaze on the infighting between far-right and conventional Republicans. Her telephone usually glows with backbiting messages from Republican factions going after each other, notably in a latest intraparty skirmish over the appointment of a district clerk, which led to name-calling and a lawsuit. She follows the social media pages of each wings and sometimes helps conventional Republicans in key races.
“It’s more practical for Democrats and reasonable Republicans to work collectively,” stated Martin, who just lately attended an area marketing campaign kickoff for conventional Republican candidates, together with a college board member who betrayed the far-right by opposing wide-scale guide banning. “That is Granbury. It’s a must to take a small win over nothing in any respect. The far-right wins on low-information voters. Identical to Trump.”
Martin carries Harris-Walz indicators for others to put up.
Her adopted house has a rural appeal with a well-swept downtown visited on weekends by individuals from Dallas and Fort Value. Granbury, which is overwhelmingly white, has turn into a preferred retirement neighborhood with gated neighborhoods and second houses on the lake. It’s the seat of Hood County, the place rodeos and “cowboy tourism” are widespread and preachers conflate Bible parables and politics. Jesus and Trump — who carried the county by 81% of the vote in 2020 — are sometimes spoken in the identical breath.
The city has a reverence for the previous and a fascination for the marginally odd, together with a museum with greater than 6,000 dolls relationship again to 1868. Banners with photographs of veterans and lifeless troopers peer over sidewalks and legend has it that Jesse James lived right here in an age of stagecoaches and outlaws. A frontier angle brims amongst older people, a few of whose grandchildren are homeschooled and whose enmity towards the federal government runs deep. Many right here wish to hold Granbury because it was, as if nostalgia, each actual and invented, lay declare to the long run.
“It was as soon as a small city and now it’s one of many quickest rising counties within the U.S.,” stated Jim Cato, who works with Martin on Granbury for All. In 2015, he and his accomplice had been denied a license for a same-sex marriage by an ultraconservative county clerk, leading to a lawsuit and settlement that finally granted the license. “The Hispanic inhabitants is growing. Folks listed below are threatened by anybody who will not be white, straight and Christian,” stated Cato, including, “range is coming.”
The solar units behind a set of three crosses outdoors a church in Granbury.
Martin challenged that sensibility two years in the past. On July 4, the identical week her Democratic Occasion parade float was adorned with rainbow banners, which acquired boos and jeers from some, the forged from the HBO drag queen sequence “We’re Right here” appeared on the town. The sequence is a gender-fluid travelog that visits American communities and phases drag exhibits. It landed in Granbury after the varsity district made nationwide information over guide banning.
A lot of the city’s response was predictable: “Huge metropolis evil has been slithering into Granbury,” stated one put up on social media. Martin noticed a chance to teach. Her politics and help of the LGBTQ+ neighborhood led to her being featured on the present, together with the drag queen efficiency during which she dressed like Barbie and slipped on a plumed-out pink wig. She was in tears on the finish. In a city much less accepting than many, she had stood with these on the edges and located, for a second, whereas her husband clapped, {couples} danced and a disco ball glittered, righteous exhilaration in a billiard corridor.
Martin takes a break on the 4 13 Salon in Granbury.
“Issues like racism and transphobia piss me off,” stated Martin, who has a biracial nephew. “My mother stated I used to be all the time like that. I didn’t go to varsity and it took me awhile — years — to construct up confidence. However you don’t should be educated to get individuals to take heed to you. I adopted a necessity. I began pondering, ‘I’m good at this. I can assist individuals.’ ” She added: “I do know I’m privileged too. I’m a white, blond mother.”
That comes with its personal liabilities. She stated she has grown accustomed to sexism, together with from males in her personal occasion, one in every of whom refused to offer her a key to the Democrats’ headquarters. A joke about oral intercourse was as soon as informed in her firm by a fellow occasion member. Males have critiqued her movies on manufacturing and grammar, and one occasion man determined to put in writing a newspaper column for her, believing she wasn’t as much as the duty. She turned him down and composed her personal. “It was impacting how I did my job firstly,” she stated. “Now, it’s only a nuisance.”
The county, she stated, could be confounding. She drove the curved street the opposite day to the DeCordova Bend Nation Membership, which overlooks Lake Granbury. The air was calm and boats glimmered far off. “Folks assume we’re ass-backward rednecks, however that’s not true,” stated Martin, who ordered a salad and kissed her husband earlier than his spherical of golf. “There’s good individuals right here.” She added, although, that conservative agendas just like the county clerk denying a wedding license to a homosexual couple in 2015, “begin in Granbury after which unfold.”
She regarded throughout the eating room. Huge home windows shone within the midday gentle. A number of males in from the fairways drank beer at a close-by desk. Her telephone hummed with messages. She has realized when to reply and when not; she is aware of the eccentricities and calibrations at play. “Two extremist candidates for the varsity board misplaced within the final election,” she stated. “The Democrats helped make that occur by becoming a member of with the reasonable Republicans for a standard trigger. That’s a win, regardless of whether or not we’re in energy or not. I just like the combat. It will get me passionate.”
Adrienne Martin, left, recites the Pledge of Allegiance.
(Christina Home / Los Angeles Instances)
Martin doesn’t thoughts silences, the place a look will usually reveal extra about an individual’s politics than a raft of chatter, however she’s busy and likes to maintain issues transferring. She recalled the newest Fourth of July city parade when she waved from the Democrats’ float. She watched the cheerleaders and the veterans, the posse of sheriff’s deputies and the firetrucks, the passing faces within the crowd. A child stood amongst them. The child didn’t clap or yell, however she noticed a shudder of recognition throughout his face, a slight smile of solidarity for LGBTQ+ rights, maybe, she stated, on the street to a city’s acceptance.
