Josh Coleman has hosted several book launch events in Birmingham, Cullman, Auburn and Montgomery since his children’s book, “Finding My Rainbow” was released last month.

But backlash from what he said are “MAGA extremists,” forced one event scheduled as a fundraiser for AIDS Alabama South on Friday in Mobile, to be upended.

No longer is the event being held at Oyster City Brewing, and featured guest and Alabama TikTok star “Mama Tot,” had to back out as well. The event is still taking place — sans Mama Tot — but it has been relocated to Books-A-Million on Airport Boulevard.

Coleman is to sign his book along with a Drag Queen Story Time.

“She said there is a trial for her son’s murderer coming up and the messages are not stopping, and she could not emotionally do it,” said Coleman, the LGBTQ liaison for the City of Birmingham and president of Central Alabama Pride. “It’s terrible. I couldn’t imagine.”

He said, “I think my phone is busy, but I can’t imagine (what it’s like) with that many people following you and having access.”

Mama Tot, whose real name is Ophelia Nichols and is a Mobile County resident, was scheduled to appear during the event. She has been at several LGBTQ-friendly events in the past, once serving as the grand marshal of the Birmingham Pride Parade, Coleman said.

Related: TikTok star Ophelia Nichols of Mobile is ‘Mama Tot’ to millions

Nichols, under the handle “shoelover99,” has 12.7 million followers on TikTok and almost 1 million on Instagram. She announced last month a non-profit in her late son’s honor, “Randon’s Way Foundation.” Her son, Randon Lee, was shot and killed on the day before his 19th birthday at a gas station in Prichard during a marijuana deal.

His alleged killer, 20-year-old Rueben Gulley, was arrested in August 2022, and has since been indicted by a Mobile County grand jury on a charge of murder. He was due into court for a status hearing at 9 a.m. today.

“It’s a tough week for our family,” Nichols said in a recent TikTok post.

Brewery fallout

Coleman said the brewery backed out on Wednesday amid an onslaught of negative messaging on social media, spurred on by an appearance of Columbia Taylor during a Drag Queen Story Hour event that included a reading of Coleman’s book.

Coleman said his book is his story about coming out and “coming to terms on who I am, growing up and moving to Birmingham and what I do now focusing on Pride and living your authentic self.”

The event’s fallout comes nearly six years since Mobile hosted one of the South’s earliest Drag Queen Story Hour events at a venue about one block away from the brewery.

That event, which took place in September 2018, was held at the Ben May Main Branch library in downtown Mobile and featured a large crowd of LGBTQ activists and supporters and few protesters. But that same event also occurred a few years before drag queens and story hours got pulled into culture war and backlash among conservatives.

“This afternoon, they emailed me and said, ‘since yesterday, (the negative comments) ramped up and we had an onslaught of calls and people calling employees and threatening them and we know there is a protest planned,” Coleman said, adding that Oyster City backed out of safety concerns for employees.

Alternative site and plans

Books-A-Million will now host the event at 6 p.m. on Friday, after Coleman said the bookseller’s corporate offices approved it. He said the Drag Queen Story Hour reading will go on, but with private security and Mobile police on site.

“I’m sure there will be protesters,” he said. “The thing is I don’t profit from this book. I want to raise money for the organizations. It’s the point of being visible and doing it for the community. Now for me, I feel like we owe it to the community to be visible.”

Coleman added, “I didn’t want to cancel the event. I like to back down to bullies.”

He said in a Facebook post that the protest was set up by someone who participated in the “insurrection at the Capitol on January 6th, and underscored “the type of opposition we face, but it also reinforces the importance of standing strong and proud.”

Coleman said the event had been scheduled for weeks, with no protests planned. But he said the social media outrage surfaced after Momma Tot posted information about it earlier this week.

It was unclear what social media post drew the most backlash. A quick glance of Mama Tot’s TikTok did not include any videos of her discussing the event on Friday.

“It could’ve been good publicity, but it just raised it to a different level of different visibility and people latched onto it,” Coleman said. “People were (urging) people to protest.”

Coleman said at similar events, protesters have shown up. But he said the protests are typically peaceful – a small handful of people praying or holding a Bible.

“It’s nothing terrible,” he said. “They just stand there and pray.”