Partner, Greenbrier Physicians, Inc.
By Marta Tankersley
Growing up in West Virginia, Coy Flowers was taught that he can accomplish anything by doing two things: constantly seeking to educate himself and out-working everyone else.
It’s a lesson he’s implemented very well as is evidenced by his successes as a lieutenant commander in the U.S. Navy Medical Corps, a clinical professor at the West Virginia School of Osteopathic Medicine, a champion of women’s access to affordable health care services in rural West Virginia and founder of Fairness West Virginia, an organization that works to secure the rights of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered (LGBT) community.
Flowers believes that a community’s collective achievement exponentially furthers the potential successes of its individual members. He works every day to ensure that the world his 7-year-old son inherits is much better than the one he was born into. “The minute my son was born, my commitment to issues and causes greater than myself became one of my main priorities in life.”
While Flowers always thought he would grow up to become a teacher or lawyer, a medical emergency as a teenager sealed his fate as a doctor. His surgeon, Dr. Adams, inspired him to pursue medicine and, perhaps more importantly, work for women’s rights to equal pay for equal work. “Dr. Adams told me a story of how his wife, a radiologist, was paid only a fraction of what her male colleagues were making for the same work,” Flowers recalls. “Because of this, our community lost both of these fantastic physicians, and I vowed to see the day when women were equally valued for their work and expertise.”
His activist work doesn’t stop there. Flowers credits LGBT mentor Stephen Skinner with motivating him to give his best to achieve great things for those who can’t fight for themselves. Although Flowers has never faced an obstacle he couldn’t overcome, he continues to use his intelligence and hard work to secure marriage equality in West Virginia. “I want to have the freedom to marry my partner, Jonathan, in West Virginia,” he says. “Our family deserves to have our love and commitment equally recognized by our government.”
Flowers is the president of the Greenbrier Valley Medical Society and a member of the West Virginia State Medical Association’s Legislative Affairs Committee, the West Virginia Department of Health and Human Services Maternal-Infant Advisory Committee and the Greenbrier Valley Theater’s board of trustees. He has also chaired West Virginia’s Maternity Care Shortage Committee for the state’s Perinatal Partnership and worked on its Telecommunications in Rural Health Medicine project, and he has served on the Department of Surgery, Medical Executive, Maternal-Infant Services Improvement, Peer Review and Graduate Education committees at Greenbrier Valley Medical Center. He has been co-chair for the Tutoring Center Foundation and is a founding member of Greenbrier Residents Outreach to the World. He also supports the Family Refuge Center in Lewisburg. In 2010, Flowers was elected to the Greenbrier County Democratic Executive Committee, and most recently, he was elected to serve as a delegate to this year’s Democratic National Convention.
Flowers has made quite an impact both personally and within his community since his days selling vegetables from the family garden along Rural Route 10, but his work isn’t finished. Like the civil rights pioneer, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., before him, he knows “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
“In all that I do,” Flowers says, “I ask myself if I am doing all that I can to bend that arc even further.”
Photography by Tracy Toler on location at Adventures On the Gorge
