On Being a Queer Prodigal Son of Appalachia
I recently had the pleasure of watching the excellent indie film Boy Meets Girl, about a young trans woman growing up in rural Kentucky. While the story could have easily fallen into the all-too-familiar tropes of tragedy and heartbreak, the ending is surprisingly upbeat and optimistic, full of hope and promise.
What really stood out to me, though, was the vision of Appalachia this film articulated — a vision sharply at odds with the one I grew up with. The sight of those tree-drenched hills and the pleasant sound of that Appalachian twang — not quite as refined as you might hear in Georgia, but still containing something essentially classy and sassy — made my heart constrict with a longing for my home. But they also reminded me just how Appalachia has to go in terms of accepting its LGBT children.
I grew up in West Virginia in the 1990s and early 2000s, at the tail end of Gen X — right before the Millennials started to coalesce as a distinct demographic and social group. I know these are murky distinctions, and that technically I belong in the latter group (I was born in 1984), but I have a theory that the generations lag a bit in rural areas. I came of age before LGBT had become more accepted incAmerican culture (due, in no small measure, to Millennials).
My high school experience was pretty typical for those growing up in a late 1990s rural area. You know, developing crushes on straight men, obviously unrequited love, desperately seeking (and often failing) to find representation in popular culture. Now I know most teens, regardless of sexuality, go through these things, but for me they took on an extra layer of meaning. The only guys available were straight (and even if they weren’t, who would be brave/stupid enough to come out in the 1990s in a small town high school in West Virginia?) I was also terrified of the threat of ostracization if I dared speak my feelings. So while I had many friends, I had no true romantic life, a profound lack that still puzzles me and haunts me to this day.
It wasn’t that I was ashamed of who I was, mind you. Despite my very Christian upbringing, I had no doubt that my sexuality was just part of who I was, and that God surely wouldn’t look on my love for men as a sin. After all, how could something so beautiful, something that brought me so much joy, possibly be bad?
Though I got off rather lightly in terms of bullying, my refusal to act in the ways that boys “should” often earned me the ire and mockery of some of the more belligerent of my male peers. Fortunately, I had both the brains and the influential best friends to avoid the truly atrocious bullying that seems to be such a key part of the high school experience for many LGBT youth.
When I went to college at one of the larger state schools, it didn’t take long for me to find out that there were, indeed, many others like me. More than I had imagined possible. I underwent a crash course in coming out, and within a few weeks came out to most of the important people in my life, including my parents. I was shown an incredible amount of love, and I even stepped up to become the Secretary/Treasurer of the Lambda Society, the LGBT group at my college.
And yet.
While my parents and friends were incredibly supportive of me, the same could not be said of other acquaintances, nor indeed for my state (and Appalachia) as a whole. I hedged about telling my roommate, and when I did tell him, he asked me to move out. Being the meek little homo that I was back then, I acquiesced. Yet the more I thought about it, the more pissed off I became that he had asked me to leave, and worse, that I was willing to do it. After the Resident Director proved unwilling to intervene, I point blank told my roommate — who pretty consistently asked me when I was moving out — that I wasn’t going to.
Needless to say, he did, and I managed to earn myself the ire of most of the rest of my floor. Hell hath no fury like a floor full of homophobic straight guys. While the harshest word flung at me was “flamer” (a rather disappointing and unimaginative epithet, I always thought), I got out of the dorms as often as I could that spring semester, desperate to escape the feeling of menace that seemed to pervade the entire floor on which I lived.
I share this story not only to help expiate the bitterness I still feel about the incident, but to show just what college was like circa 2003 in WV, and what, I fear, it is still like in many semi-rural state schools all over the country. What’s even more troubling is how unsurprised I was by the whole thing. A short time later, during the heated 2004 election, members of the local Democratic Party made it quite clear what was costing the party its hold on WV — God, Guns, and Gays (I shit you not, I heard this as a party-sponsored women’s luncheon). If my own party, the one allegedly devoted to social progressiveness, wasn’t really in support of LGBT rights, what hope could there possibly be that my redneck roommate, or anyone like him, ever would be?
I’m now 31 years old, living in upstate New York with my boyfriend as we get started on our life together. Here in Syracuse, we can walk hand in hand at the mall without fear of dirty looks or worse, assault. I don’t think this would be true in my hometown. I’m proud to live in a state that hosts four of the most LGBT friendly metro areas in the nation (Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse and, of course, NYC). And I’m proud to live in a state whose legislators voted to legalize same-sex marriage, rather than being forced into it by a court (as is the case with my home state).
I’m also proud, and happy, to live in a country which is slowly, agonizingly, coming to accept its LGBT citizens. Yet I’m also sad to think that my own beloved West Virginia still lags behind, cloaking its reluctance to fully support its LGBT folks under the pernicious guise of “traditional values.”
All of this was brought vividly home to me just recently, after news broke of a group of students at a Pennsylvania high school organizing an “anti-gay day.” I distinctly remember the feeling of stomach-clenching dread upon seeing Pennsylvania in the headline — I had spent my earliest years in the western part of the state, which is often included as part of Appalachia — and the feeling only got worse when I realized that the school in question was McGuffey High School. Many members of my family, including my mother, aunt, and cousins, attended that school. Had I stayed in Pennsylvania, I would have as well. The ostentatious vitriol of this incident brought home to me just how far this region still has to go, even in this age of gay rights victories.
So, when I watch a film like Boy Meets Girl, I feel a conflicted range of emotions. I feel a profound longing for that space, that home known as Appalachia, for those hills, for that twang, for those redneck boys and girls with their good hearts and not-quite-Southern charm. I feel anger that there are still so many ignorant people there who think being Christian means supporting the kind of hideous vitriol spouted by dicks from Duck Dynasty (and I’m ashamed to say that I heard a member of my own family say that his reinstatement was a “victory for Christianity”); people who think it’s okay to use “gay” as a synonym for “bad” or “icky” and no doubt make crude comments during How to Get Away with Murder and dress in flannel to celebrate “anti-gay day.” I feel frustration that this place that I love so damn much can still make me so angry with its backwardness. I feel a sense of peace and calm settle over me when I think about coming back, settling into the old grooves, hearing that familiar sounds of my youth. And yes, I even feel a little jealousy that “kids these days” are growing up in a world that was unimaginable (to me at least), a mere 15 years ago.
But a film like Boy Meets Girl also reminds me that there is hope, after all. That, for all of their shortcomings, the people of my home are good people, with love in their hearts. That they can change, if given the time, and come to gradually see LGBT folks as part of their family.
In that spirit of optimism, I’ll close with an anecdote. My parents and I were recently talking about a young woman who was struggling with her employer to get her partner added to her insurance. My parents seemed mildly outraged that he would so clearly flout the law, but what was even more striking to me was the way they talked about it, as if it was no big deal that a woman had married another woman. What was more, it was clear that others had seen that as a matter of course, as well. Gay marriage, in other words, had become, in the end, no big deal at all.
Such a moment gives me hope that, bit by bit, my home state can become a home again, if not to me, than to many of the other LGBT children that have fled our beautiful state for more promising pastures.
And that makes me smile.
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