Right. Here’s a left turn; some of it’s remixed, and some of it’s not.
I’m queer as hell. I think we’ve established this. The other thing I am, though–and it’s a big part of my identity, much as I’ve kicked at it–is small-town.
Neither of those is going away. The thing I’ve discovered, though, is that it’s not just my rural-ness that makes my queer-ness problematic; the trouble and pressure and nonsense go both ways.
I come from a pretty good-sized place in the middle of nowhere–three hours drive, in the good directions, to the nearest population center–with everything from the corner soda fountain to split-rail fences to tumbleweeds. It’s grown since I’ve left, of course; so have I. It was an awful place to grow up queer, let me tell you.
This is the sort of place where “gay” is used as an insult, but so are “Mexican” and “Jew”–where, when the city went to add orientation as a protected status to its hate-crimes legislation, the Chamber of Commerce moved to block it–where a neoconservative megachurch practically runs both local government and public schools. It’s a place where my high school Gay-Straight Alliance had to ally with the rest of the tri-county area, and then the ten of us would meet, at night, in the locked back room of the Planned Parenthood. “Feminist” and “Liberal” are dirty, dirty words.
It may surprise you to hear that I kind of miss it.
Okay. Hear me out.
I grew up in a place it was dangerous to grow up queer. Kids got the hell beat out of them if they were out, got spit on in the hallways, got targeted for constant harassment. I probably would not be safe walking down the street there today, and I don’t visit any more.
But I’m not city people. I’m just not. I like the art galleries, and the chance to go to the opera, maybe. I like having a place other than Denny’s open past sundown. I like the diversity of people I live among, I like not being one of ten brown people in a twenty-mile radius, dear God I like the food. But I’m not city people. I have adapted to my urban life, and there is much of it I love, but it does not come naturally.
I’m used to wide reaches of sky. I’m used to mountains and trees on every horizon, and rivers you can wade in ten minutes’ hike away, and dirt roads where you can get out and sit on your truck’s hood for an hour without bothering anyone or being bothered back. I’m used to wild animals in the backyard, darkness so deep you can see the Milky Way, a downtown you can’t possibly get lost in, and a whole lot less cement.
Like those hole-in-the-sidewalk trees, I just wilt, when it comes to cement.
It’s not just that, though. It’s the people. The people have their problems, of course; can’t be denied. Thing is, when you walk down the street, folks wave and make eye contact. You will always find someone you know, if you’re in town.
Not easy to be deviant, sure. Not easy to be welcomed in. Thing is, though? Those of us out there knew each other, and we were back-to-back. We had to be, because our lives were, to some degree, at risk. It’s a thing I noticed sharply a couple years back when I worked out in the rural valley surrounding the city I live in. When I came across, say, a lesbian couple on a homestead out there? We’d look each other up and down, breathe out carefully, and suddenly they’d be getting a discount and I’d be getting a tip, and we did our best to do right by each other, no questions asked. And whoever I was working with would always ask, “…did you know those people?”
It is a luxury to me, a vast luxury, to meet queer folks I don’t like. We didn’t have that option where I came from. You had the one thing in common, you stuck together and had each other’s backs, because your options everywhere else are “closet” and “token.” We emigrate to the cities for a reason–because the bizarre, spies-behind-enemy-lines solidarity we have to have outside them is eventually exhausting, and “survival” isn’t how a person ought to live. Here, in a huge community, we can be as nasty to each other as we like, because we have made ourselves a safe enough space to divide amongst ourselves, to associate with people with whom we have common interests or ideas. It’s a godsend, of course. But it lacks that embattled urgency, that sense of needing to stick together and keep working to change things. The reaction to a Pride festival is “bored now.” Been there, done that. For me, it’s still revolutionary to see people out on the street with their families and unafraid, still gorgeous and new and wonderful and yes, just a little frightening.
We’re another subspecies, us rural queers. See, our small towns are hard on us, yes, but so are our queer communities. The default culture is an urban one, and it’s assumed–well, why would you stay in a town or a church or a country that didn’t welcome you? Why wouldn’t you come to the city? Isn’t the city better? Better culture, better hangouts, better imagery, better people? We didn’t have our own subculture, back home, with its own parallel institutions. Small towns can make you ashamed and isolated for who you love and what you are; why should the places we run to sneer at our accents and our clothes and our food and our music, in turn? Yeah, if you have the resources to run to the city, you probably do–but some don’t, and others are attached to their roots, their families, their cultural trappings, the dirt and sky and rock of where they live. Sometimes a deep love of place comes first. But still, our mainstream queer organizations and publications and politics focus on city people and city concerns, and just assume that the countryside is going to be a conservative cesspit, nothing to be done about it. For some of us, the country is home, even though we’re refugees, and we would love for it to change so we could live there safely, but we’re just demographic anomalies, apparently.
Look, I love that there’s two gay bars in walking distance from my house. I love that my neighborhood, until recently, had an amazing women’s bookstore, and even Al-Anon has a weekly LGBT meeting blocks from here. But this isn’t home, for me, and while it’s where I have to be because of the culture, I keep pulling toward that forest and desert and open road. I will adapt to cities, but they’re not home.
This assumption that queer folk are city folk is just not working. It isolates and abandons those of us out in the sticks making lives work, and it isolates those of us in cities, with its implicit message that if you venture out past the metro area without a helmet, you’ll dissolve. It limits our causes to just working for those of us all clustered together while the rest of the state fears and misunderstands what we’re about. It just ratchets up our ability to sneer.
I don’t know what the answer is. I don’t think it’s anyone’s duty to go stick it out where they’re not welcome until it changes. But it’s time we embrace more diversity in the communities we inhabit, one way or another–or we’ll be, as someone smugly, approvingly informed me after all those anti-gay-marriage bills went through, an archipelago of city islands we like. And that’s never going to be okay with me. We can’t win the fight, politically or socially, if we only pay attention to the cities. It’s more than that, though: I think we need all those places, even if only some of us want to actually be in them. I think we need wide open spaces, too. I think we ought to be able to move between cities without having to hide in airplanes. I think, in every profession and walk of life, country music and hipster indie-rock, we ought to be alongside our neighbors. We ought to wave and smile to people we don’t really know on the street, because they’re Family. My small town can learn a lot from my queer community. And my queer community can learn a lot from my small town.