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Introduction
Tere Are No Queers Here
I snaked my way through I-64 trafc, past two car wrecks andseveral police speed traps to reach Frankort, Kentucky, by 8:20 that icy February morning in 2002. A regional eld organizer rom the Kentucky Fairness Alliance (KFA), a statewide lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgen-der (LGB) advocacy organization, had arranged or me to lobby witha dozen young people and our adults rom Berea, a Central Kentucky town o 9,800 people, and I was running almost a hal-hour late. I quickly ound my ellow advocates crowded around a table in the Kentucky StateCapitol’s smoky basement caeteria. Tey stood out among the gray-hairedwhite men in dark-blue suits who lled the low-ceilinged, uorescent-litroom silently chain-smoking as they read their morning papers.Te all-white group rom Berea sat tightly packed together with theirbackpacks and winter coats piled on the oor around their eet. An evenmixture o young men and women wore Berea College or Berea Highsweatshirts. Te our adult allies afliated with the Berea chapter o Par-ents and Friends o Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG) had the tired-but-sup-portive aces o elders trying to keep up with their younger counterparts’exuberance. As I walked toward them, a tall man in his early ies witha neatly trimmed salt-and-pepper beard stood up, smiled, and said in aresonating baritone, “You must be Mary.” He held out both his hands toshake mine as the youth seated around him also smiled, waved up at merom their seats, and made room or me to squeeze in among them. Teexcited pitch o the discussion about lobbying strategy and talking pointssuggested that they were well into a second round o coee.Aer apologizing or being late, I introduced mysel, sat down, andasked them i this was the rst time they had lobbied together. wo o the younger members o the group smiled widely and said “no,” thenlaunched into the ollowing story. Te year beore, in 2001, a small group
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Introduction
o the same young people rom Berea College, a private Christian school,met with their state house representative, Lonnie Napier, during ReligiousLeaders Lobby Day. Te KFA and progressive clergy involved in KFA’s Re-ligious Organizing Project co-sponsored the event to educate lawmakersabout LGB issues in the state. “None o us had ever met a governmentrepresentative beore,” said Jeremy, a Berea College senior. “I know Napi-er’s amily owns a lot o property around town, but I’d never met him inperson.” Te Berea students certainly did not expect their meeting with alocal government representative to become a media spectacle.Jeremy and his riend Seth broke out in laughter as they recountedtheir barbed exchanges with Representative Napier. “He let me and acouple other guys into his ofce and then started throwing Bible quotesat us, saying we’d been badly inuenced by V and the Internet. It wasweird. He just went o. Ten, he tells us he doesn’t have to be educatedabout LGB issues because there aren’t any gays living in Berea!” Napier’sclaim—proessed to two o his gay-identiying constituents—oored Jer-emy and Seth. More than 15 people regularly attended the Berea LGBstudent group’s monthly meetings and many more belonged to its onlinediscussion list. “Berea’s got to be the gayest place in Kentucky, outsideo Louisville and Lexington!” Seth asserted beore returning to the topico last year’s lobbying eorts. Apparently Napier carried the conversa-tion with the Berea students out onto the State Capitol building’s steps inrange o a local camera crew and reporter covering the 2001 Lobby Day event. Te students said that the next day’s evening news eatured imageso Napier shaking his nger in the ace o a white young man clutchinghis backpack straps and looking bewildered as Napier unleashed his re-and-brimstone condemnations o the gay liestyle.LGB Lobby Day events are quintessential examples o how a politicso visibility can work as a political orce in public lie. Private citizens co-alesce as a community o LGB people at these events to demonstratetheir strength in numbers. ogether, they seek to eect change througha public call or social recognition and equal representation. I was inti-mately amiliar with the Berea students’ strategies because I was once aqueer-youth activist. I moved to San Francisco aer college and joined acadre o dynamic youth leaders, all in our late teens and early twenties,drawn as much to the city’s politics as its social scene in the mid-1990s. Arange o not-or-prot youth advocacy organizations, like San Francisco’sStop AIDS Project and the Lavender Youth Recreation and Inormation
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Introduction
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Center, provided meeting space and other raw materials or our organiz-ing, but a tight circle o queer-youth activists led the eort to cra andrun rallies like Caliornia’s rst LGB Youth Lobby Day, held January 3,1996, on Sacramento’s State Capitol building steps and in its rotunda.Hundreds o youth activists rom around Caliornia bused in or droveto the Capitol or that rst Lobby Day to advocate or the passage o whatwould become, our years later, Assembly Bill 537, a law to protect K-12students rom harassment based on sexual orientation and gender iden-tity.
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A ew o the event’s organizers, mysel included, hailed rom smalltowns, transplants rom Caliornia’s mountain ranges and arming com-munities. Others grew up in the rural corners o Midwestern and South-ern “yover” states that many city dwellers cannot nd on a map. Teexpectations o conormity and the lack o civic engagement (unless onecounts church picnics) that we associated with our upbringings made theidea o publicly reveling in a queer sense o dierence (“Let your reak ag y!”) almost unimaginable. Caught up in the excitement o that rstYouth Lobby Day, and as only young activists can sometimes believe, weelt we could accomplish anything through these public demonstrationso deant visibility and collective action.But the Berea students’ Lobby Day experience, which I will return toin the next chapter, demonstrates the dilemmas rural young people acewhen they rely on similar strategies o visibility and assertions o dier-ence deployed by their urban peers. Unlike urban gay and lesbian com-munities able to mobilize signicant numbers o people and dollars togenerate visibility, rural youth and their allies live and work in communi-ties and legislative districts that prioritize solidarity, rely on amiliarity,and lack the public or private resources to underwrite sustained, visibledissent to assert queer dierence. Tese are also places where media rep-resentations o LGB people outpace the tangible presence o locally orga-nized constituencies able to or invested in prioritizing queer recognition.Tis book addresses how young people in the rural United States wholay claim to LGB identities conront the politics o gay visibility, expec-tations, and constraints that dene and shape the recognition o LGB-identiying people in popular culture and public lie. I take an interdis-ciplinary approach to examine how rural queer and LGB-identiyingyouth, contrary to popular narratives o escape to urban oases, standtheir ground to name their desires and esh out their local meaning. Itake stock o the strategies they use to create belonging and visibility in
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