It ain’t so bad up here in the hills
This article was originally published in Prism & Pen in Medium.com
Photo by Alexander Grey on Unsplash
The news coming out of West Virginia isn’t always about what’s best in my state. It’s much more likely to be about what’s worst. We here kid ourselves often about heading up lists of the worst of this and the worst of that. Always close to the bottom in education, health care, and, flipping the scale, always at the top in obesity and opiate addiction.
Maybe it has to do with internalizing the prevailing assessment by outsiders of who we are; that is, ignorant, inbred hillbillies operating stills in our backwoods. The truth is so much different. We’re capable and resilient people, attached to our hills and guided by a cultural and personal need for freedom. Mountaineers are always free is the state motto.
Our sad demographics aren’t so much our fault as they are the result of outside predation. Our resources have been stripped and hauled away, leaving many towns looking derelict and their people stepped on. We’ve tried Democrats and Republicans, but we don’t elect politicians with the vision to prevent or repair the decay. Maybe voting badly is our fault, we elect them, after all, we do elect them. But give us a break. We’ve had a sad history.
You might expect then that the fate of LGBTQ people would be pretty dire here. On that point, though, you’d be wrong. For reasons we can speculate about, WV is generally accepting of queer people.
It’s not all rosy, of course. We have no state-wide protections for queer people, although 17 of our municipalities do have non-discrimination ordinances that include sexual orientation and gender identity. Five of those 17 are in the Eastern Panhandle, where I live and have lived for 42 years.
But sadly, our Republican dominated legislature is getting wind of the hate messaging coming up from the South and have decided to focus their discriminatory eye on trans people. And yet in 2020, the city of Wheeling elected a trans woman to the city council. It made headlines and as far as I know elicited no hate mail. Maybe the better selves among us will stick to the motto and allow the freedom we value to extend to others.
But now to make this more personal. As I mentioned, I’ve lived here in WV for 42 years, an economic refugee from the Washington, DC area. My then partner and I needed affordable housing, and WV was the closest we could find it. We bought a home, and I commuted to work in DC, some 65 miles distant. We were only planning on staying long enough to flip the house and move back to DC, but it never happened. We found an entrenched gay and lesbian community, but one absent to our knowledge the other letters on the acronym. Those are now all accounted for, however, as the queer community has grown.
Many of the people in that long ago circle of friends have stayed or passed away without having experienced discrimination. Only a few left, but for reasons that had nothing to do with being queer. Several of them, who worked locally, were out in their workplaces or became employers themselves in businesses they started. Even some churches have been consistently supportive and affirming of queer people. Come Pride week, you’ll see rainbow flags in those churches and in just about all shop windows in our main towns.
Again, what’s surprising is that the Eastern Panhandle is Republican dominated. You’ll see Fuck Biden signs in some outlying areas and there are the inevitable pickups sporting their patriotic bona fides with American flags and don’t tread on me bumper stickers. But they seem somehow to be the ones who’ve got it wrong; they’re the outliers.
On with the story.
I’m long retired, but have tried to stay engaged with volunteer work. I’d occasionally write letters to the editor on political stuff, which was always an exercise in preaching to the choir or provoking snowflake epithets from the conservative booing section.
Then about a year ago, the paper posted an ad for contributors and I responded.
The editor and I talked about what kind of role I had in mind. I could either continue to hurl insults and invectives at bad politicians, or he could give me a column. I took the latter and began writing the Neighborhood Watch column to tell our community about what good people we were and why.
One of my first columns specifically told the readers about their LGBTQ neighbors. In publishing it, the editor insisted that I reveal my slant or, rather, my personal connection to the topic. In other words, he made me out myself in my profile, something I had no need to do in my op-ed pieces.
So what do you expect when you out yourself to a conservative community, whose largest town is 5,000 people, and whose population has discovered that the party they vote for is hatching a lot of LGBTQ hate? You expect hate mail, of course.
But there was no hate mail.
There were no villagers with torches and pitchforks storming the editorial offices. There was no reaction at all, other than a few positive remarks. OK, those were from friends, but still. I’ve since had no occasion to raise the rainbow flag again, but I’m encouraged that if and when I do, it’s not going to inflame anyone. It’s a good place to be gay, even if it’s because we’re far enough off the radar that the bad guys just leave us alone. For now anyway.