I knew I was a Southerner before I knew I was a lesbian. Ironically, I rejected my Southern roots until around the time I started to come to terms with my sexuality. To me, this rejection and subsequent reconciliation of both identities was primarily an issue of vision, a function of what I could see around me and how I saw myself within this complex region.
Growing up in the Appalachian mountains of Western North Carolina, “the South” seemed to infiltrate every corner of life. The speech was faster and clipped, the food fried and fatty, the “yes ma’ams” and “no sirs” imperative. Confederate flags hung from houses and a supermajority of Republicans dominated the state legislature, trapping my state in a blanket of conservative politics that enshrined discrimination in the law.
This environment seemed innate to “the South,” and soon my understanding of the region was defined hegemonically by what I hated about it most: the religious evangelism, the conservative politics, the prescriptive rules of gender and sexuality. I resented the South for the bigotry I felt it stood for, and I resented my roots for tying me to a place that felt stifling and backward, where progress seemed to move slower than it did in other parts of the country.
Part of this resentment was rooted in uncertainty regarding my place in the region and where I fit in, if at all. The rural, queer Southerners I did know were few and far between and stuck out like sore thumbs. I saw them as anomalies and outsiders.
For the most part, the lives of LGBTQ people were visible to me only when illuminated by attempts to alter or erase their existence. I saw queer people in the news when, in 2016, the NC state legislature passed a bill, HB2, that overturned local ordinances protecting LGBTQ people from discrimination. HB2 also infamously required trans and gender nonconforming individuals to use the restroom corresponding to the gender they were assigned at birth rather than the one they identified with. Around the same time, my social media pages were flooded with the news that Mississippi had passed a law allowing businesses to refuse service to LGBTQ people based on religious or moral objections. In my community, queerness was exposed when the parents of a gay acquiantence advocated for conversion therapy upon his coming out.
Absorbing these depictions and stories of queer people led me to believe that queerness must be antithetical to Southerness. I was unsure how LGBTQ people survived in a region that felt so inhospitable, where existence seemed constantly threatened by the political and religious landscape. When I realized I harbored feelings for other women in a way I did not for men, I didn’t know how to make sense of it. Reconciling my region with my sexuality seemed like an impossible feat when everywhere I looked, they conflicted with each other. I didn’t want to be an anomaly and I certainly didn’t want to live in the South as one, so I rejected both my roots and myself. It was easier, I realized, to resent a region and deny your heritage than it was to love it authentically and have it not love you back.
My freshman year at Harvard was the first significant portion of time I spent away from the South. With the distance came many things. I went on my first date with a woman and within minutes undeniably confirmed what I had been avoiding and rejecting since adolescence. Displaced from the mountains and shoved into the bustle of the city, I was able to affirm this piece of myself, surrounded by people who felt similarly, in a place I felt would accept it.
My freshman year was also the first time I missed the South. I missed the food and the music, I missed the people, and I missed the Blue Ridge Mountains. I felt homesick for a region I had left despising. The right-wing politics and bigotry didn’t leave the South when I did, but leaving gave me a more nuanced and hopeful understanding of the region and my place in it.
Where I saw myself in the South and what I saw around me was intimately connected to what I learned about the past. Few places understand the malleability of history better than the South, whose regional notoriety lies in its ability to manipulate current understandings of the past. This phenomenon is easily recognizable in debates about confederate monuments and alternative stories about the forces behind the Civil War.
Historical revisionism has also attempted to erase queer people from Southern history, a phenomenon enabled by the passage of anti-LGBTQ laws. These laws often try to deny individuals claim to their home by simply pretending they and their histories don’t have a place there, a way of constructing the present to obscure the past. With the passage of North Carolina’s HB2, the infamous “bathroom bill” of 2017, came a thinly veiled attempt to create a state without individuals that didn’t fit neatly into binaries of gender and sexuality. But denying LGBTQ people a place doesn’t scrub the South clean of our existence or long history in this region.
I grew up believing LGBTQ Southerners were an anomaly, a people displaced in an unwelcoming region devoid of queer history and community. I was wrong. The South is home to a plethora of LGBTQ trailblazers, including writers like Tennessee Williams, Dorothy Allison, and Alice Walker, the latter of whom’s influential novel The Color Purple is set in the South and includes depictions of lesbianism. Queer activist and lawyer Pauli Murray spent their childhood in North Carolina hours from my home and went on to become a key figure in the movement for both women’s rights and civil rights, a legacy I was never taught in school despite its close proximity. In spite of these kinds of erasures within Southern history, archiving projects have recently been founded across the Deep South to document and preserve the vibrant history of queer Southerners and their communities.
It wasn’t until leaving the South and attending college that I discovered a history I hadn’t known existed. Learning this gave me the privilege of sight; I was able to see myself as both a lesbian and a Southerner. This isn’t to say there isn’t tension between my Southern roots and my sexuality, because the ability to see myself in history and in the South doesn’t negate the harm some Southerners have done to the LGBTQ community that makes living in this region difficult for many queer people. It is to say that these identities don’t live in opposition to each other as they used to. Political landscapes that are hostile to queer Southerners don’t erase the history and community of the LGBTQ people who live and thrive in the South and have done so for centuries. Queer history is Southern history, and queer people belong in this region as much as anyone else. It’s time the South started acting like it.
