I confess: I am in love with America.
I say this as a native son. I was born & raised in the heartland in a rural town not too far from a big city. I have had every privilege afforded to me: I was born to two kind and loving parents, I wasn’t raised religious, I had a sheltered childhood full of books and free time and curiosity. I went to public school and received a good education, and while I never fit in or had a lot of close friends, that education was a playground for my curiosity, which has survived into adulthood.
I now live in an another rural town—this one far more remote than the one where I was raised)—in another part of the country. On a political map, my life has been inverted: where I once lived in a blue part of a red state, I now live in the reddest part of a blue state. I spent much of my 20s moving from city to city across the country, from the South to the Pacific Northwest, always looking for something I never found: community. Being the child of a small town, cities felt too unaccountable, too anonymous. While I once craved that anonymity, it came to feel hollow as I grew older.
Being gay, this anonymity initially felt freeing. Away from the confines of my childhood town, I could be whoever I wanted to be. I explored my sexuality without guilt or shame. I inadvertently became a different person every couple of years. I was a die-hard liberal, crystallizing into something more critical of the Left with age. I used to look to the political Right with suspicion: when you’re gay and raised in a conservative town, you learn not to trust conservatives. But with age, I can see these people as what they are: all too often afraid of change, and full of guilt and shame about who and what they are. The most difficult lessons are ones in which you realize the world isn’t as black-and-white as you thought. People that hate others for what they are merely hate themselves. I wish humans were more complicated than this, but we’re not. We’re predictable and obvious.
After years in the city, I became bored with the homogeneity of thought: almost everyone thought like me. We were all educated, liberal, and financially somewhat comfortable. Sure, most fellow millennials had very little money, but they never seemed to lack a purpose, always jetting off to work a third job giving books to the homeless or working long hours at a fancy restaurant with some prestige. But alarmingly, none of my friends seemed to want to travel too far from the city. There was a profound lack of curiosity about people that live in the spaces between cities, which is precisely how rural spaces have come—both understandably and somewhat condescendingly—to be defined. Worse still, during the rise of Trump and the rural populism that fueled it, there was a profound and sharp animosity that became palpable. My urban, liberal friends could not understand why Trump appealed to so many rural people, and my friends on the Left started to think of rural people as ignorant, racist, and dumb.
Let’s pause for a moment.
I am a gay man living in rural America because, plainly, I love it. I love the landscape, the general absence of people, the fact I can get in my car and be hiking with my dogs in ten minutes and not see another human all day. I love many of the values of small-town America: accountability between neighbors, the sense that kindness counts for something. I love waving hello to people whether I know them or not—and having them wave back.
But I’m a gay man living in rural America. Many of the values I don’t share with the people I’m surrounded by, first and foremost religiosity. I was not raised religious. Growing up, the people, both adults and fellow kids, that insisted, explicitly or implicitly, that I should feel bad about myself were the religious ones. As an adult, armed with the knowledge that they were merely trying to make me feel as insecure as they did themselves, I have some compassion for what they must go through. No wonder so many religious people believe in hell: they put themselves through it on a regular basis.
And then there is the poverty of rural places, which is unique in some of its causes and effects, from urban poverty. (Though it is just as unjust.) Desperation fills the vacuum left when a sense of purpose is taken from someone. For most rural people, this was a decently-paying job that has been automated or shipped overseas in the last four decades. It is no wonder why alcoholism and opioid use and drug addiction and suicide are on the rise in rural places. When a person no longer has purpose, they look for meaning wherever they can. If that’s in the momentary solace provided by painkillers, so be it. This is not a mystery.
I’ll be candid: this poverty and the afflictions that stem from it make me very uncomfortable. I have a hard time trusting some of my neighbors because I know they struggle with heroin addiction. Some of them are religious. Many of them own high-powered guns. They are no different than the people I grew up around, my neighbors back in the Midwest. As someone who was bullied and ridiculed by many of those people, it’s hard not to pre-emptively judge rural people, to not assume they are bigots who hate me merely because I’m gay.
This is where I find myself: alive with the memories of growing up in a rural place, both good and bad. I have lost many friendships over the last few years with my more educated, urban friends because I do not tolerate the bigotry and condescension of rural people, even though I understand it. At times, I too am filled with that condescension.
And at times I am filled with doubt. Will I ever feel truly at home in a rural place, where I’m often the only gay person around? Will I ever feel at home around my neighbors, some of whom are addicts? Will I ever be able to be free of the judgment I feel for those religious neighbors that attend a church I know preaches against the sins of homosexuality?
I don’t have any answers. But this is where I am: trying to find a place in America where I do feel at home.