I often wonder where I fit in this world.
These days, it seems both obvious and painfully reductive to start with my list of identities, some of which I have created for myself, others that have been placed upon me — some of which I claim, others that I reject.
I’m a white man in my mid-30s. Millennial. Cis. Educated, with nearly two masters programs under my belt. (One I didn’t finish and another I’m mid-way through…and unsure about.) I was born in a small rural town in a Midwestern red state, and now I live in a small rural town in a Western blue one. I’m gay. I’m an atheist. A Star Wars and Star Trek fan. Raised as an only child, though I have two half-brothers. I’m a landowner, a homeowner, a registered independent (lowercase ‘i’). I’m partnered, though that word makes me uncomfortable, as does commitment. I used be a winter person, and now I’m firmly in the summer camp. I’m a dog person with a soft spot for the older, bigger ones. I prefer the mountains, not the ocean.
If you were to ask all but my closest friends and family, you’d undoubtedly get a salad of those identities. All those things go a long way to defining me, yet none do so accurately or completely. I’m many things to many people, myself included.
Most defining, in my experience, has been my sexual orientation. I grew up in a time and place where being gay was not common or accepted, and as I came into my adolescence, I realized that I was unlike everyone I knew, but I didn’t quite know how. I found myself thinking of other boys in my class in a way no one else seemed to. Most of my male friends talked about girls the way I thought about boys. It wasn’t long into high school that I found myself printing off Backstreet Boys fanfic from the newly-installed internet, reading the pages at night under the blanket. On the walk to the bus the next morning, I would take the pages and burn them in the woods near my house, fearful I’d be discovered.
I didn’t come out until two years into college, at least not to the people that mattered most: my parents. I had been admitted to a top-20 university after having spent high school obsessed with class rank and academic success. A year-and-a-half in, I had what can only be described as an emotional breakdown, and I moved home. I started therapy, and after a month or two and many hours of practicing exactly what I was going to say, I came out to my mom. A month or two later, I came out to my dad. They were unexpectedly kind and loving, though in hindsight it wasn’t unexpected at all. I was afraid to come out to them, but I had been blind to an obvious truth: that my parents are good, kind, loving people, and were never going to be anything but accepting.
But this didn’t make my adolescence any more pleasant. I had been riddled with fear and internalized homophobia for so long that it took many years after I came out to deal with that fear. I moved around a lot. First Nashville, then Chicago, then Missoula, then Portland. I’m indebted to each place for different reasons, but I came of age in Missoula. I turned 21 in Missoula. I had moved there on a whim (a running theme in my life) and fell in love with its remoteness. Being so far from any major city, I felt both independent and secluded, about to create and play with and assert my identities for the first time. Though I lived there for only three years, it feels as though I lived a lot more than that in three year’s time. To this day, my closest adult friends are people from that period in my life.
In Missoula, I was openly gay for the first time, and it was a wild time to be. The late 2000s were a heady time — my own political awareness had started to assert itself. George W. Bush was president, the wars in Iraq & Afghanistan were in full swing, and memories of being gay in the rural Midwest were still fresh. While I was politically active, I was politically aware. I remember the day of Obama’s election, of crying tears of joy at the dive bar, drunk with a hundred other young people, all of us elated at the symbolism of his election. The world felt wide open and new, and above all, safe.
I moved to Portland, Oregon not long after, beckoned by its unspoken and illicit promises of a liberal utopia, of radical acceptance. I moved there the year Portlandia debuted, and I was awash in good vibes, in comfort. I enrolled in graduate school, walking several miles through the city to class each day. I made friends, went out drinking at least three nights a week, and had far too much fun. I was headstrong. I slept around. Sometimes a few men each week. I was open with my sexuality, asking for what I thought I wanted, asking to try new things with new people. I played. I loved every minute of it.
But three years went by, and I became unhappy. I was “living the life,” as they say. I had a little apartment to myself, a cat, some close friends. But underneath it all, I was miserable. How could I have all these things yet somehow be so unhappy?
I’ll save the next part of my life for another time, but thanks to the sudden intervention of a new friend, I moved away from Portland, away from a large-ish American city. I moved to a rural town in the mountains. No more traffic, no more driving an hour to go on a hike. I made new friends, I slept with more men in more adventurous places. I took up mountain biking, kayaking, canoeing. I got a dog, then another, then another. I bought some land and lived out of a tent on that land for a few years. I grew weary of tent living, so I bought a small home in another town, a town 200 miles from the nearest friend. I work from home, so I’m able to live anywhere, and I had long admired this place. Just a few days after moving into my 130-year-old rental, I made an offer on the place. Eight months later, the deal closed, and I was now a homeowner in a very remote town where I knew no one.
I set about getting involved, going to city council meetings and joining the board of a local medical nonprofit. I made friends. Months passed. Small-town politics caught up with me, and I left the board. People I had considered friends — my only friends in town — turned out to be anything but. I was alone.
I kept at it. I shoveled my neighbors’ sidewalks. I mowed their lawns. I introduced myself to people I didn’t know, thrusting out my hand as I made direct eye contact. I changed the way I spoke, however subtly. I was no longer so quick to smile or wave. I spoke quieter, in fewer words, less effusively. I became quieter. I steeled myself to life here, a town with several churches just a few blocks from my house. I took care of my lawn, painted my garage, repaired the fence. Slowly, I became part of the fabric of this town, however reserved I might be.
Now here I am.
Some days, I wonder how this all happened. There’s no reason for me to be here — I can work from anywhere — so why am I here?
Politically, I’m unlike most people in my town. They’re largely conservative, and I’m not. Politically, I’m unlike most people in, say, Portland, too. Much of my unhappiness living in Portland was because everyone thought, broadly, as I did. I was (and remain) liberal, but while there was a modicum of diversity in the city, there wasn’t much diversity of thought. Many of the problems facing Portland today — rampant crime chief among them — were obvious a decade ago.
Fundamentally, people here and people there seem ignorant of human nature. People here are far too angry, too fearful of change. Some of that is justified, but fear and anger won’t stop change from happening, nor will it ingratiate you to others. People there move far too quickly and, in a strange turn of events, have become far too angry. My liberal city friends have no compunctions about putting down rural people, insulting their intelligence and voting record. I used to think that liberal people knew better. Specifically, I thought liberal people used to be more compassionate, more understanding, more forgiving. It was was attracted me to that side of things to begin with. But that no longer holds true.
I no longer feel at home around many of my more liberal friends. The casual nature of their derision, the way they look down at rural or conservative people, it all feels too familiar. It was me, not long ago. I was as shocked as anyone by Trump’s election, sinking into tremendous despair for many years after. But as easy as it would be to blame his election on the ignorance or hatred of some folks, I realized that, like everything in the world, nothing is that simple.
Moving out here, I’ve been moved by the plight of rural poverty and the populism it fuels. Alcoholism, drug addiction, homelessness, food insecurity… Not that these things don’t occur in cities, but the entrenchment of these issues out here is remarkable. Four years of living in this town have shown me that many people are right to be angry, right to feel that they’ve been left behind. Close friends’ remarks about people in towns like mine continue to take me by surprise, continue to remind me that many of my friends are the embodiment of what people here have grown to resent: an educated liberal that long ago left her own small town behind to move to a big city, only looking back with disdain.
My small town had three mills — flour, lumber, paper — at the start of the 1980s. Those industries have long since disappeared, the jobs moved overseas. The remaining business have dried up, no longer able to make a go of it. The pharmacy, the lumber yard, the hotel. They’ve all disappeared. Full of interesting old buildings, main street now sits largely empty.
It’s a strange sight to behold. It’s a stranger thing to come to terms with, to tacitly accept. As I walk to the post office, I pass many empty buildings, most of which are owned by wealthy people in other parts of the country. Their vacancy has become mundane, but to someone only fifty years ago, it would have been unrecognizable.
So many towns in America have been hollowed out. What people love about small towns has threatened to be hollowed out, too. Jobs and a sense of confidence in the future have disappeared, and drugs and alcohol and religion have filled in the vacuum. Shame and regret and anger are palpable — and understandable. I’ve yet to find a secular way to express this sentiment so succinctly, but there but for the grace of god go I.
And here I am.
Living in a small town.
Most days, I have to actively stave off the creeping mistrust I feel for those around me. I am, after all, assuming a lot about them, making judgments. I know that if I were to get to know them, I would find in me the compassion to do everything I could to help alleviate their suffering. But this position takes work and, if I’m honest, a little distance. I do not trust most people here to see me as their equal, and this weighs heavily on my mind.
Yet this is home, by choice.
And each day, I have to choose to be open and kind. And to feel as though I did when I was younger, to feel as though I need to defend, however subtly, my very existence? It’s exhausting.
And now I see some of the same intolerance from my friends, all of whom I know mean well. All of whom I know have goodness in their hearts. All of whom should know better.
I no longer feel at home on the political left. I never felt at home on the political right. I never felt at home in the midwest, and I don’t think I feel at home here.
I don’t know of a place where I do feel at home, and the weight of it sits heavy on my shoulders.
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.