Finding My Home in Queer America
The big, the small, I tried them all: I eventually found my Pride home somewhere in the middle.
Illustrations by Monica Garwood
“I would never want to be queer outside of New York,” a queer femme friend told me at a midtown Manhattan diner. She was book-mad, like me, with the same love for bold color and even bolder women, but unlike me, she lived in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn. I was a Kentucky-raised queer, only in New York for a summer internship at a halfway house for formerly incarcerated women and their children. During those months, I got to taste what made the city so tantalizing to queers — I spent hours wandering through Greenwich Village, shyly buying lesbian magazines at the Oscar Wilde Bookshop, the country’s first bookstore dedicated to gay and lesbian literature, and plotted a trip to a nearby nude beach. I even found a girlfriend without trying. The parades, the pageantry, the endlessly juicy Big Apple.
After returning to Berea, Kentucky, to finish my college degree, I contemplated my next steps. Although I had enjoyed my time in New York, I couldn’t see myself settling there. The city that never sleeps was too much for someone who required a more languid pace. So after graduation, I left for Washington, DC because I assumed it was “New York-lite.” New York, with training wheels. (Washingtonians, please forgive my reductive notions of yore.) Not only that, DC had more than one Pride celebration! I went to Capital Pride and then, exclusively, Black Pride. I was delirious with the delights of locally produced Black queer magazines, tea dances, nightclubs, and community.
I ended up spending about nine years in the nation’s capital. Eventually it was time for me to heed the call of my internal nature girl, and head away from the cacophony of the coast. I found a casita in rural northern New Mexico at the edge of a national forest, mountains filling the view from my windows. As a neighbor told me, “There are more animals here than people.” No exaggeration in a town with 100 humans, and countless black bears, wild turkeys, coyotes, and elk on the roam.
The coast-to-casita shift seemed like a head-scratcher to others, but to me, it made some kind of sense. Yes, I reveled in the options of the urban — the restaurants, the events, the new connections that always seemed to beckon around the next corner. And, of course, the relative queer harbor of it all. But I was no less Black and queer when alone at the forest’s edge — when setting up feeders for my faithful horde of hummingbirds, grabbing a wild strawberry from the bush growing just outside the door, or deep-inhaling the sap of the ponderosa pines on sunny days. That is not to say loneliness didn’t find me; when it did I would drive south, to bigger towns in the state, in search of queer community. Española, Santa Fe, Albuquerque: Pride in those places looked like intergenerational summer cookouts for queer women of color. Brown and Black grandmothers and toddlers milling about. Romances heating up alongside the grill.
In late 2013, I found myself living alone in another small town, this time in southwestern Pennsylvania, just a few miles from the West Virginia border. Uniontown was primarily white and resolutely red: more Trump signs than rainbow flags. Still, my apartment was perfect, and I told myself that, just like that remote casita, it would be great for focusing on my writing. I followed Pride on my Facebook feed, though hitting a cascade of “likes” wasn’t the same as being doused in glitter on the parade route. In my lowest, loneliest moments I called queer friends of mine who didn’t live in “flyover country” — friends in Vancouver, Seattle, San Francisco. One kind friend in Oakland invited to move in with her and her wife. Even with those housemates, my share of the rent would exceed what I was paying for my roomy one-bedroom in the Laurel Highlands. But it was tempting nonetheless. All of the Bay Area opportunities for queer meet-cutes, in my mind, could make daily life into one big Pride parade without end. I wrestled and I wondered.
In the end, illness made the decision for me. I made an emergency move to the closest sizable city — Pittsburgh — to access the health care I needed. There, I got better. I met my partner, introduced to me by a local Black queer minister, no less. Together we went to Pittsburgh’s People’s Pride, a grassroots antidote to the more corporate celebrations. Founded by local Black trans woman activist Ciora Thomas, it’s a reminder that trans women of color were the firestarters of the Stonewall Uprising and the resulting Pride movement. I hadn’t been to a Pride fête in years, but there I was, amid the Mardi Gras beads, feathers, and twerking. It wasn’t New York or San Francisco, but I missed nothing.
And that’s just the thing. Living outside of a supposed “queer center of gravity,” as Samantha Allen referred to urban meccas in The New York Times, can foster a chronic case of FOMO. Did I miss out on too much, living in those small towns in New Mexico, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, and Florida? There were times that the queer event calendar on Facebook was too much to bear — I mean, what I was doing out in the middle of nowhere? Although I traveled often, it seemed like the pulse of the world was always fluttering elsewhere. Then again, there were times when I looked upon the ice-capped mountain range from my house in New Mexico, and I marveled at my luck. When the weather warmed, there were times I would open the window to hear nothing but wind and birdsong, feeling complete and at the center of the only world that mattered.
Now I live a few minutes’ drive from downtown Pittsburgh, but as I write this, I can gaze upon a lush wall of green thanks to the park across the street. I have heard the last-night songs of foxes and coyotes coming from the trees. I have seen wild turkeys. The groundhogs are a constant presence. Hummingbirds still visit every day. I could bear to live in a more remote place, but that nature girl in me is getting fed right here. And so is the Black queer who also needs the nutrients of the city. I’ve talked to enough friends living in those queer coastal or big city meccas to know that community can be elusive, anywhere. I’ve lived in enough places to know that there is not one place big enough to hold all of my queer Black multitude. And maybe those complexities can finally be a source of pride.
About the author: Almah LaVon Rice is a writer based in Pittsburgh. She’s at work on a mixed-media memoir.
