Celebrating LGBTQ Resiliency in Appalachia
Turning queer, being queer, and staying queer in West Virginia
I’ve heard tell about highly introverted actors who get out on the stage sweating and full of misgivings, inclined to see nothing but doom in a performance they know will be inadequate. They will suffer needlessly beforehand, but at the end the audience judges it to have been commanding, even outstanding. The fear goes away as some point, but it pumps the adrenal to a positive outcome. The poor actor, though, will be convinced they’ll never be able to do it again. That’s me.
Being the introvert that I am, I’ve been convinced that getting on stage at all would be a monumental mistake and, so, have successfully avoided doing so my whole life. Then at the age of 76 a highly extroverted friend, who knows I can emote with the best of them when we’re one on one, needed a favor. She had need of two more bodies to fill roles in an ensemble piece being produced for a single performance at our local university.
Carrie Nobel Kline, a professional storyteller, had over a span of years collected a series of interviews with LGBTQ people in West Virginia. She was searching for possible material for one of the performances she and her husband put on, but it led to her putting together a play script.
Her interviewees, for the most part, were people who by birth or choice lived as openly queer people in many of the out of the way places we have in our state. Kline was interested in the why’s and how’s of their lives. Weren’t there certainly places — better, easier places — to be queer without squirreling yourself away in some dark hollow?
An aside here. West Virginia is called the Mountain State, but more realistically it is the ridged state. The Appalachian mountains, among the oldest on earth, are naturally inclined to run as paralleling ridges, mainly on a north-south axis. People live in the river valleys between the ridges and consequently will see the rising sun later than those in the flatlands and, they’ll see the sun set earlier. That’s where the dark hollows (hollers if you’re from West Virginia) come from. But they’re beautiful with the sun sparkling on the rivers running through them when the sun is overhead.
The ridges are also mostly unbending and unbroken, making it hard to travel from one valley into another. You have to ascend and then descend those ridges on poor excuses for roads, with more hairpins than you’d find on a Texas beauty queen prepping for the pageant. It’s a lot easier where I live in the Shenandoah and Potomac river valley west of the Blue Ridge Mountains, the easternmost of all those parallel ridges. The rivers here are strong enough to have carved out a broad valley so you get the full daily quotient of sun.
So back to the LGBTQ people in those dark valleys in West Virginia’s interior. What are they doing there? Is is just the rough roads that keep them there? Or are they willingly there? This is collectively what the interviews Kline recorded aimed at throwing some light on.
Anyway, returning to the scheduled performance and its lack of two minor actors. My friend, like so many extroverts, being somewhat pushy, convinced me that anybody would jump at the chance to put themselves out in front of an audience. Who wouldn’t want that fleeting fame and faint applause. It’ll be fun!
I gave in, but I still had to try out for one of the two open roles. One of them was to portray an 18-year-old gay male, the other a 72-year-old gay male. Kline’s interesting take on casting depended only on how your voice could command the role. It didn’t matter that you didn’t look anything like the original interviewee. In the final line up, we had men portraying women, a woman playing a man, straights playing gays, a cis man playing a trans woman, a cis woman playing a lesbian. And the age discrepancies were sometimes jarringly extreme when we later introduced ourselves to the audience.
So, having this unusual casting plan explained to me, I did my best to pretend I was an 18-year-old kid. I thought I did OK, but typecasting won out and I, the oldest cast member, ended up playing the oldest character. I became Howard, a 72-year-old psychotherapist living in the far western part of the state.
The performance was bare staged. No costuming, no set design. The only props were 12 chairs for the 12 cast members. As lines were delivered, the actor delivering would stand, give their lines, then resume sitting, making way for the next character. Because none of us, with one exception, were experienced actors, we had printed copies of the script to rely on if needed. The play was staged as kind of a dialog between the various characters, but the words were the interviewees’ own.
It all went off great. The whole ensemble got more than the faint applause I had expected. It was enthusiastic, as I remember it or have manufactured it in this retelling. And it was fun as my friend had said it would be.
What that applause represented for the folks in the audience, it’s hard to say. Each of stories that the characters delivered were particular in its details. Some older characters had a full lifetime to wrap themselves in, while the younger ones were still in their discovery phases. The audience itself was a mix of people, some students from the university, others established members of the local community, and some the partners and friends of the actors. You couldn’t know who was reacting to what.
Emotionally, I got my own best feelings for the character of Sandy, a grandmother who grew up as a tomboy, married, had a child, divorced, ran her own business, explored women sexually, finally identified as a lesbian, found a partner to love and be loved by, and at last we heard was experimenting with her fem side.
Sandy’s story was focused on her role in her community, the small town she was born and raised in. She emphasized her sense of integrity being the means by which her shifting identity never got in the way of her community accepting her. That community, as is much of West Virginia, is conservative, but resilient and ultimately non combative. If you’re here and you’re a proud product of the place that created and shaped you, then we your community belong to you as much as you belong to us. It’s the bullies that are out of place.
Note that this doesn’t mean that the locals will fully understand what makes you tick. Often those of Sandy’s generation will be too polite or too God fearing to delve into the particulars of who you are and why. It’s nobody’s business, including mine. They’ll say, she’s just a good person, is all.
All that’s fine and safe enough to keep you in your own skin, but it’s not necessarily affirming. It can leave you with a life, but not one which a lot of others will share with you. It’s still small town, after all, and everyone is playing their own role.
Yet Sandy in part of her tale, mentioned that her grandson in Kindergarten had a liking for dolls for which he was heckled by his five year old classmates as being “gay.” His response: “No, I’m not. My grandmother is, but I’m not.” It easier, she says, for the younger ones.
My character Howard is a thinker who because of his training as a psychotherapist has to intercept the arrows directed at him and try to understand the forces behind them. He tries to explain that being different isn’t typically the issue, but that acting different is the usual trigger for the haters.
He sees sexuality as not inherently objectionable to those who dislike or fear gay people. It’s the threats that queer people make to the stereotypical male and female behaviors that rankle the troublemakers. Not fitting into a traditional mold is thumbing your nose at the power dynamics that have “made America great” and that’s the real source of animosity.
Kline interviewed the real Howard in about 2010 and we’ve seen since then a period where LGBTQ people have acquired rights and respect on one level, but in doing so have bumped up against some vaguely defined border beyond which a segment of the population doesn’t want us to trespass. So maybe Howard was right, people can be comfortable with your sexuality, but not with how you display it. Or, rather, at how enthusiastically you display it.
In the end, Howard says that LGBTQ people do behave differently from the norms because, well, because they just do. And they bust those norms in spite of the blowback they get, and they wouldn’t choose to act any differently from the way they do. “Being gay is perfectly lovely,” he said.
That was Howard’s sum up and the line of his that me, introverted notwithstanding, was most proud to say out loud — for the both of us.
Kline titled her “staged reading” A Celebration of Appalachian Resiliency in Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender People. I’ve adapted that title for this article. Her work is unpublished.
