Reconnecting With My Queer Cousin and My Appalachian Roots
The power of finding family again
It’s common knowledge by now that queer people often have the need of finding and forging their own families. It’s an unfortunate truth that, even in the year 2024, far too many queer folks find themselves cast out from their families, cut off from a vital source of belonging and love and solidarity and forced to find new ways of being in the world.
However, if there’s one thing you should know about queer people, it’s that they’re resilient, and they’ve proven remarkably adept over the decades at forging new families, ones that are chosen rather than born.
Though this obviously affects everyone regardless of where they come from, I can’t help but feel that it has a particular bite for those who, like me, hail from Appalachia. We put down deep roots and, like many other marginalized groups, we tend to cling to our families with a peculiar tenacity.
There are a number of reasons why this is the case, of course. To begin with, there’s the fact that the region, including my home state of West Virginia, lags behind the rest of the nation when it comes to the acceptance of queer folks.
Part of this is undoubtedly religious — there’s a strong strain of evangelical Christianity running through…
