Making and Taking Space for Mountaineer Queers: A Talk Given at the 2006 Associated Writing Programs Conference in Austin, Texas

FEATURED AUTHOR—SPEECH MakingandTakingSpaceforMountaineer Queers:ATalkGivenatthe 2006Associated Writing Programs Conference in Austin, Texas_______________________________ Jeff Mann Today I'd like to discuss the ways I've been trying to make and take space for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) folks in my native Appalachia. Many folks outside the region imagine that it is one of the most backward, conservative, queer-hating parts of the country. There is a good bit of intolerance due to rampant religious fundamentalism, though homophobes are not restrictedto the Highland South, as many of you can attest. Despite the ubiquitous presence of the Religious Right, I've managed, thanks to good timing, good connections, and sheer orneriness, to have some success publishing poetry and prose about gay and lesbian life in the mountains and using my writing to claim space for other "mountaineer queers," as I like to call us. Since we Appalachians are supposed to be compulsive storytellers, I'll tell you a few brief anecdotes, meanwhile trying to resist the native urge to embellish and wax prolix. For twenty years I've been quietly publishing poems with both Appalachian and queer themes in small magazines, so I guess that's why my father didn't bother to ask me for permission when he outed me in the most widely distributed newspaper in West Virginia. My sister called one Sunday morning to ask if I'd seen the most recent issue of The Charleston Gazette. When I answered in the negative, she said, "Uhhhh, you really should pick up a copy." Turns out my father, responding to a local preacher who'd claimed that "gays, lesbians, and pedophiles" were not welcome in the Mountain State, had begun his rebuttal with the sentence, "My son is gay." It was soon thereafter that my partner John began referring to me as O-HOTSO-WV—the Official Homosexual of the State of West Virginia. I've since joked that 1 ought to have a glass-walled room in the West Virginia Cultural Center so that school children on field trips might be marshaled past to observe 24 me while I do stereotypically homosexual things like chatter bitchily and browse through fashion magazines. Those behaviors don't come naturally, but for the sake of educating future generations, I guess 1 could try. Soon thereafter, with a small, at-least-state-wide reputation as the Hillbilly Queer Poet, I was invited to read at a conference held by the Center for the Study ofEthnicity and Gender inAppalachia at Marshall University. One of the directors of that center, Lynda Ann Ewen, I discovered with a little online snooping, was also the editor of an Ohio University Press (OUP) series on ethnicity and gender in Appalachia. Aha, I thought greedily, finally some folks that might be interested in the weird combo of gay and mountain themes that is my specialty. Here was a way to wedge myself into mainstream publishing. It felt like I'd found a secret door into an otherwise impregnable fortress. Up to that point, I'd sent my queer poems to some journals and presses and my hillbilly poems to others, but this OUP series seemed to me to be one of the few places where my peculiar artistic hybrid would fit the mission of the press. So, after months of back and forth, a contract. The book began as poems, then became a mixture of memoir and poetry (mostly because OUP didn't have the sweet little pot of money that poetry contests generate in order to cover the press's ass when the book of poetry doesn't sell, so the editors asked me to supplement the verse with more marketable prose). Here comes the good timing I mentioned earlier. My OUP book Loving Mountains, Loving Men was released about the same time that Brokeback Mountain appeared in theaters. No one could have predicted this convenient convergence. Of course I was riveted by the movie—at last a mainstream film with gay men this country boy could deeply relate to. And I soon realized, thanks to a friend's prodding, that the similarities between the movie—gay men in mountainous Western landscapes—and my book—gay...