From an attempted assassination and an historic withdrawal from the race, the 2024 election has already had more twists and turns than an Aaron Sorkin screenplay. I should be forgiven, then, for how emotionally invested I became in the veepstakes. I did not imagine ever caring this much about running mates – I never have in the past – but as in so many other ways, this election is different.
JD Vance and Tim Walz represent antithetical conceptions of American masculinity. On the one hand, Vance is your stereotypical patriarch with an aversion to “childless cat ladies” and a preoccupation with controlling those around him. His is a masculinity built around domination and authority. He’s Al Bundy with a bit of money.
Walz, on the other hand, represents a masculinity that is protective but nurturing, strong but gentle. He squares traditional values with progressive sensibilities. He’s Ward Cleaver after reading “The Feminine Mystique.”
For me, though, the analysis runs deeper – and much closer to home. As a working-class gay man from the Rust Belt and Appalachia, I feel these two men are archetypes in my own life. JD Vance and I are so similar that I cannot help comparing myself to him. Tim Walz, on the other hand, is the kind of man I wish I had known as a child – the kind of man who might have understood me and protected me from the homophobia I experienced.
Tim Walz is the kind of dad I wish I had. JD Vance is the kind of son I fear my father wishes he had. Together, these two men can tell us a lot about what it means to be gay, to be working class, and to be from the middle of America.
I have often called JD Vance my “evil twin.” Born 18 months earlier and 30 miles away from me in Ohio, his family hails from the same part of Kentucky mine does. Both our mothers are named Beverly. Both of us have mamaws who were sometimes our primary caregivers but always our greatest source of comfort and encouragement. Vance is the first in his family to go to college. So am I.
But JD is straight. I am gay.
Maybe that’s the difference: I’ve always had this sneaking suspicion that had I not been gay, I very well might not have developed empathy for other people and marginalized groups.
Perhaps this is why I can hold space for people like JD, particularly those who didn’t make it out of generational poverty the way he did. I understand that the only difference between me and them is perspective. I come by mine honestly, and they probably do, too. Theirs is skewed by what we unhelpfully term as “privilege” – straightness, whiteness, maleness, and in Appalachia rarely but sometimes wealth – but might more accurately be termed as “blinders.” They can’t see what they can’t see.
JD can see. We know this because he showed compassion and understanding to a trans former friend and his recognition of class which is at the heart of “Hillbilly Elegy.” He sees injustice and chooses to ignore it because it benefits him to do so.
I suspect ignoring injustice benefited my teachers and principals, too. I have written about “the daily crucible of homophobia” I experienced in high school. What continues to trouble me is how no one did anything about it, despite being well aware of just how bad things were. I couldn’t walk down a hallway without being called slurs, and more than once ended up in the principal’s office because someone had threatened me with violence. Nothing was ever done, though.
It wasn’t any better at home.
I wasn’t understood by my family as a child. I don’t think my father knew what to do with a son who wanted to dress up as Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer for Halloween, or who preferred concocting elaborate fantasy stories in his mind to playing football with the other boys. I was physically weak, emotionally sensitive, and mentally in my own world.
When I came out as gay, it’s like my family finally accepted the battle to masculinize me was lost. Before that they were holding their breaths, hoping beyond hope that they could change the trajectory I was on.
When I came out to my dad, he cried. Not because he was upset, he told me at the time, but because he was scared for me. He didn’t know how to help me or keep me safe.
Dad was a man’s man. A former Marine and biker who fancies himself a Hell’s Angel, he and my stepbrother, six weeks younger than me, have the relationship that Dad and I never have. They bonded over football, over skateboarding, over rock music, over women. The day my stepbrother followed in my dad’s footsteps and entered the military was the proudest day of my father’s life.
I look at JD Vance and see the son my father wishes he had. Sometimes, I wish I was that son. Perhaps then I wouldn’t have felt so alienated from my own family. Perhaps I could have gone to Yale had I had something or someone to offer me that structure and a roadmap. Like I said, JD had the military. That was never an option for me; Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell wasn’t repealed until I was 25.
If JD Vance is the son my father wishes he had, Tim Walz is the father I wish I had. Kind, compassionate, goofy, funny, and progressive, the Minnesota governor very famously became the faculty advisor for a gay-straight alliance in 1999, a time when such a high school club was extremely controversial. “It was important to have a person who was so well-liked on campus, a football coach who had served in the military,” Jacob Reitan, the gay student whose coming out prompted the formation of the club, told the New York Times last month.
“A football coach who had served in the military” is about as “all-American man” as you can get. He’s practically the hero of a Toby Keith song.
I had no Tim Walz defending me, though. Shortly after I came out, I moved out of my father’s house and in with his parents. It had nothing to do with me being gay – I’d been asking to live with Mamaw and Papaw for years – but I suspect for my father, my coming out was the thing that finally broke his will. He’d tried everything to mould me into the son he wanted. Realizing it was never going to happen, he let me go.
At my school in Kentucky, no teachers intervened on my behalf. When the principal did get involved, he blamed me for coming out even though I’d only told a few girls I thought were friends, one of whom then told everyone else. I had few teachers willing to step in on my behalf, let alone step up and help form a gay-straight alliance.
Part of what makes Walz such an exciting pick to so many Democrats is that he squares traditional masculine values with modern progressive ideals. He’s a strong man without being a strongman, protective but not patriarchal, a man’s man who is comfortable taking his lead from a woman.
Certainly, Walz reminds me of the kind of straight men I’ve always felt safest around. His goofy dad vibe reminds me of friends who have always made me feel secure, protected, and most importantly accepted in their presence. They’re the kind of men I didn’t have in my life as a child or teenager but who I am forever grateful came into my life as an adult. It’s just a pity they didn’t come into my life sooner.
Skylar Baker-Jordan is 100 Days in Appalachia’s Contributing Editor for Community Engagement. Support his work and our continued coverage of politics in the region by donating here.
