One of the first collections of scholarship at the intersection of LGBTQ studies and Appalachian studies, Storytelling in Queer Appalachia, edited by Hillery Glasby, Sherrie Gradin, and Rachael Ryerson, amplifies voices from the region’s valleys, hollers, mountains and campuses. It blends personal stories with scholarly and creative examinations of living and […]
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When civil rights attorney-turned-filmmaker Jon Matthews agreed to start a film festival with his friend Tim Ward, Matthews said the title alone was the selling point. “He’s like, ‘It’s Appalachian Queer Film Festival,’” Matthews said. “I’m, like, ‘Done. You’ve got me. Sold.’ … I never heard anything like those two […]
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As a home-schooled child raised in Philadelphia, Mississippi, Mackenzie Gray didn’t have access to information about transgender people. The 39-year-old woman, now living in Birmingham, Alabama, thought she was just a gay man drawn to activities people typically labeled as feminine. But after meeting other trans women at drag performances […]
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Growing up in southern West Virginia in the ‘60s and ‘70s, Jeff Mann first came to terms with his sexual identity in the pages of Patricia Nell Warren’s “The Front Runner.” His favorite teacher, who confided to him that she was a lesbian, lent him the love story about a […]
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Sundays were for sermons. The question wasn’t whether or not you went, but rather which church you attended on those mornings. Even those who called themselves atheists usually sat quietly in a pew, even if just to pick apart the words spoken in the pulpit. Small town West Virginia, in […]
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Do people who identify as LGBTQ struggle for acceptance in Appalachia? Ideas about gender are changing across the country and in places like West Virginia. Still, some people, like 20-year-old Kyra Soleil-Dawe, who lives in Shepherdstown, West Virginia and identifies as gender-queer, have found that coming out to their family […]
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