Wildcrafting Our Queerness: LGBTQ+ Art, Archiving, and Activism in Contemporary Appalachia A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree of Bachelor of Arts in American Studies from The College of William and Mary by Maxwell Cloe Accepted for ___________________________________ (Honors, High Honors, Highest Honors) ________________________________________ Leisa Meyer, Director ________________________________________ Jay Watkins III ________________________________________ Charles McGovern Williamsburg, VA May 8, 2020 Table of Contents INTRODUCTION: Queerness and the Mythical Appalachia 1 CHAPTER 1: Art 17 CHAPTER 2: Archiving 49 CHAPTER 3: Activism 88 CONCLUSION: Networks and the Ethics of Oral History 118 APPENDIX: Art and Images Referenced 123 BIBLIOGRAPHY 138 Cloe 1 INTRODUCTION: Queerness and the Mythical Appalachia Appalachia is a region of myths. For decades, Appalachia has existed in the national imagination as an alien wasteland. The mere mention of the mountains, which stretch over 2,000 miles from New York to Alabama, conjures images of toothless hillbillies and dusty coal miners tragically fighting for survival in a landscape that is wildly uninhabitable for anyone daring to enter. Appalachia is, for many, out of place and out of time—an empty spot on the map of the United States where everyone lives without electricity, running water, or the modern liberal politics of the metropoles down below. These dominant narratives regarding Appalachia have mobilized even more aggressively over the course of the past few years. During the months leading up to and following Trump’s election, major news outlets scrambled to explain why such an outwardly hateful and unrespectable person routinely usurped the other, respectably liberal candidates. Appalachian historian Elizabeth Catte characterizes this genre of journalistic writing as “the ‘Trump Country’ piece”1 and argues that the conclusion drawn by the genre points to Appalachia as the source and explanation for these political woes. HuffPost ran a profile on McDowell County, West Virginia, in which they scapegoat the Appalachian county as the cause of Trump’s victory. The article’s title, “This County Gives A Glimpse At The America That Voted Trump Into Office,” constructs the region as a distinct “America,” an othered country separate from the presumably liberal areas outside of the mountains. The article itself describes the county as a “stronghold for Trump”2 and uses a series of staged black and white images to suggest that the town is close to death, if 1 Catte, Elizabeth. What You Are Getting Wrong about Appalachia. Cleveland, OH: Belt Publishing, 2018. 22 2 Levine, Sam. “This County Gives A Glimpse At The America That Voted Trump Into Office.” HuffPost. HuffPost, November 18, 2016. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/mcdowell-county- trump_n_582f18dde4b030997bbefa0d. Cloe 2 not dead already. Vanity Fair’s “Welcome to Trump Country, U.S.A.” explicitly states that it is searching for “What one West Virginia county explains about the G.O.P. front-runner—and America,”3 similarly constructing Appalachia as a microcosm for the entirety of conservative America. The article relays multiple anecdotes about an almost caricatured Appalachia, such as the opening paragraph which takes place “in a strip club in Morgantown, West Virginia, drinking shit American beer that tastes like ice and newspaper. A man is passing me a semi-automatic handgun and telling me to pull the trigger.”4 Countless other major news sources, including The New Yorker,5 PBS,6and The Guardian,7 published similar articles in the months surrounding the 2016 election, in which they depicted Appalachia as a wholly backwards region whose votes for Trump exemplify their disconnect from modern liberal politics. Catte argues that these caricatures of Appalachia “cast Appalachians as a mournful and dysfunctional ‘other’ who represent the darkest failures of the American Dream while seeking to prescribe how we—the presumed audience of indifferent elites—should feel about their collective fate.”8 This is by design. By casting the poor and the rural as the root of the country’s malaise, powerful media outlets distract from the much more probable explanation that the desire for profit drives wealthy corporations (including many of these media outlets) and politicians to work towards the interests of the wealthy and not the working class. Instead of analyzing the ways in which liberal political structures have alienated and failed to address the concerns of 3 Saward, John. “Welcome to Trump County, U.S.A.” Vanity Fair. Vanity Fair, February 24, 2016. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/02/donald-trump-supporters-west-virginia. 4 Ibid. 5 MacFarquhar, Larissa. “In the Heart of Trump Country.” The New Yorker. The New Yorker, October 10, 2016. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/10/in-the-heart-of-trump-country. 6 Lerer, Lisa. “Once a Clinton Stronghold, Appalachia Now Trump Country.” PBS. Public Broadcasting Service, May 3, 2016. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/once-a-clinton-stronghold-appalachia-now-trump-country. 7 Sambamurthy, Adithya, Paul Lewis, and Tom Silverstone. “Why the Poorest County in West Virginia Has Faith in Trump – Video.” The Guardian. Guardian News and Media, October 13, 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/us- news/video/2016/oct/12/west-virginia-donald-trump-supporters-mcdowell-county-poverty-video. 8 What You are Getting Wrong About Appalachia. 23 Cloe 3 Appalachian people, media institutions instead blame Appalachian people themselves for either voting Republican or not voting at all. Not voting at all is an especially common outcome— Catte notes that McDowell County, West Virginia, the focus of many “Trump Country” pieces, had a voter turnout of 36.24%.9 This is not to say, of course, that Appalachia is a left-wing paradise without the slightest presence of racism, homophobia, or misogyny, but rather that the region is not uniquely bigoted, nor does it exist as a monolithic culture. These media outlets, and the well-meaning liberals who read them, are able to absolve the blame that wealthy corporations and politicians elicit and pass that blame onto Appalachia, allowing themselves to feel good and remain complacent without addressing any of the deeper problems of capitalist exploitation (and related problems like racism, sexism, and homophobia) that better explain the current state of American politics. This framing also obscures serious problems facing the region, such as the mounting opioid crisis and the proliferation of harmful mountaintop removal mining practices, and distracts from the multitude of progressive organizations working to ameliorate those problems. By blaming Appalachia for the nation’s problems and overlooking actual instances of struggle and action in the region, media institutions erase any semblance of a “real” Appalachia, reducing the mountains so that they exist everywhere and nowhere at the same time This conglomeration of blame, myth, fear, and self-righteousness that surrounds the popular discourse on Appalachia applies doubly for the queer people living in the region. The dominant cultural examples of queerness in the mountains are, for many, John Boorman’s 1972 film, Deliverance, and Ang Lee’s 2005 film, Brokeback Mountain. In Deliverance, Appalachian queerness appears solely as the rapist who attacks Bobby Trippe, an Atlanta businessman. 9 Catte, Elizabeth. “The Votes Are in – an Update to ‘Appalachia as Trump Country.’” elizabeth catte. WordPress, November 23, 2016. https://elizabethcatte.com/2016/11/23/the-votes-are-in/. Cloe 4 Simply referred to as “Mountain Man” by the closing credits, the rapist embodies the classic Appalachian stereotype of a toothless, inbred hillbilly, who appears even more sinister and backwards through his violent act of same-sex rape. In this case, the combination of queerness and Appalachian rurality takes the form of an animalistic, anti-social monster. In Brokeback Mountain, two rural men (Jack and Ennis) engage in a gay relationship behind the backs of their wives and mountain community. Although, unlike Deliverance, Brokeback Mountain depicts rural gay men sympathetically, its vision of queer rurality is perhaps just as dire. Jack and Ennis’ relationship, like many fictional queer relationships (and unlike many actual queer relationships), ends after years of emotional turmoil and fear of homophobic violence when a group of men murder Jack in an apparent hate crime. As historian Colin Johnson explains, the film is not entirely sad because of unrequited love or violence, but because it “deals with the theme of unrequited love between two men […] in rural Wyoming.”10 Both films suggest that the only outcome for queer people in the mountains is isolation and brutality—whether at the hands of the queer person themselves or the bigoted society which surrounds them. The takeaway is clear: LGBTQ+ life and rural life do not mix, and everyone would be better off if queer people stayed away from the hills. In his book, In a Queer Time and Place, cultural theorist Jack Halberstam uses the term “metronormativity”11 to describe this culturally dominant understanding that the queer and the rural are incompatible. Metronormative narratives treat rural regions as a spatial closet out of which LGBTQ+ people must emerge by moving to the city and realizing “the full expression of the sexual self.”12 If queer people exist in a rural area, they are either in hiding, “out” but only 10 Johnson, Colin R. Just queer folks: