In 2018, I authored a piece on my queer redneck roots—a powerful reckoning with my past. For the first time on paper, I told the world about my seemingly dichotomous identities as both an Appalachian and a queer person. I spoke openly and honestly in ways I haven’t before, at least not on such a large platform. I paid the price, too. Family members whom I mentioned in that piece severed ties. It hurt, but it was also a long…
While much of Kentucky tourism centers around the annual Kentucky Derby in Louisville and the popular bourbon distilleries that speckle the state, there are booming smaller towns right off Interstate 75 that are revitalizing their downtowns and embracing the farm-to-table movement. Driving northbound on I-75, travelers might easily miss Corbin, London, Berea, Richmond, and even Lexington.…
In his newest novel, Southernmost, Silas House confronts a changing Appalachia where even Asher Sharp—a fundamentalist preacher in Tennessee—questions his rigid moral beliefs, years after his brother comes out as gay and flees to Key West. And while House has a canon of work that candidly depicts Appalachian people (including the New York Times’ best-selling Clay’s Quilt), this is his first novel to tackle openly gay characters.…
I was born in Tennessee on a bright Thanksgiving morning, surrounded by the same Appalachian Mountains my family had called home since the 1790s. My mother is Mediterranean and Hispanic and hails from the Northeast, but my father’s family has thrived for nine generations in the deepest part of the South. As a little girl, I played on my great-papaw’s 87-acre farm, fishing, shooting, and eating grapes off the vine. Life’s pace is different here. I was gifted my first gun…
My connection to my “half” southern heritage has always felt tentative. Growing up, my identity was deeply rooted in my Pacific Northwest upbringing. Despite moving back and forth between Washington state and the D.C. area, my middle school and high school years in Bellingham, WA shaped my sense of place and belonging. During these years, it was easy to romanticize my southern heritage, to see the South as a distant and foreign place, and to laugh and gently tease my…
I am a non-binary transfemme panromantic demisexual Appalachian! At least that’s the basic bio version of my identity. I’ve also spent most of my life living in the rural South, so that’s important to me, too, but it doesn’t come before my Appalachianness. My skin’s white, but I definitely don’t identify with mainstream imperialist white supremacist capitalist heteropatriarchy, so my lefty politics are also a central part of my identity (but shhhh, don’t tell anyone! They might think differently of…
My childhood was texturized by horror films, particularly adaptations of King’s work. People still gasp when they hear I watched the original Carrie and It before age 10, The Shining by age 12, along with a host of other classics in between. In Kentucky, I would always spend a night at my Aunt Judy’s and we’d huddle under blankets while watching a horror movie on her wood-paneled TV. I say they left traces; my friend says, “more like craters in your…
Arguably the most prolific gay novelist in Appalachia, Silas House was born and raised in nearby Laurel County. Educated at Eastern Kentucky University and then Spalding University for a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing, he now teaches at Berea College, the first desegregated and coeducational college in the South.…
A huge part of me grew up closeted in Kentucky, and I know that—in a state of roughly four million folks—lots of other boys did, too. And while the cities of Louisville and Lexington brim with gay bars and rainbow crosswalks, there are plenty of guys living out and proud in smaller towns, too. I wanted to meet and connect with fellow gay men across Kentucky, so I rebooted Tinder and Grindr.…
