Browsing Tag

Tennessee

Changing Pronouns: An Interview with Publicly Private’s Kollyn Conrad

Posted on September 12, 2022

A photo of Kollyn Conrad of Publicly Private

As a non-binary southerner, I’m all too familiar with society’s pushback to gender and sexuality exploration. Like so many other queer and trans folks, my process of finding the identity that feels best to me is one that is ever-evolving. Yet, from broader society—and often, from within the LGBTQ community—we’re not given the grace to navigate identity at our own speed, to be brave enough to come out over and over again as that identity evolves, and to stand in…

Traveling While Queer: Chattanooga, Tennessee

Posted on July 12, 2019

Welcome back to Traveling While Queer, your guide to the country’s most fabulous cities—the scoop on what to do, where to go, and what to see—all from an LGBTQ perspective. In this installment, we journey to my hometown—Chattanooga!…

The Southern Roots of LGBTQ Religious Activism: The Curious Story of George Hyde’s Gay Ministry in 1940s Georgia

Posted on December 7, 2018

Over the past 50 years, as conflicts over homosexuality have wracked religious denominations across the United States, LGBTQ people have both fought for affirming inclusion within their faith communities and formed distinct groups of their own. When most folks today think about early LGBTQ religious activism, Reverend Troy Perry and the Metropolitan Community Church (MCC) spring easily to mind. Perry, a southerner by birth who grew up in northern Florida and was first licensed as a Baptist preacher there at…

Bonnaroo: A Queer Experience

Posted on June 19, 2018

I was working a corporate chair massage gig at a random high-rise in Austin, Texas when my colleague started boasting about her upcoming massage stint at Bonnaroo, the four-day-long music festival in rural Tennessee. Colloquially called “The Farm” by festival-goers (aka Bonaroovians), Bonnaroo celebrated its 17th birthday this year, making it one of the longer-standing music festivals in the South.…

‘Southernmost’ Review: Times Are a-Changin’ in ol’ Appalachia

Posted on May 24, 2018

A photo of Southernmost author Silas House.

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.…

Southern Rebel: Embracing My Queer Redneck Roots

Posted on April 13, 2018

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…

A Tennessee Trans Icon Comes Home: Remembering Aleshia Brevard

Posted on November 20, 2017

In her classic interdisciplinary manifesto Borderlands/La Frontera, Chicana lesbian writer Gloria Anzaldúa explores homophobia as "fear of going home." Especially for LGBTQ folks of color and those straddling different cultural worlds, she writes, "We're afraid of being abandoned by the mother, the culture, la Raza, for being unacceptable, faulty, damaged." For many trans folks who leave the South to transition or to find community, this fear of rejection by our communities of origin is all too real. Yet, before drag…

Like a Mimosa Blossom: Making My Peace With the Queer South

Posted on September 13, 2017

An illustration of mimosa blossoms in the queer South.

Well, that’s what I always told myself, at least. When I arrived in North Carolina from the Northeast as an effeminate, bookish eight year old, nothing seemed right. Southern twang and slang mystified me, while I struggled to adjust to new foods, schools, and manners. And the homophobic and gender-oppressive bullying I’d always encountered seemed, if anything, to intensify. I couldn’t wait to grow up and get out.…

At The Forefront: Texas A&M Research Fellow Explores Evolution of Queer Youth Culture

Posted on August 18, 2017

A photo of Nikita Shepard, a research fellow focusing on the history of queer youth at the Don Kelly Research Collection of Gay Literature and Culture at Texas A&M University

Queer scholar Nikita Shepard sits at a long wooden table—the soft overhead lighting shines down as they dive into another issue of ONE magazine, one of the first pro-gay publications in the United States. This library has been Shepard’s home for the past month as they conduct research in one of the country’s premier collections of LGBTQ scholarly literature. But Shepard isn’t studying in the halls of Berkeley or the Ivy Leagues of the Northeast—they’re in College Station, Texas, in…

The Road to Truth: Finding Strength as a Queer Parent

Posted on June 12, 2017

A photo of queer woman Laura McGuire at Axelrad Beer Garden in Houston

I am a queer woman, Dianic witch, feminist, femme, multiracial woman, and southerner. I was born in Tennessee, grew up largely in Florida, and now proudly call Texas home. I am a certified sexuality educator, doula, yoga instructor, and a mom to two amazing kids. Needless to say, I am never bored! But while I can now claim these identities as my own, I spent most of my life trying incredibly hard to be someone else.…

Tennessee

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