I needed to learn how others were making it work. I needed proof that violence and harassment are not the only experiences of rural gay people. I needed to affirm for myself and for other rural queers that we do exist in places like my home, that we always have. So I set out with no money, no experience, no clear plan, and an overly ambitious goal of documenting our stories. And I grew frustrated that we’d been so thoroughly eradicated from local and national histories that the only easily accessible stories of rural queerness centered around violence and death-like the murders of Matthew Shepard in Laramie, Wyoming, and Brandon Teena in Falls City, Nebraska. I started to see queer people around town, started to hear stories about unrelated women and men who had lived and farmed together in the county where I was raised. Not if we want to survive.Īfter a decade away-first at college, then dancing in gay country bars in Austin, Texas, trying to piece these seemingly opposing parts of my life together while always aching with homesickness-I finally moved back to West Virginia. I grew up on a sheep farm in southern West Virginia in the 1990s, and I’d never met an out queer person before I left for college in Massachusetts in the early 2000s, where I quickly discovered my own queerness and bought into the long-standing narrative that queer people don’t-maybe even can’t-live in places like where I had come from. Since 2013 I’ve been gathering oral-history interviews with rural and small town LGBTQ+ folks across the continental United States for a project called Country Queers. In 2011, while home visiting their parents, Mike and his sister went to a drag show at Cumberland’s Embassy Theatre and were blown away by the thriving drag community in town-the energy and charisma of the queens, the robust and adoring audience, none of which he’d imagined were possible in the conservative and largely rural county where he was raised. I’ve been invited to town by Mike Snyder, a photographer raised just up the road in Frostburg, Maryland, who’s been working to document Cumberland’s drag queens for nearly a decade. I easily develop a crush on Cumberland’s contradictions. This kind of quirkiness also feels familiar, where “museums’’ are often an eccentric collection of marbles or old canning jars. Multicolored party lights spin dizzily above the collection. A few doors down, another storefront displays a postwar TV and radio, along with fake houseplants, with a sign on the TV that reads: mullaney farm family museum. In one, a taxidermized rendition of a cobra fighting a mongoose-apparently, in this case, played by a weasel. More than a few storefronts hold bizarre combinations of things. The remnants of a more prosperous past linger in Cumberland’s downtown architecture, full of regal brick buildings-undulated stained-glass windows in some, ornamental carvings on others. I feel most at home in towns that have seen better days, and there may be no more universal Appalachian truth than nostalgia for the bygone booms of our now-struggling communities. I was raised in southern West Virginia and lived for several years in the coalfields of eastern Kentucky. When Baltimore was the king city, Cumberland was her queen. It’s on its Wikipedia page and is mentioned by nearly everyone I meet here. This story was produced in partnership with the Pulitzer Center.Ĭumberland lists “once the second largest city in Maryland” in its highlight reel.
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