Writing About Lives

Courtney Anderson performs .

A colorful pride festival attendee.

SPENCER, Ind.,- Pride festivals in San Francisco, Chicago and New York City boast hundreds of thousands of spectators every June with their go-go boys, drag queens and dykes on bikes. Courage drew activists together some forty years ago to create something out of nothing in those urban centers. Now they’re pretty much corporate organizations with big budgets.

But here in this town rural Indiana town of 2,500 souls, a band of drag queens performing on the Owen County Courthouse steps in the rain proved to have even more courage. And Courtney Anderson’s cartwheel in high heel boots, was the show stopper. That’s Miss Gay Indiana 2009.

Drawing a strong contingent from nearby Bloomington, a handful of courageous souls braved the weather for this town’s fourth annual pride festival. Last year organizers were proud to claim 250 people – “more than double the prior year’s turn out.” It’ll easily be up to 300 this year.

When the drag performers came out to do their routines, a few law enforcement officers on duty elbowed each other and winked. Yeah, it’s easy to mock drag queens but how much courage does it take to show up in Spencer dressed in full regalia without a gun?

By 3 p.m. the festival organizers were packing up and shutting down. A mob of LGBT folks wearing a rainbow of outfits took over Skid Row Bar & Grill directly across from the court house. When John Mellencamp sang “I’ve seen it all in a small town” in the 1980s, Spencer is the kind of a rural Indiana town he had in mind.

GRADY, Ark. – Whenever the train comes through this town, all the windows, tables and kitchen tops shake as the reverberations are felt by the people living closest to the train track. That’s my family. All of them live within
a few hundred feet of it, some even closer. The noise is so deafening all conversations, television watching and sleeping, are interrupted by the rat-a-tat-tat of the locomotives.

Each time I come down here I walk away with some insight or appreciation for our family’s geographic roots, what it means to be from a town of 500 and more importantly what it means to have escaped. More than anything this last trip I am committed to writing a book proposal that will help me excavate the landscape and rich themes of American religion,
dislocated sexuality, mental illness and addiction so carefully placed in my family.

It never fails that when I leave Grady, when I’ve wave goodbye to my cousins and kiss my grandmother on the cheek, tears always seem to gather in my eyes. Life on the other side of the train track is freedom. This last time my grandmother, Muh Deah, had a more poignant reaction.

“Goodbye Muh Deah,” I yelled as I walked toward the screen door.

“Don’t say goodbye to me,” she snapped back, her body slumped over in a chair facing the TV. She’s unable to hide the pout on her face.

“Alright then, farewell.”

She waved her hand without even looking up from the TV.

I never realized how trapped she must feel when we drive off.