Happy Pride Month, Appalachian Kentucky!
A hand-picked selection of our favorite LGBTQ+ stories from The Goldenrod's first year, plus a round-up of small town Pride events.
Happy Pride Month, rural Kentuckians!
We’ve hand-picked a few of our favorite stories from The Goldenrod’s first year spotlighting LGBTQ+ communities across Appalachian Kentucky past and present: from the queer literary icons who have helped shape our hills and hollers, to pioneering LBGTQ+ mental health resources filling a critical need, to the struggles that continue (fighting against anti-trans legislation) and successes to cheer on (building a new LGBTQ+ event space).
We’ve also rounded up a list of all the small town Pride events happening across the region, from picnics and parades to screenings of The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. (If I missed one, drop it in the comments!)
Get out there and celebrate this month, because—say it with me—y’all means all.
(The latest t-shirt designs from Pikeville Pride—like the one above—are must-haves, obviously. Snag yours here.)
“I wanted to become a therapist because when I was growing up, I identified as gay but didn't really have anyone to talk to. My family wasn't supportive. They're very religious, so I knew I couldn't talk to them. And they also didn't really believe in mental healthcare, so they never sought out any type of therapy for us. But when I was figuring out what I wanted to do with my career, I decided I wanted to be a therapist so I could be that person for other people. I wanted to provide a voice in our community to help advocate for others who still haven't found their own voice.”
“It feels like we've swung in the opposite direction pretty fast, pretty hard. But I’ve long said that most of these people, most of your rural voters, really don't care. This is not an issue that's near and dear to them. It's been made to appear that it’s near and dear to them because they're having their fear stoked, but most of these people have a misconception of what trans and gender nonconforming people really are without having any real-life experience. They’ve never met a trans person, so to speak, or if they have, they don’t even know that they did.”
“I just recognize that, without diversity, you cannot have innovation. And when you limit who can participate, you limit which problems can be solved. It became obvious to me that there's not only a need for an influx of diversity and an influx of people with different ideas and backgrounds and experiences, but even more disheartening is that those people already existed here. And the forceful removal of them, whether it's passive aggressive or aggressive, is essentially linked to that economic disparity that we see.”
“The Quare Women seemed to recast the entire mass of characters as potentially queer if you look at it a certain way—all the unresolved gender trouble suggesting a void where established norms and identities used to be.”
“When I think about queer rurality or rural lives of queers, those distinctions quickly break down, right? They're as socially constructed as gender and all of that. As someone who does queer history from Kentucky, there is an assumed metro-normative narrative to the gay liberation movement or whatever you want to call it. But those things don't really work out. And that's also true when you shorten the scale, right? You can't talk about queer history and Lexington or Louisville without moving outside of it and vice versa.”
“New York Public Library had a huge 50th anniversary of Stonewall exhibit, and right in the middle of it is Lige Clarke. It's like, ‘Oh wow, look at what the gays in New York are doing!’ But it’s also like, yeah, he is a gay in New York, but he’s actually a Kentuckian. Here’s someone from Hindman right at the center of it. So that urban-versus-rural narrative quickly falls apart.”
Rural Kentucky Pride Month Events
Richmond Pride Festival
June 18th from 12 p.m. - 10 p.m.
Dreaming Creek Brewery, 109 E. Irvine Street
Grayson Pride in the Arts
June 24 from 6 p.m. - 9 p.m.
Grayson Gallery & Art Center, 301 E. 3rd Street, Grayson
