I had been wanting to leave New York City for a very, very, very, very long time.
After burning out at work, I went from a person that loved first dates and queer meetups to someone who hid in the corner of parties until I could leave or ditched them all together to be alone in the quiet serenity of my apartment.
Even after taking numerous steps to get a handle on my mental health, I never fully recovered. I felt constantly at odds with my life in New York City and found myself stuck in a strict regime I developed just to keep myself sane. I had stopped enjoying the drinking culture after constant hangovers spent my spiraling on Sundays. I was constantly overwhelmed with the crowds and the lines and the waiting. The daily commute and being packed onto a train was exhausting. When I first moved to the city I didn’t see the need for a car, everything I could ever want was just a two dollar train ride away! But lately I was starting to feel trapped in my own city. I don’t think the pandemic surfaced new feelings, it just exacerbated what was already there.
With all the free quarantine time I was forced to observe in 2020 I rediscovered how truly refreshing a simple walk in nature really was and how important it was to have constant access to it. I hiked 56 times in 2020 but it wasn’t without excessive effort and expense of getting a car and finding parking, leaving at the crack of dawn to walk twenty minutes to my car’s parking spot to then drive an hour to a new trailhead. When real life started to poke it’s head back out this past spring and I started to go back into some resemblance of my old life. I stopped having the time or the energy to hike on the weekends, which felt like the only thing that kept me balanaced.
I knew it was only a matter of time before I left.
I have very seriously considered moves to new cities. I even went as far as to set a timeline for myself a couple of winters ago. But I could just never pull the trigger, there was always something in New York City that I was too afraid to leave behind; my queer community.
I had come out in New York City. I had frequented it’s gay bars. I found it’s queer sports leagues and loved (and sometimes hated) the communities it created. I marched in the Pride parade. I watched a video I filmed go viral at the Pride Parade. I never been concerned about my safety while wearing a rainbow shirt. Anyone who had an issue with who I am was in the wrong place, not me. New York City belonged to the “others”. In my head there was no where else I could find communities like it.
Then again, I was leaving New York because I wanted something different. Of course the communities wouldn’t be the same but that didn’t mean they wouldn’t exist. In some place in my self-absorbed mind I assumed all queer people congregated in the liberal cities and as I started exploring in the very early stages of this trip I am learning that this is FAR from true.
My queerness is a part of who I am. That’s true and that will never change and there’s a safety in finding those people who can just let you be who you are. But I also know there is already so much judgement and divisions within all the varieties of the Ls, Gs, Bs, Ts, Qs, Is and As that it’s really isn’t as perfect of a place as we’ve always made it out to be.
But then why was I so scared to leave it?
In my second month of this trip, I coincidently came across a Real Queer America: LGBT Stories from Red States by Samantha Allen in the very scarce LGBTQ Section of the New York Public Library’s Digital Library. Allen, a transgender reporter, narrates her very own road trip through queer communities in red states. To a New Yorker, her perspective on big liberal cities and their very large queer scenes is a really fascinating, though it can feel rather harsh. What I found the most refreshing was her reflections on her visits to small town gay spaces, how all the variations of LGBTQIA co-mingled and how it felt more like a community because everyone wasn’t segregated to their own bars or groups of friends. They had to get along because all the had was each other. It was a great book to pickup while navigating my biggest fear about this trip; driving through a red state as a queer woman from a liberal city. As I edge closer and closer south I thought I’d feel more nervous but all my queer experiences so far have alleviated my anxiety.
Not every person in a red state is a character from a Deliverance. That’s something this northern needs to get through her head. I currently sit in West Virginia, a state that Trump won handedly over Biden, every single county in the 2020 Electoral map, is various shades of red. Yet I haven’t once felt out-of-place here and I have noticed a surprising number of queer presenting people in my daily life. Whether it’s the short-haired cashier packing up my groceries and perking up at my rainbow reusable bag, the flamboyant man in a bright patterned shirt sitting behind me at the coffee shop, the numerous pride flags hanging off of houses in downtown or the woman at the public pool who brings up the queerness of her children and herself in a casual conversation. It has become clear to this sheltered city queer that LGBTQIA people do happily exist outside of my safe liberal bubble.