James Schwartz
Anonymous
April Vazquez
Samer Hassan Saleh
My Other Name Is Morales Which Is Pronounced Morales
Jennifer Morales
ᏗᎾᎦᎵᏍᎩ ᏗᎦᏬᏂᏍᎩ ᏧᎦᎶᎦ (Digital Talking Leaves)
Patrick Del Percio
Jasmine Burnett
FOREWORD
Queer Heartlands
DOUG KIEL
The Midwest and Appalachia are both routinely identified as parts of the American heartland. What “heartland” means, however, is more than a little murky. Typically the phrase is used as a shorthand, quite often by politicians, to evoke images of small towns and white cisgender men and women laboring in factories and farms throughout the vast U.S. interior. In the popular imagination, the heartland is where “real” America can be found, where its traditional values and institutions are most cherished.
Garrison Keillor made a decades-long career out of satirizing, and often reinforcing, these one-dimensional perceptions in his writing and nationally-syndicated radio program, A Prairie Home Companion (1974–2016). In each radio broadcast, Keillor described his fictional setting of Lake Wobegon, Minnesota, as a place “where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.” Keillor’s folksy caricature draws from a widely held notion that the heartland is defined by plain uniformity, the absence of difference. There are no LGBTQ people at Lake Wobegon.
It may seem a contradiction to be queer in a place that is so heavily mythologized as the epitome of “normal”—and implicitly, straight and white—American life. Sweeter Voices Still reveals the heartlands as they truly are: rich with queer human experience. They always have been, as Kai Minosh Pyle shows in their opening piece, “The Midwest is a Two-Spirit Place.” From an Indigenous perspective, it is European ideas about gender and sexuality, steeped in Abrahamic religion, that are historically queer in the lands now known as the United States.
As many of the authors in this volume attest to, LGBTQ people in Middle America have often been made to feel out-of-place, like they don’t belong in the region. “The prairie wasn’t the place for boys who liked boys,” writes Taylor Brorby in his piece, “Boys and Oil.” Stacy Jane Grover’s “Lancaster is Burning” speaks to a similarly conflicted relationship to her home. After coming out as transgender, she notes, “I struggled, wishing to be a country woman, of the land” rather than being forced into exile. Sweeter Voices Still is an act of queer worldmaking; it makes an important contribution to changing how the American heartlands are represented, signaling that it is possible for LGBTQ people to thrive in the “flyover states.”
Throughout these pages, the authors bring the landscape to life, share memories of formative moments, and revisit the spaces that hold them. In stories and poems that span generations, readers are taken to piers in Michigan, a hunter’s tree stand, fairgrounds on Independence Day, a dark stairwell where men cruise for sex, and bars that serve as an oasis of queer community, where the release of music and dancing can heal. Owen Keehnen writes of one such place, Irene’s Cabaret along the Mississippi River in Quincy, Illinois, that for 36 years “was a melting pot of drag queens, leathermen, hustlers, lesbian farmers, bi-curious spouses, coeds, etc.” Sweeter Voices Still highlights that not only do LGBTQ people belong in the heartland, but also they have long created safe spaces for each other, developing alternative forms of kinship.
The need for many LGBTQ people to seek out new, chosen families is underscored by testimonies in this anthology that detail struggles for acceptance in one’s family of origin. Home can be haunting. Childhood memories about fathers and fragile masculinity loom large in this collection. As LGBTQ children begin to discover who they are and transcend social norms about dress and behavior, some fathers intervene to strictly reinforce binary gender roles, sometimes with violence and shame. Many, but certainly not all, of the mothers in these stories play a very different role as an important lifeline. In small but consequential moments that are captured in these pages, mothers are frequently a source of comfort, even a voice that gently hints it’s OK if you have a secret. For some, particularly from earlier generations, open secrets about sexuality could go unacknowledged by families for an entire lifetime. In “A Tale of Three Seasons: Black Midwestern Lesbian Lineages,” Jasmine Burnett writes about her great Aunt Betty, born in 1931. “My Aunt Betty never ‘officially’ came out,” Burnett notes, “she simply lived and allowed you to arrive at your own decisions about how you thought she was living her life.”
Throughout this book, the fear of judgement by God and family are among the most powerful forces keeping LGBTQ heartlanders silent and in the closet. This is particularly true for the most devout. Andriy Partykevich, for instance, writes in “Vichna Pamyat” about his journey into the priesthood of the Ukrainian Orthodox church, while also coming to understand his sexuality. “I knew I was gay, God knew I was gay, but the Church could not or must not,” Partykevich writes. Similarly, in “Letter to the Prodigal Son,” an anonymous author from Amish Country writes about admiring the courage of another gay man who left the community to live his truth. He eventually returned, however, and the anonymous author notes, “I brushed away tears, for I hoped you could make it out there.” Partykevich held onto his own secret through more than 20 years of service to the church, but did ultimately leave the priesthood and married a man. Partykevich expresses deep regret, seeking forgiveness from his late father for having never come out while he was alive. Sometimes the struggle is to accept oneself; as the anonymous Amish author asserts so poignantly, “because our people won’t forgive us, we must forgive ourselves.”
The stories and poems that Ryan Schuessler and Kevin Whiteneir, Jr. have arranged here, with musical cadence, present the heartlands in a new light, moving far beyond one-dimensional stereotypes. Sweeter Voices Still is a remarkable achievement, providing a truly kaleidoscopic view of LGBTQ life in Middle America.
INTRODUCTION
RYAN SCHUESSLER AND KEVIN WHITENEIR, JR.
This book is about a place. A place home to innumerable stories. Some you know, recounted time and again around dinner tables and barstools, between raucous laughs and in hushed whispers. Others untold, or buried so deep they stir a familiar resonance you only recognize if you listen closely. Tales of family and friends; of love and hurt; of fear and joy in these places that we call home.
In recent years, much has been written about the Midwest and Appalachia. A lot of it was spent trying to map dark lines across the country’s gray