The stories in this book come from as far east as Buffalo and as far west as the Bakken; as far North as the Upper Peninsula and as far south as Oklahoma. These are the homelands of Indigenous nations, so numerous we cannot name them all here. They remind us not only that this land was stolen—a history too often taken for granted—but that their lives encompass so much more than trauma. They remind us that they are here, and that many of them are queer, too, in ways and words beyond the LGBTQ acronym. We implore you: as you celebrate your stories and ideas of these places, honor and turn your eyes to theirs.
Both of us are from this place. Ryan grew up in Missouri before moving to Chicago as an adult. Kevin was born and raised on Chicago’s South Side before moving to very-rural Wisconsin for college. We come from very different communities—racially, economically, spiritually. But both of us identify somewhere within the expansive LGBTQ acronym and have never felt the need to leave this place because of that. On the contrary, it is why we envisioned this book.
The Midwest, Appalachia, Rust Belt, Great Plains, Upper South—Lower North?—whatever this place is called, is a queer place. It always has been. Its cities, farms, hamlets, reservations, suburbs, mountains, grasslands, forests, rivers, lakes, swamps, cul-du-sacs, dirt roads, and highways have birthed and shaped queer lives in all their beauty and mess. They are the backdrop to the existences we continue to fight for. Despite what American history might have you believe, this place is not a place from which queer people must always flee to find or save themselves. The queer people here do not exist only to serve as “blue dots” within “red states.” For every story about the kid from Iowa who steps off the bus in Manhattan, ready to “finally” live, is a story about the kid who was already living in Iowa. This book is about that kid and has been written by people like them.
Within this book’s pages you will find queer voices you might recognize: established and succesful writers and thinkers. You will also find voices you might not—people who don’t think of themselves as writers at all. You will find Black voices, immigrant voices, undocumented voices. You’ll find voices that have been scorned by a church, and voices from within a church; you’ll find Hindu, Muslim, and Jewish voices. You’ll find voices speaking in Spanish, Cherokee, Hmong, Somali, Ukrainian. You’ll find an unsigned letter from Amish Country. You will find stories that spread a kind of contagious glee. You will find stories dripping with a familiar pain, and yet whose voices are sweeter still. Sweeter all the same. You’ll find sex, love, and heartbreak and all the beings we meet along the way: trees, deer, cicadas, sturgeon.
You will find these truths within these pages: Transgender women and men are women and men, bisexual and aesexual people are real, “they” and “them” can be singular pronouns, Black lives matter, sex work is work, and you don’t have to go to a gay bar to be gay—and it’s okay if you do, too. In this book, we say “queer” a lot, but know that word means different things to different people and can be painful, especially for our elders. We see you, too.
Most importantly, though, we hope that people see themselves in this book’s pages. Every queer person’s life is punctuated by the moment when they first recognized someone like them in a movie, book, or TV show. For some, that has yet to even happen. Even if this book is not that moment, we hope it is in service to a future where that moment is so normal you don’t have to hope it will happen at all.
This book is for the kids from Missouri, the South Side, Lac du Flambeau, Amish Country, the Allegheny range, downstate, the U.P., the Sandhills, and so many other flown-over places, so that they might have an easier road.
The Midwest is a Two-Spirit Place
KAI MINOSH PYLE
OZAAWINDIB | THE HEADWATERS
Lake Itasca, MN
Me, standing there. Sunlight hot on my shoulders, water running ice-cold on my toes. I’m reaching for the bottom of the stream—and it is a stream, right here, not yet a grown river—where the rocks are smoothed down from time. Not as much time as you would think, though. The hidden dam has only been here for a hundred years, built by the programs meant to boost the country out of the Great Depression in order to make the headwaters “beautiful.” Something more momentous, something befitting the greatest of American rivers. Something that would draw in the tourists. They call it the Mississippi in English, but in the original languages of this place it never had only one name. Fiercely attendant to its twists and turns, the Dakota call it Ȟaȟáwakpa and Wakpá Tháƞka, the Anishinaabe call it Gichi-ziibi, Misi-ziibi, Wiinibiigoonzhish-ziibi, Bemijigamaag-ziibi, and finally at the point where it flows into the lake of deemed its origin, Omashkoozo-ziibi.
Two hundred years ago the woman named Ozaawindib would have known these names well enough to take those white men to the headwaters. In the journals that keep the accounts of the white men’s guided tour, they call her a brave man. Brave she surely was, but she was no man. Even the would-be American lover who scorned her thirty years earlier wrote in his book that all the Indians called her woman, no matter what kind of body she had been born with.
Those Americans called that white man the discoverer of the headwaters. They celebrated it as a scientific achievement. Ozaawindib, she knew his real goal, Mr. United States Indian Agent. Coming to insert himself into contentious Anishinaabe/Dakota relations—it was better for the U.S. if the Indians didn’t fight. Easier to make treaty, take their beautiful land.
Two hundred years later I am standing there, toes in the riverbed. A transgender Anishinaabe relative on stolen land. I am standing there and I am saying her name.
WAZOWSHUK | THE RESERVATION
Mayetta, KS
I found her in the pages of an old ethnography. Named three times over, I choose to remember her as Wazowshuk. That American name, the one they wrote in the census, is a deadname to me. To her wealthy employer’s daughter she was Louise, a name given in jest but received with joy. Fifty years after her death that employer’s daughter, a Potawatomi who married white, remembered her to an anthropologist, called her a queer fellow, gave her a girly nickname. A cute joke, but when the family came back from abroad she was wearing skirts. The grandmothers called her m’netokwe. Spirit woman. They still knew those old roles, those ceremonies for people like her. In 1970 anthropologists were still calling her berdache.
What I know is, “Louise liked she”—the closest thing I’ve ever seen to preferred pronouns recorded in the archive. I know she didn’t like to wear beadwork. She liked her employer’s daughter’s hand-me-downs, white women’s clothes, that stuff coming out in the Sears Catalogue. I know she like to ride sidesaddle in dresses through the Kansas fields. Even when those rich girls laughed.
Her father, born before the removal, wasn’t raised on those plains. He walked the Trail of Death to Osawatomie and made a new life on the reservation. It was just open prairie grass then, the land giving their tribe its new name. The 1880s came around and both his children got allotments, Wazoshuk male in the eyes of the government, but it was only a matter of time before that land was taken too. Not even a death date in the records to mark her passing. Nothing but a memory written down in these dusty pages.
RALPH KERWINEO | THE CITY
Milwaukee, WI
It was a scandal at the turn of the century: a woman passing as a man. A Black Indian passing as white. A jilted ex-wife. Interracial bigamy. The story had all the fixings, but it’s hard to find his voice recorded in newspapers that lied, put words in his mouth to suit their readers. Hard to even know to say she or he but I try anyway because s/he deserves better.