From the Jun 24 – Jun 30, 2004 issue

Pullout

Reverse Migration

Want to change the debate over gay rights? Leave the Big City and Go Rural, Young Queers.

by Trisha Ready

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Carol Lay

Street Eats

Infiltrate. The word went through my head while I watched the CNN election results in November 2000.

All the states George Bush won were lit up bright Republican red on the TV map: the heartland, the Bible belt, the Rocky Mountain states. Most of the whole damned country. The new Mason-Dixon Line seemed to be a philosophical division between coast-hugging, urban liberals and the rest of the country. I fantasized that the trend could be reversed if more people left places like New York City or Seattle to infiltrate rural towns, getting jobs at Wal-Marts, joining evangelical churches--whatever it might take to win small-town converts over to more liberal views.

Reverse migration isn't an original idea, and it may be a flawed one. But I've actually tried it. When I was 29, I moved from the Castro District in San Francisco to a small town, and eventually to a rural community.

I landed first in Bellingham, and Alcoholics Anonymous, but eventually made my way out into the further reaches of Whatcom County, where I worked for several years at a bouquet manufacturing plant in Lynden, Washington. Lynden is a good Christian town where it's illegal to mow your lawn on Sundays. The women I worked with were loggers' wives, and fishermen's wives, and the wives of men who worked at the steel smelting plant or the Arco refinery. One of the women had a special horn installed in her car that sounded the stadium "Charge!" call in support of the first Iraq war. Some of the ladies wore flannel shirts and drove big trucks with gun racks. Most of them looked more like dykes than I did.

The first day I walked into the bouquet-production room, "My Achy Breaky Heart" was blasting and a gaggle of country ladies were slinging flowers. "Bunch of hicks," I thought. They took one look at me, I learned later, and whispered, "Useless." And I was useless. I didn't know a thing about flowers, or how to milk a cow, or mend a fence or how to make dolls out of milk cartons. I didn't understand how to do hard physical labor, like they did, as if my life depended on it.

It seemed unwise to tell them I was queer. What I did tell them was that I was a divorcee in recovery.

My divorce gave the ladies something to gossip about. My recovery status earned me instant credibility; it was like saying I belonged to a beloved neighborhood church. Alcoholics Anonymous is a universal common denominator, which also makes it, now that I think about it, a great infiltration tool. I can't tell you how many AA meetings I attended around Whatcom County where I disclosed intimate details about my life to people who looked like card-carrying NRA members. They, of course, were revealing equally intimate details to me and others at the meetings within an implied framework of tolerance and anonymity.

I also attended meetings held exclusively by and for queers. I met queers who worked at Arco, and queers who went to Alaska twice each year to process fish on barges. All of the queers I met had different stories about how they survived--openly and secretly--in Whatcom County. The main thing I learned from their stories, and from working daily with the ladies on the bouquet line, was that the best opportunities for dialogue and cross-cultural bonding took place during long bouts of physical labor. In the middle of a grueling 12-hour shift, the hicks seem less like hicks to me, and I became for them much less useless. I learned that the ladies were smarter and more resourceful than I had expected. They lacked basic exposure to different perspectives and consistent experiences to help them sustain new viewpoints. They learned I was willing to climb into a pine tree during a snowstorm when we ran out of fern for bouquets.

I never officially came out to the bouquet ladies. I didn't need to. Once my girlfriend started visiting the plant, my queer status was public. My girlfriend didn't have any self-consciousness about being out, regardless of how repressed a setting might be. She would walk into the bouquet production room and yell "Hey, Baby," when she picked me up. I'd met her at a queer AA meeting, and was immediately drawn to her. She looked like a badass biker chick. Her hair was peroxide blonde and she had a lovely scar across her brow that came from a head-on car crash she'd caused when she swerved to miss a cat on a country highway. She was a reverse refugee from the city, just like me. She'd returned to the country to calm down. In Seattle, she had worked for years as a professional dominatrix. Eventually she and I lived together in a blue school bus on a piece of land her family owned. We ate dinner sitting on the hood of her father's broken down Cadillac. She dyed my hair fire-engine red.

One of the bouquet ladies turned to me one morning and asked, "So you eat pussy? That's what you do?" It was 5:00 a.m. I had a mouthful of lukewarm, gas-station coffee that I almost spit out. I swallowed, and answered, "Sometimes." She said, "Gross." Right then I could have snapped back. Several comments came to mind, but I knew it was a critical moment. She was pulling down the wall between us with a crow bar of blunt emotion and thereby making room for an honest friendship. I knew enough not to screw that up. Plus, I really wanted to know what she thought, how she thought; I had questions for her too. We ended up talking for hours and days about sexual preferences. I learned she had tried some S&M and had several elaborate Harley-Davidson fantasies. My new friend pretty much paved the way toward my acceptance and ability to be open with the other ladies on the line. It turned out that we all had a common desire to talk about sex while we worked. Sex talk made the workday seem shorter. Sex talk made the bouquets turn out better. I remember being shocked one rainy afternoon to find out that only 2 of the 13 ladies had ever had an orgasm. Plus, they taught me to like Clint Black, pull tabs, and pea and peanut salad.

Somewhere along the way I stopped missing the city. The ex-dominatrix and I broke up. I fell in love with a Seattle artist who said no way in hell would she live in the sticks. So even though I was happy in rural Whatcom County, I wound up back in Seattle. I hated the city for its pretentiousness at first. I wore a red bandanna tied around my neck for months until some pretty girl called me a hick.

These days I wonder what kind of impact queers could have on the national political scene if we were really deliberate about infiltrating small towns and rural counties. We could launch a kind of Queer Peace Corps in several major cities and fan out in small groups across a state. We could get jobs that would sustain us for a couple of years and put us in close touch with small-town people. We could join churches or clubs, go to AA meetings, or volunteer for the Salvation Army. Then the real work would start: looking for opportunities to start a dialogue, gradually making friends. We could demystify queerness for them at the same time that they demystified small-town and rural people for us.

I can't say for sure what impact I had on the bouquet ladies' lives--whether they became advocates for their inalienable right to orgasms, or whether they considered queers in a different light because we'd bonded over a common love of the National Enquirer. I didn't stay long enough to find out what happened to all the ripples I stirred up. What I can measure though is how their influence still echoes in me--in how I work, in how I write, in how I feel more at home in parts of the country other queers won't even visit.

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