STEPHANIE WOODS
Most people in Tatum, Texas, work at the electricity plant or the coalmine, but Stephanie Woods' family ran cattle. She grew up in the same house her mother grew up in, and on the same street as her cousins, her grandparents, and her aunt. "My aunt was the secretary of all the churches in Tatum, so she had all the good gossip." Tatum was the kind of town (pop. 1,200) where everyone met at the Dairy Queen to, as Woods put it, "get up in your business."
Woods, 24, graduated high school with the same people she had gone to kindergarten with. "It was kind of incestuous if you tried to date," she said last week. "It was the same people all the time." Even though she was a "Christian goody two-shoes" as a teenager, she was a tomboy. "Looking back, I was so totally gay. How did I not have a clue?"
She went to a liberal arts college in Shreveport, Louisiana--"a sort of middle ground between a small city and a big city." In her senior year she realized that she was a lesbian, and became an atheist.
After college, she moved back home to work and to raise the four cows she owned (she had invested her teenage allowance into them) and to save money to move again, but she broke her wrist helping her dad on the ranch--a cow kicked her--and couldn't work. So she sold her cows. She used the money from that sale to buy gas to get to Seattle and to pay for part of a first month's rent.
"I've actually been closer to my family since moving here," she said. She's been out to her mother for a while, and came out to her father over Memorial Day weekend. "It gave me my own space to get comfortable with myself, and they responded to that." She still goes back to Tatum for visits.
JASON HEINZ
Jason Heinz lived in Oelwein, Iowa, population 4,000, until he was 14. "It was a weird town," Heinz remembered last week. The Heinzes were a prominent family in Oelwein--"For some reason we were in the Fourth of July parade every year"--and Jason's parents, insurance salespeople, had insured nearly the whole town. It was mostly corn farmers. People parked horse-drawn buggies outside the bank. "At one time we had two grocery stores," Heinz said, "but then one closed."
When he was 14, the family moved to Boise, Idaho, and then Jason's parents split and his father moved back to Iowa. He never considered going to college back in Iowa, even though his father wanted him to. But even Boise was conservative. "In high school I couldn't have even admitted I was gay. If anyone even had a notion I was gay, it would have been hell," he said. "If I had come out in Boise it would have been a scandal, but in Iowa it would have been a persecution."
The move to Seattle, to go to college, was overwhelming. "To come to a place where there were Lusty Ladys and black people--it was a sensory overload." The culture shock hasn't entirely worn off. "I had to destroy a large part of who I was," said Heinz, who is 21. "I have an obligation to banish that whole side of me because it was so against me. That whole culture was so against what I am."
He's in touch with one friend from his hometown in Iowa, and occasionally in touch with his father, but he hasn't come out to either of them yet. He has no plans to visit Oelwein any time soon. "The things they believe and how their culture works--it's out of the '50s. I'm glad I'm gone."
TODD CROUCH
Argenta, Illinois, is four hours south of Chicago and an hour east of Springfield and half a mile from the Oasis Truck Stop. The superintendent at the high school Todd Crouch attended was fired for using school phones to make calls to 1-900 phone lines. He was replaced by someone who, upon accepting the superintendent job, had to resign from the local branch of the KKK. A friend of Crouch's, who was half Japanese, once found a burning cross on her lawn. Crouch's graduating high-school class, in 1996, had 78 people in it.
"I hated every waking minute there," Crouch said. "It's the kind of town where people don't ask you what you're reading, they ask you what you're reading for."
Crouch applied to and attended Columbia College of Chicago. "I knew I had to go to a big city. It was the only place my parents would help me with, because it was in state." After college--he got a degree in photography--he moved to Decatur, to save up some money, and then to New York City, where he worked as a photographer's assistant and a bellhop in a hotel in Midtown. New York made the most sense, given his ambition to be a photographer and his tastes--and his, you know, proclivities. (He's bisexual.)
He had a ton of sex. "If the timing was right and it was three o'clock in the morning and I was smoking out the window and someone walked by and asked for a cigarette, sometimes"--he exerted judgment, of course--"sometimes I'd say, 'I'll be right down.'"
Crouch moved to Seattle a couple months ago to be closer to friends. The nicest way he could think of to describe Argenta, his hometown, is as "a nice place to leave."
ALICE PAINE
Alice Paine's parents were in the Marine Corps, so she lived in 12 states before she was 13. They finally settled on Muncy, Pennsylvania, smack-dab in the middle of the state and right outside Lancaster County, which is Amish country. Pittsburgh and Philadelphia are both about four hours away; the nearest city, an hour and a half away, is Scranton. "It was pretty horrible," said Paine, who turned 23 on Sunday. "I wasn't out at the time, but I was ostracized for looking different. It was kind of rough."
Last week she was sitting in her room in her Capitol Hill apartment, which is crammed with drums, guitars, and a big keyboard (she does experimental solo stuff), and she pulled out her senior yearbook (class of 1999) and started flipping through it. "I mean, look at the people. Look at everyone. And there's me. I had a shaved head." Everyone used to go to the mall to shop; she bought guys' clothes in the thrift store and rode a skateboard and watched movies. "I was dying the whole time. I couldn't wait to get out of there."
She went to Clarion University of Pennsylvania. "I was trying to get as far away as I could without having to pay out-of-state tuition." In college, she got her first tattoo and found some friends, but she had to drop out because her parents stopped supporting her. "My parents found out about me, and they said they weren't going to pay tuition if I didn't bring home a boyfriend."
She moved to Pittsburgh but didn't like it because there wasn't really a music scene, and then moved to New York City for six months with a friend, and then back to Pittsburgh, and then to Cleveland. "I was just trying to experience different locations."
Paine has no plans to move again. "I really like Seattle.... I never see people stare at me, which I would see all the time in Muncy." She has a good living situation and she's going back to school. She may or may not be out to the people back in Muncy--she doesn't know. She hasn't talked to her parents in two years.
Would she ever go back? "Um, hell no," she said. "That'd be like putting myself in jail or something."
MICHAEL McAFOOSE
There are a lot of churches and a lot of tornadoes in Warsaw, Indiana, and--except for going to the lake or working on a farm--there's nothing to do. Michael McAfoose went to a high school in the middle of a cornfield. His best friend and classmate was the son of a pastor, and the two teenagers used to have sex in the empty church. There was nowhere else to go.
"Being in the '80s, it was real difficult to know what it was we were feeling," McAfoose said the other day. "You never heard the word 'gay' uttered anywhere, at any time."
In McAfoose's senior year, the pastor and his family moved to South Dakota and McAfoose fell into a depression. Like many young queers in conservative towns, McAfoose decided that he needed to be heterosexual in order to be happy, so he met a woman, moved in with her, and had a kid. He was 19. "I figured that if I had a child it would make me heterosexual. And it would quell the rumors around town that I was gay. I brought a child into the world for all the wrong reasons." About a year after the child was born, the mother of their son threw McAfoose out. (He'd been sleeping with an auto mechanic on the sly.) He found his clothes stuffed into garbage bags on the sidewalk.
He checked into a hospital to treat his depression, and then, a few months later, into a homeless shelter in Fort Wayne--a city 17 times the size of Warsaw. He got a job at a leather store in a mall, where the assistant manager was gay. ("He was such a flamboyant fag that I was offended by it.") He got cruised all the time near the homeless shelter where he lived. (There was a gay bar down the street.) But he wouldn't come out for years.
In the meantime, he went on a few gay-bashing sprees with some punks he'd befriended ("I had nowhere to go, I was lonely"), and then, in a parking lot outside a diner, McAfoose got gay-bashed himself. Someone saw him giving another guy--a straight guy--a hug, and swung a baseball bat at his head. It nearly killed him.
McAfoose, who works at Gay Community Social Services, has lived in Seattle for 12 years. (He continues to pay child support for his son, who is 13. He isn't allowed to see him.) He made the decision to move here after getting out of the hospital, where, in spite of the severity of his injuries, few people came to visit him. "I looked at my life and there was nothing there. I went home, pulled out a map, looked at the United States, and chose the farthest city from Indiana." When McAfoose arrived, late in the summer of 1992, he was amazed to see two men holding hands on Pike Street. He was also amazed by the buildings. "I come from an area where the tallest thing you can find is a cow standing on all four legs," he said. He has never been back to Warsaw.
HEATHER DUNHAM
Heather Dunham grew up in a religious family, and was sent to Berean Christian High School in Walnut Creek, California--a town east of the Bay Area, population 60,000. "My parents wanted me to go to a Christian school," she said. "So I had to go. It sucked."
At Berean there was a girl "who looked like a really bad Robert Smith" that Dunham had a crush on--it was the late '80s, after all. Then Dunham overheard the girl in the bathroom, telling a friend that Dunham had "lesbian tendencies." It quickly became the school rumor. "I was like, 'They aren't just tendencies!'" Dunham said last week, with a grin, as she poured drinks behind the bar at Bill's Off Broadway.
High school wasn't great, but Dunham dealt with it. "I'd cut class, and go to San Francisco," she says. She found a girlfriend, and managed to keep the lesbian tendencies under her parents' radar until her older sister ratted her out. "I still don't know how she found out," Dunham says. Her sister broke the news to her parents at church, of all places. When her parents got home, where Dunham was hanging out with her girlfriend, they told the girlfriend to leave, and kicked 17-year-old Dunham out of the house. She packed up her things on Mother's Day, and left.
For the past six years, Dunham--now 31--has lived in Seattle, and she's been the bassist for punk band Texylvania for the past four. Why did she move to Seattle? "It's big enough, but small enough where you can focus and totally be yourself," she said. "It was either Seattle or Texas."
