Writing Queer Appalachian Romance and My Healing Journey to Self-Acceptance

Writing "Country Road Romance" has allowed me to stop running from my queer Appalachian origins and instead to embrace them as a source of strength and inspiration.

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I have a confession to make. For all that I have now made writing about Appalachia a key part of my professional life, for much of the past 20 years I’ve actually been running away from my country origins. There are many complicated reasons why this is the case, but a lot of it has to do with the way that my home state of West Virginia has changed dramatically in the past two decades. What was once a reliable, if still conservative, part of the Democratic coalition has now turned not just Republican but deeply Trumpian. This has meant, in turn, that it’s become a state that is increasingly hostile to queer folks of every variety, but particularly trans folks.

And, if I’m being honest, it also comes with the sense of shame about being from Appalachia that haunts so many of us who’ve left the area. For me, at least, this manifested as a desire to be seen as something other than a mere “Appalachian writer,” and it’s taken me a lot of work and introspection to see my roots as a source of strength and inspiration rather than as a stigma or a limitation I had to overcome.

Nevertheless, I still love my home state and my home region. Even though I’ve lived away from it since 2009, I still feel the pull of it each and every day. It’s almost as if there is a part of me that’s left behind in those hills and hollers, and it’s no exaggeration to say that I never feel as if I’m completely whole until I’m visiting my parents. I’ve taken to referring to myself as a queer Appalachian expat, for though it’s hard to imagine actually living in West Virginia–particularly since my partner has a tenured job at a university in eastern Maryland–I still find every excuse I can to go back there as often as possible.

As I’ve written here before, it was upon one such trip that I got the inspiration to write my first queer Appalachian romance. I will forever be grateful to the Appalachian Queer Festival–which I continue to be a part of–for providing me a path back to putting the sundered parts of myself back together. Little did I know that writing a story about a struggling writer and a Hollywood actor falling in love in my beloved West Virginia would provide me a means of coming to terms with my conflicted relationship to a complicated region.

When I first sat down to start writing Country Road Romance, I didn’t have much of an idea as to what the story was going to be about. All I knew was that it was going to be about someone who’s planning a film festival who ends up falling in love with the talent. Very soon, though, it became clear to me that there was more than a little of myself in Jared, a geriatric millennial whose life hasn’t worked out quite like he would have expected. To be sure, I’m not nearly as prickly as Jared, and I don’t have quite as many hang-ups, but that’s the fun of fiction, right? Your characters can be both like and unlike yourself, giving you the chance to work through stuff that you didn’t even know was going on beneath the surface of your own mind.

Of course, I knew that it was going to be fun to write this book. After all, who doesn’t love a gay rom-com? There’s just something infectiously pleasurable about writing this very optimistic genre, which shows you that there is a lot of joy to be found in the world, for all that the forces of queerphobia seem to be in the ascendant. Moreover, as I’ve written here before, Country Road Romance is my way of imagining a West Virginia and an Appalachia that might not exist in the moment but might still, if we put in the effort to bring such a queer utopia into being. Just because it’s escapist doesn’t mean that it can’t address some of the real issues confronting the people who still call the region home.

What I did not expect was that this novel would come to feel so deeply, intimately personal for me. Don’t get me wrong. There’s always a piece of me in everything that I write–which is a large part of why I will never offload any part of the writing process onto AI, but that’s a different post–yet somehow it felt different this time. Some of the same issues that Jared, and to a lesser extent Charlie, deal with are the very things that I’ve grappled with as I’ve grown older and have started to re-examine some of the assumptions I’ve made about what and who I am and what I want my relationship to West Virginia and my heritage to look and feel like. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that writing this book was therapy, but it was something like it. Having Charlie interrogate Jared about why he persists in putting down his family and his hometown–despite the fact that he seems quite fond of both of them–forced me to grapple with the fact that I do the same thing. Sometimes it takes writing fictional characters to make you take stock of the dismissive attitudes that you’ve internalized and the extent to which those attitudes have started to curdle what could be more productive relationships.

At the same time, Country Road Romance is a bit of a love letter to the Mountain State. Yes, there are many times when I get frustrated and saddened and even furious at the leaders of West Virginia for the way that they continue to make members of the queer community their scapegoat, and yes there are times when I even want to shake voters there and ask them what the hell is going through their heads (and I include members of my family in that). But I love them even so.

The older I’ve gotten, the more I’ve had to accept that life, much as I hate to admit it, is far more complicated and messy and nuanced than I would like it to be. Yes, West Virginia–and Appalachia more generally–can and does break our hearts, sometimes in ways that are hard to recover from. At the same time, I know that I’m not alone in feeling that pinch in my heart and that soaring in my soul every time I cross the state line and see that sign welcoming me to “West Virginia: Wild and Wonderful.” I know I’m not the only one who only ever feels at home when I’m standing on one of those ridges that I’ve always called home or driving down the street in one of our small holler towns. That’s a feeling that simply can’t be replicated and, when it comes right down to it, there will always be a part of me that stays there, no matter how far I roam or where I go.

It may sound more than a little cliche to say that there’s no place like home, but I do think there’s a lot of truth to that statement when it’s applied to West Virginia. Our state has been through a lot in its 160 years of existence, but somehow it’s managed to endure everything that’s been thrown at it. Its population might be dwindling, and there are times when the future seems bleak, but we’re survivors, damn it. Country Road Romance reminded me of why I love being from West Virginia, and why I wouldn’t trade being a queer Appalachian for anything in the world.