Appalachia

There will be a performance this Saturday afternoon at Virginia Tech.

LGBTQ in Appalachia: Oral Histories in "Revelations"
Mon October 20, 2014

...Carrie Cline who produced this oral history presentation called Revelations is originally from New York. But when she moved to West Virginia she began to wonder about something.

"If people in Appalachia are marginalized by the greater world, then the people who raise and are role models for gays and transgender, queer Appalachians may be teaching people how to rise above the stigma."

With a Rockefeller Scholarship, she began to explore the ways people who are other than straight Appalachians incorporate the resiliency that’s such a core part of Appalachian culture. She took oral histories from dozens of people and created a performance piece from what they said

"It opens with people talking about strong roll models in their own lives one person says my gramma taught me not to use the term ‘four eyes’ and not to put other people down. Someone else, a gay man, talks about an aunt who was very much herself, wore big grass skirts through the Krogers and his mother who would have 40 people over for Thanksgiving and also just going her own way and finding her own path. So several of these kinds of stories are exchanged and then people move on to the theme of realizing that they were different in terms of gender and sexuality."....

MORE at http://wvtf.org/post/lgbtq-appalachia