In Alabama in 1925, when my aunt Gilder Brown was six years old, she walked by herself two miles on the dirt road into town to Mr. Hick's barbershop and asked him to "cut her hair like a boy's." He laughed and asked if her mama knew what she was doing. Gilder mendaciously said yes, and he indeed gave her a boy's haircut, which she wore when she started to school that fall, where she fell in love with a pretty, very poor little red-headed girl that her mama wouldn't let her get near.
When she died with me at her side, 80 years later, her hair was still exactly that short. She never married, never told me she was a lesbian, and never used the word "trans" to describe herself. But when I brought my transgender lover home, Gilder welcomed Leslie as her younger self. And the day Gilder lay dying, she recited this fragment of a poem to me:
Say I'm weary, say I'm sad,Say that health and wealth have miss'd me, Say I'm growing old, but add, Jenny kiss'd me.
She knew she could trust me with this bit of her story, because I myself had come out as a lesbian to her, my family, and the world in North Carolina in 1975, despite the fact that I'd lose custody of my two children as a result.
The queer South is centuries full of such stories, both known and the untold. A red thread of resistance binds those of us who have been "in the life."
The South is full of our queerness—35 percent of the LGBTQ population in the U.S. lives here (the Northeast is home to only 19 percent). In the Deep South—Alabama, Mississippi, Florida, and Louisiana—almost 40 percent of us identify as people of color; In Texas that figure is over 50 percent. In most Southern states, 20 to 30 percent of us are raising children.
We have power in our numbers—and we need that. According to a study published by the UCLA School of Law, compared to other U.S. regions we queer Southerners are "more likely to lack employment protections, earn less than $24,000 a year, and be unable to afford food or healthcare." We are living through a terrible period, when the voices of the unashamed racists, woman-haters and queer-bashers of my segregated childhood are broadcast from the highest public offices in the land. We are living in a time when—as William Faulkner of Oxford once said—"The past is never dead, it's not even past." And yet we are also living in the now, the only place where the future can be created.