The world is beginning
Let's go to gay prom!
In some ways, this post is a follow-up to the one about my Christian physical therapy office (if you don’t know what I’m talking about you might want to read the January 3rd post, “Theocracy”). By the way, I found out the guy who runs my physical therapy office is a pastor, which explains the Bibles, the Christian wall decals, and the fact that he was talking with other patients about what next week’s Bible study topic is. And it explains the Christian radio channel that’s always on – though I think this is less due to patient preference and more due to the fact that the music is completely inoffensive. The bearded guy in his 60s sitting next to me at my last appointment informed all of us he’d just bought Lil Wayne tickets, because Lil Wayne is playing at the Kentucky state fairgrounds this spring (kudos to whoever booked him for that).
Anyway, this time I wanted to talk about progressive church and other communities here in West Virginia and in Central Appalachia more broadly. If there’s a “point” to this post, it’s that even tiny pockets of progressivism make a splash here, because the size of the communities are relatively small and because members of these communities are used to being fighters. It should be noted that the meaning of “progressive,” like all political definitions, is as shifty as sand. Here I’m defining it as a political position that is oriented towards more support for public services, scientific consensus, and bodily autonomy. I think of it as a fairly broad tent encompassing some liberals and some leftists who have common objectives if not always common means.
I’ve been attending services at a church where I’m usually one of about ten attendees. The first time I visited, the biggest family in the congregation slept in too late and I ended up being the only person sitting in the pews (everyone else was preaching, working sound, doing liturgy, or working the livestream). Everyone kept approaching me to tell me some variation of “we’re small, but we’re good people.” This is why I came back—because, simply put, the vibes were good. The lead pastor is a well-known local environmentalist and is involved with a nearby horse rescue. I found her more compelling than the priest of a larger church I visited who kept saying the word “fornication” but also seemed scared to explain what that was or what he thought about it (like, if we’re gonna say “fornication” in a liberal church in 2024, let’s at least get into it).
The small church invited me to a small potluck afterwards, where someone referred to “the last of the gay tomatoes” and then had to explain the inside joke to me as the only visitor. Apparently this past summer the church attended a sort of protest/tabling event set up by a local women’s organization to mourn the fall of Roe v. Wade (in West Virginia, if I became a victim of rape tomorrow and didn’t test for pregnancy, report to the police, and schedule an abortion before 8 weeks was up I would have to carry my rapist’s child to term. This is not something my mother would have had to worry about when she was 23, but I do). At this event the church was handing out tomato seeds, and to their dismay the lone counter-protestor at the event set up shop next to them, yelling out of his megaphone. They offered him water (“I don’t want your water,” he said). They offered him tomato seeds (“I don’t want your gay tomatoes,” he said). Church members took any leftover seeds home and grew them themselves, and the last of them finished up the growing season last month. So yes, at one point I was the only person in their pews – but they have enough momentum to have tabled at a community event, run a livestream and sound system, have two supply preachers and a liturgist, and host a potluck. They work hard because they haven’t gotten comfortable, not here. The fact that I was able to visit three other progressive churches in my town alone before I got to this one also speaks to an interest and need here.
We’re screening an environmental documentary at work in two weeks, and when a longtime employee told my team to plan for 100 people, we raised our eyebrows. As of today? We have 80 signups. Some local middle schools are bringing kids for other showings. In a state (and a country) where public services like education and healthcare have been stripped for the past several decades and young people are seeing the effects of climate change in real time (just paid my first car insurance premium, which is high because the industry is accounting for…increased natural disasters throughout the country), people are seeking. The same coworker who told me to plan for 100 people at the screening is hosting a prom for LGBTQ adults this summer (theme is “turn back time” – folks get to have a prom where they can actually be themselves this time around). The world is ending, let’s go to gay prom!
The will for a world that promotes human flourishing is hard to repress. As one of my summer interviewees put it, “everywhere we’ve lived, we have to fight.” In a small community like my city, or this state more generally, when you put out the call to fight, people show up. At that church, they would have held a service if no one was in the pews. They maintained that space, and I wandered in one morning.
On the car ride back from a clean water rally in the state capitol a few weeks ago, my boss turned to me and asked, “So, what do you think? Do you think we’re gonna pull this thing out of the gutter?” This question used to throw me, until I really took a second to think about it and came to my current stance, which is that I’m going to act like yes, we can. Because—and this is not an admission of hopelessness, but just a fact—I don’t know what else I would do. I don’t know how else to live, in the same way that some people don’t know how to do that trick where you curl your tongue in the middle. Maybe one day my body will learn how to fall into deep despair, but for now it just refuses to do it.
The world is just beginning, let’s go to gay prom!
P.S. I might not post for a while because I’m getting back into pitching to publications again and that takes a lot of brainpower. But I have more topics I want to cover here (tell me your favorites), including but not limited to: how all my heroes are dead; socialist education through folk songs; freeing your soul by planting a garden.
