I was contacted by the reporter who wrote this story, about the federal hate crimes law getting its first test in Harlan County, Kentucky, and asked some questions about my experience of being openly gay in the hills. She told me she was coming down to Harlan from New York City to talk with some folks and do this story about the man who was allegedly beaten for being gay. I told her my story, then got a call from her a couple days later in which she told me she no longer needed me to drive down from Lexington to meet her, that she was going to meet with some other people she had gotten in touch with.
After reading this, I have a theory about why I was no longer needed as a contact: She apparently wanted to talk exclusively with gay people who've had terrible experiences in the mountains because they're gay, something that I did not have. I have never been persecuted, beaten, taunted, made fun of, singled-out, ostracized, discriminated against or otherwise made to feel like I wasn't welcome in my homeland because of my sexuality. Was my experience all rosy and peachy-keen? Hell no. But was it the most terrible experience of my life? Not in a million years, and I certainly wouldn't chose to not live in Appalachia because I'm gay. I'm not the only gay person in the mountains who feels this way.
I'm bothered by this article. I know that for every positive coming-out story in the hills, there are a dozen more that aren't positive. I know that some people have been ridiculed and beaten and discriminated against, and I know that a lot of gay people from Central Appalachia don't want to live there anymore because they feel unwelcome. But not everyone has that experience, and to write a national article that makes it seem as though they do is, in my mind, wrong.
It also bothers me that this reporter frames my homeland as a place only inhabited by pill-heads, violent bigots, religious fundamentalists and corrupt politicians. I'm not saying those types of people don't exist in eastern Kentucky, because they do; but I would be willing to say that it's not the everyday norm in most places, and that there isn't a higher rate of those types of people in the hills than there are in any other part of the country.
I know that eastern Kentucky suffers from a terrible drug problem, that there are some corrupt politicians in eastern Kentucky, and that there are violent bigots and religious fundamentalists living in my hills. But I also know that some of the kindest, most supportive people I've ever known were raised in Southern Baptist churches - some are even deacons in those churches - and some of the fairest politicians I've ever known maintain political positions in the hills. There are a lot of people addicted to pain killers, but there are also a lot of people that aren't.
I've come to expect news stories written by reporters from national media outlets about my homeland to be somewhat skewed in their representation of it. However, this article was rife with hyperbolic statements that seems to suggest things about Eastern Kentucky that simply aren't true, or things about it that make this article reminiscent of early 20th century portrayals of it through the eyes of flat-lander reporters who framed the region as a backward, isolated place, and then blamed the people's ignorance on said isolation.
Some examples (I've bolded the remarks that bothered me the most):
"Harlan County is about a two-and-a-half-hour drive from the nearest city with an airport, along a road that twists and turns through quiet hills. It's one of the poorest places in America and one of the most beautiful. The luxuriousness of the landscape -- an unending carpet of foliage that rises on all sides, enclosing roads in vivid, green lushness -- is pockmarked with billboards advertising personal-injury lawyers, drug-treatment centers and evangelical TV stars. The only restaurant open late at night is a knockoff of the Waffle House, where, locals say, miners and their girlfriends pop pills in the bathroom. There are no bars, but 116 churches. One resident offered a succinct list of the places where people hang out: "church or jail."
"Stewart and Stallard are hoping the case will change things, that it will finally get people talking about gays in the community but they also know that fear has a way of making people quiet. For years they had tried to start a support group for the few openly gay people in the town. But the only way to convince people to show up to a meeting would have been to offer them prescription painkillers or a party, Stallard said."
"But Jordan Palmer refused to accept this fate. He became a lonely hero, the single crusader for gay rights in all of southeastern Kentucky."
"Every year in Kentucky drugs kill more people than car wrecks. Every day three people die of overdoses. A major investigation conducted by the Lexington Herald-Leader in 2003 found that more painkillers flowed into Kentucky than any other part of the United States. This all perhaps explains why southeastern Kentuckians might not want to talk about the case."
To be fair, the reporter does mention that Palmer and his organization, of which he is no longer president, are not the best advocates for gay rights in Kentucky because they often too quick to make statements about hate crimes that just aren't true, and that Palmer is - in my own opinion, not the reporter's - too full of himself to actually care about other people's rights and true equality.
However, the other statements - some of them apparently made by the people with whom the reporter spoke - are bombastic remarks that frame Eastern Kentucky as an incredibly closed-minded and one-dimensional place. I was once a reporter, so I understand the nuances of writing a news story about a certain group of people of which you know very little and having to rely on statements that members of that group give you to describe the entire group. However, in this case, since I know this reporter talked to not only myself, but another young gay woman in Appalachia who also did not have a terrible experience, I question the reporter's objectivity, and I assume she relied on hackneyed stereotypes about the region because it was easier than actually delving into the complexities of a region long bastardized in American culture as a backward and closed-minded place filled with ignorance hillbillies who know nothing of the outside world because of their severe isolation.
I try as hard as I can to give every story written about Appalachia by an outsider reporter as much credit as I can. I try to remain objective when reading them and understand them from the point of view of someone who is not so invested in reshaping the image of the region to portray it to the rest of the country as a more complex place. For the most part, I'm able to do this because I find that reporters are more fair about Appalachia now than they ever have been.
But this reporter, whom I had so much hope for when we talked on the phone, is not among those who are fair to my homeland. Her lack of objectivity on the matter of gay rights and growing up gay in Appalachia, her disregard for telling both sides of the story of being gay in the region and her dismissal of the complexities of a region that is, for lack of a better word, extremely complex, bothers me very deeply, and I felt it necessary to discuss the issue of news framing of my region, which continues to be very stereotypical, even to this day.
No comments:
Post a Comment