Raise Hell and Eat Cornbread, Comrades!

November 13, 2018 9:01 PM

Want to Know Where Intersectional Queer Radicalism Is Thriving? Look to Appalachia.
posted by standardasparagus (12 comments total)

If the ambient leftist psychokinetic energy of Appalachia were to be represented by a Twinkie, it would be a Twinkie 35 feet long, weighing approximately 600 pounds.

Check out this Deutsche Welle documentary about Appalachian coal country released a couple of weeks ago: “Das schwarze Herz Amerikas / The black heart of America” (←link to English version, direct .mp4 link); the same guy standing in a longwall mine with a hard hat on at the beginning talking about how he doesn't care about unions appears near the end, chatting about the changes since his father's day, saying how much the last hour of the longer contemporary workday takes out of him.

Your heart aches for these people and what they go through, in onion-layers of deeper and deeper disadvantage and exploitation, but if we cross the right streams every molecule in our political system will explode at the speed of light. Possibly even in a good way.
posted by XMLicious at 10:08 PM on November 13, 2018 [2 favorites]

This seals the deal, I really want to visit West Virginia someday. I mean, the rest as well, but West Virginia gets a lot of good press already and now you tell me it's full of queer radicals?
Wisconsin just got bumped down a notch.
posted by AnhydrousLove at 10:18 PM on November 13, 2018 [2 favorites]

prioritizing the needs of the most vulnerable with direct action

If only we all wanted and did this.
posted by wellred at 5:13 AM on November 14, 2018 [1 favorite]

I don't know. I'm queer and grew up in Georgia. It was not really a fun time.
posted by coffeeand at 7:39 AM on November 14, 2018 [7 favorites]

Besides the actual links, this post led me to discover Birdcloud, my new favorite sex-positive-but-not-always-positive-you-know over-buzzed bad-ass bluegrassy-rock duet ladies. So thanks for both!
posted by freebird at 8:08 AM on November 14, 2018 [1 favorite]

The article mentions a zine called the Cornbread Communism Manifesto: there's a link to it in this Facebook post from the Cornbread Communism account. Be warned, it's a 200 MB PDF file. Fun to see an old-school zine like this!

The link itself is on Google Drive, which Metafilter seems to not let me link to. https://drive.google.com/open?id=1uDqCVAflYT3nLM1qbUxcZR8RoxitiACA
posted by Nelson at 9:58 AM on November 14, 2018 [4 favorites]

Mod note: fixed link
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 10:04 AM on November 14, 2018 [3 favorites]

Re visiting WV: I grew up in West Virginia and yeah you really need to be careful where you go if you are visibly queer, says the visibly queer woman.
posted by winna at 3:14 PM on November 14, 2018 [4 favorites]

I live in Charleston and work at a restaurant with a lot of queer, left, and/or artistic people, and this still doesn't remind me of the state I live in. I'm sure there are pockets of queer radicalism but thriving probably isn't the word I'd use for them.
posted by repute at 8:55 PM on November 14, 2018 [2 favorites]

If a radical, queer-led revolution in the United States is possible, it will most likely emerge from the backroads and hollers, map dots and one stoplight towns stretching from the northern Georgia mountains to western Pennsylvania.

I feel like this completely misses the significance of Black Lives Matter and activism by undocumented young people, both of which are led to a significant extent by queer people. And while I'm sure there's all sorts of good and important stuff happening in Appalachia, I think that leftists sometimes focus on that region as a way of re-centering white people as the most authentic and important members of the working class. So the framing kind of bothers me.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 9:04 PM on November 14, 2018 [6 favorites]

The Queer Appalachia Moth man Paper Doll
posted by The Whelk at 11:48 AM on November 15, 2018

This seems like a Happy Happy Gays puff piece. I mean, one of my dads is a product of a WV coal mining town; the homophobia in West Virginia is pretty rancid in my direct experience. I certainly don't think of it as a safe place to be out.
posted by DarlingBri at 12:44 PM on November 15, 2018