LGBTQ+ Eastern Kentuckians are refuting Appalachian stereotype

Cara Ellis, left, at Pikeville Pride’s booth at the Hillbilly Days Festival in Pikeville, Ky. (Photo by Ryan C. Hermens, Herald-Leader)

LGBTQ+ Eastern Kentuckians aren’t big-city transplants, as you might think; they’re native Appalachians reaching out to break stereotypes and form a supportive community, reports Rick Childress of the Lexington Herald-Leader. Childress’ visit to the “Pikeville Pride” booth during Hillbilly Days, Pikeville’s annual festival “celebrating all things Appalachia,” provides a good example. “Members of Pikeville Pride sat at a booth strewn with rainbow flags and banners. The grassroots organization works to highlight Eastern Kentucky’s LGBTQ+ community. . . . In a town and region long assumed to be unwelcome to LGBTQ+ people, members were met with honest questions, smiles, thank yous and even a ‘grandma’ who got their grandson their ‘first pride flag,’ said Cara Ellis, who is Pikeville Pride’s president and a Pikeville native.” Ellis said, “I never thought we would have this in this town.”

Outreach allows the group to support young people who may struggle. “It’s never been necessarily easy to be gay in the mountains, and a ratcheting up of anti-LGBTQ rhetoric and legislation, both in Kentucky and nationally, will make life harder for those who are out in rural communities,” Childress writes. “The suicide rate among LGBTQ youth is much higher than their peers. A national survey conducted last year by the Trevor Project, an organization that provides crisis help for LGBTQ youth, found that 45% of LGBTQ youth seriously considered suicide in the past year. . . . But that suicide rate goes down if students come from households that affirm their gender identity, attend an LGBTQ-affirming school or live in an accepting community.”

The group’s presence at events like Hillbilly Days provides a human face inviting conversations that educate the region. “They also defied a common misconception that Ellis said she’s encountered in her work with Pikeville Pride,” Childress reports. “Many assume that those in the group have moved in from bigger cities and aren’t native Appalachians. Ellis told him, “It’s like, no, we’ve been born here. . . . We’ve been raised here. We’re from here; we stay here.” Childress adds, “According to Jonathan Coleman, a historian and co-founder of the Faulkner Morgan Archive, a nonprofit that saves and shares Kentucky’s LGBTQ history, the typical narrative about Eastern Kentucky is incomplete. Coleman said: “The story of what it is to be queer in Eastern Kentucky is always a really flattened-out, simple narrative. . . . You leave if you can, as soon as you can. You’re traumatized, and then you try to escape. That, of course, is not accurate for lots and lots of folks.”

Pikeville’s 2020 population was 7,754. (Sperling’s Best Places map)

Pikeville Pride continues to provide a supportive community “especially in a place where an accepting group of people hasn’t always been easy to find,” Childress reports. “The group started in 2017 as an organized counter-protest to a white-nationalist march in the city’s downtown. After that protest, about 20-25 people continued to meet. They decided to put together Pikeville’s first pride event in 2018 in an attempt to ‘highlight the diversity and inclusion that we actually do have here in Pikeville, that maybe people don’t realize,’ Ellis said. . . . . Tonya Jones, who, along with her wife, has fostered multiple LGBTQ+ youth in Pike County, was among the original group that started the organization, said they had a free hugs booth at the first event.” Jones told him, “I had someone just come up and just wrap their arms around me and just start bawling. Because they said it was the first time anyone accepted them for who they truly were.”