Sweeter Voices Still. Группа авторов

       FOREWORD

       Queer Heartlands

      DOUG KIEL

      The Midwest and Appalachia are both routinely identified as parts of the American heartland. What “heartland” means, however, is more than a little murky. Typically the phrase is used as a shorthand, quite often by politicians, to evoke images of small towns and white cisgender men and women laboring in factories and farms throughout the vast U.S. interior. In the popular imagination, the heartland is where “real” America can be found, where its traditional values and institutions are most cherished.

      Garrison Keillor made a decades-long career out of satirizing, and often reinforcing, these one-dimensional perceptions in his writing and nationally-syndicated radio program, A Prairie Home Companion (1974–2016). In each radio broadcast, Keillor described his fictional setting of Lake Wobegon, Minnesota, as a place “where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.” Keillor’s folksy caricature draws from a widely held notion that the heartland is defined by plain uniformity, the absence of difference. There are no LGBTQ people at Lake Wobegon.

      It may seem a contradiction to be queer in a place that is so heavily mythologized as the epitome of “normal”—and implicitly, straight and white—American life. Sweeter Voices Still reveals the heartlands as they truly are: rich with queer human experience. They always have been, as Kai Minosh Pyle shows in their opening piece, “The Midwest is a Two-Spirit Place.” From an Indigenous perspective, it is European ideas about gender and sexuality, steeped in Abrahamic religion, that are historically queer in the lands now known as the United States.

      As many of the authors in this volume attest to, LGBTQ people in Middle America have often been made to feel out-of-place, like they don’t belong in the region. “The prairie wasn’t the place for boys who liked boys,” writes Taylor Brorby in his piece, “Boys and Oil.” Stacy Jane Grover’s “Lancaster is Burning” speaks to a similarly conflicted relationship to her home. After coming out as transgender, she notes, “I struggled, wishing to be a country woman, of the land” rather than being forced into exile. Sweeter Voices Still is an act of queer worldmaking; it makes an important contribution to changing how the American heartlands are represented, signaling that it is possible for LGBTQ people to thrive in the “flyover states.”

      Throughout these pages, the authors bring the landscape to life, share memories of formative moments, and revisit the spaces that hold them. In stories and poems that span generations, readers are taken to piers in Michigan, a hunter’s tree stand, fairgrounds on Independence Day, a dark stairwell where men cruise for sex, and bars that serve as an oasis of queer community, where the release of music and dancing can heal. Owen Keehnen writes of one such place, Irene’s Cabaret along the Mississippi River in Quincy, Illinois, that for 36 years “was a melting pot of drag queens,

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