Queer in Appalachia
/What if ‘home’ isn’t a place you feel welcome?
Newt Schottelkotte on their road trip through Appalachia (Photo courtesy Newt Schottelkotte)
“When you grow up never seeing yourself in the world around you, you start to believe you simply don’t belong there.”
Season 4 // Episode 4
As a nonbinary person, Newt Schottelkotte never felt at home in Appalachia. But then, they went on a road trip with their dad. Driving through the Blue Ridge Mountains, something started to shift.
This is a story about figuring out how to be yourself without abandoning where you’re from.
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Welcome to Out There Podcast. Our stories are written for the ear, so for those able, we recommend listening while reading along. Transcripts may contain minor errors; please check the audio before quoting.
VOICEOVER: Hub and Spoke audio collective.
WILLOW BELDEN: Alright, I am out for a bike ride, and I’m in a spot here where I can see three different mountain ranges. And I only know what one of them is. And I’m always curious what the other two are.
This happens often. I’ll be out doing something fun. I’ll see mountains in the distance. And I always want to know what they are. Which is where an app called PeakVisor comes in handy.
PeakVisor is one of our sponsors for this episode. When you open up their app, it shows you a panoramic image of everything you’re seeing, with all the peaks labeled. It tells you each mountain’s name, its height, how far away it is. And it works for mountains all over the world.
If you, too, like to know what you’re looking at when you’re out on adventures, check out PeakVisor in the app store. You just might love it.
Hi, I’m Willow Belden, and you’re listening to Out There, the podcast that explores big questions through intimate stories outdoors.
This season, we’re exploring the theme “Secrets of the Earth.” Each episode, we’re harnessing the power of nature to uncover new truths and help us understand our own humanity.
Today’s story is about self discovery. When we’re looking to find ourselves, we often go back to the place where it all started: home. From a yearly beach trip to a beloved backyard, the natural spaces we grew up in can be places of clarity and comfort.
But what happens when those spaces come into conflict with who we are? What if home isn’t a space where you feel welcome? Newt Schottelkotte has the story.
NEWT SCHOTTELKOTTE: You might not believe me if you saw me, but I did Cotillion. Cotillion is a formal ball or dance where debutantes are presented to society. The goal is to impress potential suitors. You go to a series of classes in a community center or high school gym and learn how to do things like foxtrot, know when to use a soup spoon, and greet the Queen of England.
I took about two Cotillion classes before saying “Hell no,” but the impression it leaves on you is clear: this is the ideal to strive to. Putting on makeup and a nice dress and going to dinner and dancing with a man is what being a girl in the south is all about.
The problem was, femininity never fit me growing up. I would have knock-down-drag-out fights with my mother about having to shave my legs. I pleaded to not have to wear a dress on special occasions. And it wasn’t just that I didn’t want to act like a stereotypical girl. I never felt like I was a girl.
But to be fair, being a boy didn’t look great either. Boys in the south did a lot of things that seemed toxic to me. I didn’t want to be the kind of jerk who dissed the Babysitters Club, or who made fun of boys for crying.
I wasn’t the only person who struggled to fit in, but that didn’t make it any easier. In the south, there wasn’t room for nuance. I remember seeing girls on the school volleyball team with perfectly curled hair and waterproof makeup, because anything less than extreme femininity when playing a sport would instantly get you pegged as an “ugly lesbian.” When I did theatre in high school, any guy that didn’t need a girl to hand-hold him through doing his stage makeup was instantly suspect. If you deviated from your assigned role, the labeling was swift and negative. And that didn’t leave room for anyone to explore their own gender. Everyone presents their gender differently, whether you identify as the one you were assigned at birth or not. My little sister is a girl in a totally different way than my mother is.
In this kind of environment, there was one type of femininity, and one type of masculinity. I decidedly clicked with neither. Being anything other than ambiguous and in between felt wrong. Like I was doing a bad performance, and everyone watching me could tell. I was caught between a rock and a hard place, and during high school, where so much is placed on figuring out who you are, I felt trapped by either option.
The first time I realized there might be a third option was during choir class my freshman year of high school. We were on a break, and I was scrolling through my Tumblr dashboard, when I came across a post breaking down the history of gender-neutral labels.
The post explained that the Talmud, the Jewish book of holy commentary, lists six different terms to talk about gender. Six. They have words for cis people and words for binary and nonbinary trans people.
Reading this, I felt a flutter of excitement in my gut. I had heard the word “transgender” before, but it was never really talked about. And “nonbinary” was a new concept altogether. Instantly, I felt less alone. The Talmud is older than the concept of Jesus, so for thousands and thousands of years, people have been out there who didn’t fit neatly into the categories of male or female. And religious texts recognized them. Not only that, but the blog post explained that thousands of indigenous cultures had a term for their version of gender-queerness.
The post also talked about pronouns, and how we use the singular “they/them” pronoun when people don’t neatly identify as male or female. Something about that appealed to me right away, so I added “they/them” to the “she/her” that was already in my Tumblr bio. Instantly I felt a rush of endorphins and adrenaline, and a week later I removed the “she/her” altogether. As soon as I did that, people online started referring to me with they/them pronouns. It felt so good. So true to who I was. It was like they were actually talking to and about me, not this abstract idea of a female person I had never really felt connected to. I cherished that one space where I could give people the real me, and where I actually felt seen. The following year I even chose a new name for myself. One that wasn’t obviously feminine. I started calling myself Newton — or Newt, for short.
But that was all strictly online. I didn’t feel like I could tell anyone at home that I was nonbinary. It wasn’t that I was afraid of the worst case scenario. I had heard the horror stories of trans kids getting kicked out, sent to conversion therapy, and worse. My parents weren’t bigots, but they had absolutely no idea what trans people were, much less nonbinary people. It would be a monumentally difficult and intense process of explaining myself to them. I didn’t want to go through that while I was still living with them. The whole idea felt overwhelming. Even putting aside the fact that I was still figuring myself out.
And so, I explored my identity alone. In secret.
I grew up during that nebulous time when shows like Glee had informed kids my age that gay people existed and didn’t deserve to be shoved in a locker (just ignored entirely), but the only resources for someone in a small town to figure out their gender and sexuality were on the Internet. Most of what the nonbinary identity meant to me came from queer spaces online, and pdfs of books the local library didn’t carry.
I remember listening to the fiction podcast Welcome to Night Vale. The main character is gay. I would lie in bed, headphones over my ears and eyes closed, letting the world around me become one where people like me didn’t have to worry about explaining ourselves; we could just go on cool adventures and save the world. But then, the episode would end, and I’d be back in the real world. In Appalachia. In a place that seemed bigoted and inhospitable. Where the news cycle was dominated by Trump and poverty porn. Where people like me were pushed out, or worse.
I felt so isolated. Everything about this region felt awful. I didn’t fit the social culture. I felt alienated and unwanted. When you grow up never seeing yourself in the world around you, you start to believe you simply don’t belong there.
Finally, when I left for college, I decided it was time to come out. To my parents, and everyone else. I planned to haul my stuff into my dorm, introduce myself to my hallmates as Newt, and start my new life in college being a hundred percent out of the closet.
The day after moving, I went out for breakfast with my parents to have The Talk. We sat down, the A/C roaring like most southern places in late August, and while my dad ordered biscuits for the table, I did the best thing I could think of to stop myself from backing out now: I went on Instagram and changed the name and pronouns on my account, then posted a screenshot of it to my story. Boom. Done. Time for the low-tech approach.
My palms have never sweat as much as they did when I started to explain to my parents what nonbinary means. Both were in their late fifties, so it took a couple of attempts. I tried the flat Earth approach. I explained that our understanding of gender and science is constantly evolving, and just like how we’ve historically assumed the Earth was flat, we learned more as a species and moved on. We used to think there were only two genders, but, as many pre-colonial cultures knew from the very start, we now understand things are much more fluid than that. You don’t have to be one or the other.
My dad ordered more biscuits.
Then I told them my name was Newton.
“What’s wrong with the name we gave you?” my dad asked.
I told him it was instantly recognizable as a girl name, and I’m not a girl. He didn’t have anything to say to that. There wasn’t much reaction from either of them, really. It felt like I was pouring my heart out to a pair of brick walls.
By hour two, I had successfully managed to get my mother to say a whole five words on the subject. My dad ordered another cup of coffee the moment I began my oral presentation on the history of the singular they. I explained that all the way back in the 1300s, people used “they” to refer to a single person whose gender the reader doesn’t know yet. The only real change in its use, I explained, is that now we also use it even when we do know a person’s gender. My dad still wasn’t looking at me. But then he forgot who our server was and wondered aloud, “Where are they?”
I blotted my forehead with the last napkin at our table.
Finally, they had to hit the road to make it back home before dinner. Nobody screamed, I did not throw up from nerves until I got back to my dorm, and we did not talk about the subject at all until I came home for the holidays. So, it could have gone worse. But, if I was being totally honest with myself, a “congratulations” would have been nice. Or a hug.
By the end of my first semester, I had come out to just about everyone I knew, legally changed my name, and regularly introduced myself with they/them pronouns. While home for winter break, I chopped my hair off into a much butchier style and instantly felt my confidence skyrocket. My closet began to be dominated far more by the men’s section than the women’s. Aside from appreciating the much bigger pockets, I liked the way the clothes made me look and feel.
And yet, these revelations weren’t exactly welcome. I had so many negative associations with masculinity that it felt like I was indulging in something I shouldn’t be. Masculinity was bad, femininity good, and androgyny even better — right?
You’re probably thinking that college did the trick in helping me figure all of this out, if not from a gender studies class, then joining the campus GSA or meeting like-minded people at an event. Or I would have packed my things for a big city up north and found myself the old-fashioned way. It might come as much of a surprise to you as it did to me, then, where my biggest moment of self-discovery actually occurred.
By the time summer vacation rolled around, I was feeling pretty stir-crazy. So when my father asked me to come with him on a road trip through Appalachia and up to Gettysburg for his sixtieth birthday, I said yes.
Why? Well for one, I really did want to have a relationship with my parents. There’s the idea that, when you come out, if your folks aren’t immediately a hundred percent accepting of you, the relationship is a lost cause and they’ll never change. I had heard stories from friends that that wasn’t always the case, and if my father was willing to invite me, I was willing to take the olive branch. Something a lot of queer people learn as we grow up is that sometimes you have to meet the people you love halfway.
In terms of the location, if you’d asked me where I’d like to have gone on vacation, I would have probably picked New York or even London, not a small mountain town known solely for the bloodiest single battle of the Civil War. That being said, I had been cooped up in a tiny dorm, staring at a Zoom screen for the better part of the year. He could have invited me to visit the world’s largest ball of string and I would have said yes. At least I knew I would get more biscuits out of it.
The drive to Gettysburg is usually about six hours, but my father and I tacked an extra two on to take the scenic route. We headed into the Blue Ridge Mountains, meeting a thunderstorm about halfway through the day. The fields of corn and soybeans slowly became denser and denser forests, interspersed with wide fields of rolled hay. We passed small farms with produce stands and cows huddled against the rain. The air was cool from the storm, and we rolled down the windows. We kept the radio off and didn’t say anything, just listened to the hum of the engine and the birds calling overhead. The air smelled like wet soil and rhododendrons.
As we reached the high point of the road and saw the world spread out in front of us along the highway, the rain stopped. The pavement beneath the car was still warm enough that steam poured off it. The clouds settled around the tops of the mountains as mist, and the sun punched holes through to beam down onto the fields below. My mother always called them God fingers, like heaven itself was reaching down to touch the land. It was one of the most beautiful things I had ever seen.
The river was so loud I could feel it in my teeth. The pulse of the water over the rocks and through the valley sounded like a thousand crowded heartbeats, flowing together into a rip current of sound that made everything else around me fall away. You can’t be surrounded by that and not feel a part of something miles and miles and eons bigger than yourself. These mountains didn’t care about my baggage. They’re 480 million years old. They’d been around longer than any of all that.
It surprised me how much yearning and love I felt. I had distanced myself from this region for so long. Maybe I was wrong to write off an entire region so quickly. I had been trying to sever my connection to Appalachia my whole life, but there was so much beauty here. Maybe I needed to give this place another chance. Maybe I shouldn’t be so rigid in labeling a place as either good or bad. Once I came to that realization, it unlocked a completely new way of seeing where I’m from — and who I can be.
WILLOW: Hey, it’s Willow. We’ll hear the rest of the story in a moment. But first, support for this episode comes from Rumpl. Rumpl is introducing the world to better blankets with their full line of durable, premium, ultra-warm outdoor blankets and gear.
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And now, back to the story.
NEWT: The day that we walked around the town of Gettysburg was their local pride festival. Gettysburg sits smack in the middle of rural Pennsylvania, an area most people would refer to as “the middle of nowhere.” I’ve always been pretty interested in history, but if you’d asked me to list historical sites that I’d classify as even marginally queer-friendly, Gettysburg would have been near the bottom.
After a long morning of touring Civil War battlefields flooded with aggressively heterosexual middle-aged dads, stepping into the town square and staring agog at the pride flags hung everywhere was like finding another planet in your backyard. There were parents taking their kids to the craft fair stations in fun costumes, and a circle of advocacy and health booths, and teens and tweens wearing flags like capes and cringey glitter makeup and pins and just getting to do all the embarrassing things you do at that age but as themselves. LGBTQ, in Appalachia, on a beautiful summer day in June.
I went to one of the craft fair booths with my father and sat down in the midst of a group full of queer people of all ages: a grandmother and her grandson, a mother and her infant wearing rainbow antlers, and a college student home for the summer. We were all painting rocks, each of them a different animal. I made a frog, because I like frogs.
Part of what is so incredible about queer spaces is that they bring people together who would otherwise have nothing in common. As much as we like to insist that our gender or sexuality is a small part of who we are, there is an important community to be had with people who share your marginalized experience. As I sat there, covering my chosen rock with green paint, I realized that our queerness wasn’t the only pivotal thing that everyone here had in common. It was the place we had chosen to gather in — the place we all called home despite everything and everyone that said we shouldn’t.
Walking around, seeing all of these people, it reminded me of something important: we are here. We have always been here. And not just that, but we exist here joyously and are working together as a community to create spaces that celebrate who we are without abandoning where we’re from. On that day, there wasn’t a single protester or bigot looking to ruin the fun — just clear blue sky above a place where we could all be ourselves. Not just queer, but Appalachian too.
When we sat down on the curb of town square to eat lunch, I started chatting with the lesbian couple next to me. One of them was a butch. She had short, short hair — almost a buzzcut, with a single stud earring as her only piece of jewelry. Her nails were neat and short, hands littered with calluses, and she was wearing cargo shorts and a men’s tank top. Her sneakers were the exact same kind as my dad’s. She was holding both her, and her wife’s, paper boats for their hot dogs, the keys on her belt loop jingling every time she leaned forward to take a bite. She and her wife were refurbishing their basement, and she was more than excited to tell me about the wood varnish they were using for the floors.
Whenever I see another butch in public, it always feels incredibly special. We have this thing called the butch head nod, where whenever you see another butch out and about, you give them a quick little bob of the head and make eye contact. It can only last a second, but that moment of connection and solidarity is so important to me. It says, “I see you, I know who you are, and I am reaching out deliberately to remind you that you are not alone.”
Sitting down with this fellow butch in the heart of Appalachia wasn’t just special because of that base kinship. It was a chance to see the specific version of myself that I wanted to be in this place. She had on work shoes like mine — the kind made for yard work that dads (including mine) go crazy for — and a drawl like mine and seemed perfectly comfortable with both of those things. I wanted to be that comfortable in my own skin. Seeing her planted a seed in my mind: that I could not only be openly queer here, but that I could embrace my masculinity and my Southern roots.
That night, we ended the day, and the trip itself, at a cider tasting place just off the square. There were people obviously coming from the festival, and more traditionally rural-looking folks, all sitting together and enjoying the music and drinks. I certainly wasn’t old enough to drink yet, so I just sat and looked around, taking in the atmosphere. It felt pretty close to perfect.
Before this trip, I had never gotten the opportunity to see queer people in the south and Appalachia out, in every sense of the word — thriving and living and loving in our home. The thing about so many queer spaces is that they’re online, and when they’re not online, they’re centered in, and about the experiences of, the people who live in metropolitan and northern regions. Walking around Gettysburg — getting outside and offline — helped break down the false idea that we don’t exist here, much less belong. Of course we do. There are things that need changing, but we can be here, and we can be happy too. Being gay in the south is not about being beaten to death with a shovel on the side of the road. It’s not about hating church, or leaving your family, or at least not entirely about that. There is community to be had here, and there are people being themselves in a way that I had always wanted to.
A lot has changed since that trip. I feel a lot more comfortable now with calling myself a transmasculine nonbinary person. For me, that means that while I was raised as a girl and assigned the gender marker of female at birth, I now present myself in a more masculine way. I’m still nonbinary, still neither a man nor a woman, but I started testosterone and pretty much my entire closet is squarely from the men’s section, boots and all.
I fall very firmly into the category of a fine southern gentleman, and I’m okay with that. I like holding open the door for not just my date, but older folks and moms juggling their kids. When we’re out on the town, my friends know they can trust me to watch their drink, or fend off a jerk at the bar, or walk on the outside of the street. I like working with my hands. I like providing for the people I care about.
My version of southern masculinity is about being someone that your people can rely on no matter what. It’s telling someone, “It makes me happy to make your life a little bit easier in whatever way I can” — whether that’s lending a hand to a stranger or showing one of your own that they are welcome here, too.
WILLOW: That was Newt Schottelkotte. They are a producer, sound designer, composer, and all-around podcasting person from Nashville, Tennessee.
Coming up next time on Out There: it’s pretty common to go swimming in the summer. But what about in the winter?
ELIZABETH WHITNEY: I felt like I was on fire. It was like someone had plugged me into an electric socket. It was this incredible high. And I just stood on the dock. And then of course you’re chasing that high, if you will, for the rest of the time you’re swimming. Like, every time you do it, you’re like, “Ah, is it going to feel that good again? Is it going to feel that good?”
WILLOW: Tune in on June 15 for a story about ice swimming.
Before you go, I want to share a couple of things.
First, I’m participating in a panel that the Sierra Club is running. It’s going to be tomorrow, June 2, at 1 p.m. Eastern Time, and it’s online, so you can join from anywhere. We’re going to be discussing diverse perspectives in outdoor media, and I would love to invite you to join us. I have a link to the event in the episode description, and I hope to see you there.
Secondly, we’re starting to plan out the next season of Out There, and I’d love your input on what the season theme should be. I’ve put together a really quick poll — it’s just one question — and you can fill it out by clicking the link in the episode description.
Out There is a proud member of Hub & Spoke, a collective of idea-driven independent podcasts. One of the other shows in the collective is called Open Source. They like to describe themselves as “an American conversation with global attitude.” You can find Open Source wherever you get your podcasts, or at radioopensource.org.
Alright, so I’ve opened up PeakVisor. It’s thinking.
PeakVisor is one of our sponsors. It’s an app that helps you make the most of your time in the mountains. Let’s say you’re out on a hike or a bike ride. It’ll help you figure out what mountains you’re looking at.
Oh wow, ok. So I am looking all the way down into Rocky Mountain National Park. Like, I can see Long’s Peak from here. That’s pretty cool.
PeakVisor has info on more than a million summits all over the world. Plus, they have detailed 3D maps to help with planning. And they have a peak-bagging feature that lets you keep track of your achievements.
If you’d like your own personal mountain guide, check out PeakVisor in the app store. You just might love it.
Today’s story was written and narrated by Newt Schottelkotte. Story editing and sound design by me, Willow Belden. Out There’s advertising manager is Jessica Heeg. Our audience growth director is Sheeba Joseph. Our ambassadors are Tiffany Duong, Ashley White, and Stacia Bennet. And our theme music was written by Jared Arnold.
We’ll see you in two weeks. And in the meantime, have a beautiful day, be bold, go outside, and find your dreams.
Episode Credits
Story by Newt Schottelkotte
Story editing and sound design by Willow Belden
Music includes works from StoryBlocks and Blue Dot Sessions
Links
Take our poll about next season’s theme
Sierra Club Panel: Diverse Perspectives in Outdoor Media
Support Out There on Patreon
Sponsors
PeakVisor
Rumpl
Use promo code “OUTTHERE” to get 10% off your first purchase at rumpl.com/outthere
Kula Cloth
Use promo code “OUTTHERE2023” to get 15% off your order at outtherepodcast.com/kula
