Welders, Thongs, and Monster Trucks: Inside @QueerAppalachia's Search For Community in the Deep South
Atop a bluff in West Virginia, Mamone lives 30 minutes from the closest main road. They, for all intents and purposes, are isolated from the rest of the world. So in this house, in the woods, at the top of the bluff, Mamone is the only LGBTQ+ person as far as the eye can see. Yet with the flash of the wake button on an iPhone, Mamone controls a wildly popular underground Instagram account. One day, they may post a photo of a welder wearing a lacy blue thong underneath work pants. The next day, a drawing of a monster truck smashing police cars while fireworks shoot into the sky. Mamone's world, and the world of @QueerAppalachia, is exquisite, visual anarchy. To be included, there is only one rule: everyone gets included. Otherwise, fuck you.
Gina Mamone, who prefers simply Mamone, is a 40-something with a Southern vocal fry as cool as the moniker they prefer to go by. They are also one of the founders of the overarching project named Queer Appalachia, founded in 2016. What started out as an art-driven zine developed by the late Bryn Kelly has evolved into part-internet-sensation-part-art-collaborative-part-quarterly-publication-part-public-service-announcement. There are a lot of parts, but the mission is unified. For Mamone, this is a full-time job, and it's one that is integral for an often overlooked community. @QueerAppalachia, and its publication Electric Dirt, seeks to unify the queer people of Appalachia by capturing the variety of races, abilities, genders, religions, and addiction statuses of an area that is largely believed to be straight and white.
I stumbled upon @QueerAppalachia a few years ago. The content of the Instagram married two worlds for me that, as a kid growing up in East Tennessee, I didn't know could co-exist. Initially, it made me uncomfortable, as it probably does for a lot of Appalachian-born kids—it allows kinks and sexuality and eroticism to live alongside RealTree and opossums and Dolly Parton. It's the rare culture shock that happens when two parts of you can coexist without conflict. That, in part, cannot happen without creators who don't embrace that themselves.
Discussing the intersection of queer culture and Appalachia with Mamone is complex, because it means that one moment, you might be talking about butt plugs and the next, a recipe for venison tater tot casserole. The variety is reflected on the popular Instagram page, which boasts over a quarter-million followers. This project exists to highlight everything Appalachia, from Dolly Parton to same sex couples sprawled out across a John Deere tractor. The fact that it is a series of anomalies is what makes it so universal because it represents an unspoken population that lives vibrantly in the depths of isolation. They congregate in this digital church, sharing single stringed narratives that only recently have found a singular internet loom. In the world of @QueerAppalachia, you can be a gay, femme, black, male-presenting farmer, recovering from an opioid addiction. All that's required of you is that you cover the cornbread when you finish grabbing a piece.
Below is the conversation Esquire had with Mamone, the Creative Director of @QueerAppalachia.
ESQ: One of the things that drew me to Queer Appalachia is that it really is this merging of identifiers that all seem in opposition, which I think is half the point. How important is that intersectionality to you?
Mamone: That is the point in so many ways. It's contradictory. People's first response is to laugh at it, but in that place that they're laughing is people's identity. Growing up in the coal fields of West Virginia, which is the Bible Belt is its own nuanced way, we were taught these homespun ways while learning really contemporary radical queer politics. It's not a space that's existed very much before.
Part of the idea behind our collection of stories is what does pride look like in 2020? I was chatting with somebody recently about that feeling of isolation in quarantine, and they pointed out that for so many rural queer people, that is just the norm.
It is. And especially if you're rural queer and disabled, then that is for sure your reality. That I've learned through this project. We see geographic isolation, especially in Appalachia. There was this go-to COVID graphic that went around like the second week of... when people were just starting to cancel things in a way they hadn't before, and it basically showed the south lit up and for people that were having to drive long distances. And it was definitely done in a way that was shaming these Southerners.
I know what you're talking about. I've definitely seen that.
[It’s a product of] our bullshit infrastructure. I don't know if I would have even thought this a couple years ago before this project, but whenever anything doesn't make sense or is a little wonky, like for whatever reasons, whether it was budgets or votings, there's so many nuanced things that can dictate reality. But if it happens below the Mason-Dixon, it's because they're ignorant. All of those people? They have no choice but to drive to a supermarket that far away because they live in a food desert. But no one was okay to talk about that. They were very quick to go into "ignorant people won't stop driving around."
I know that you're creative director, and you've been with the project since about 2016. How did you come to be involved?
I was one of the people that started it. I knew Bryn Kelly. It started out being a memorial project. So, Bryn, she killed herself in 2016, but the people that were left in Brunswick didn't see it as a suicide. They definitely saw it as a nuanced murder of what happens when you have AIDS and you're chronically poor forever and you can't access anything that you need from healthcare to medicine. There were a lot of factors. Bryn wasn't going to have a life with much dignity in it. I was very lost in her leaving us the way that she did. And when [Queer Appalachia] was thrown out to be an option, I was like, "Oh, that could be a healthy thing to do with my grief. We could make something." I never thought this would be a thing beyond us.
You’ve mentioned Bryn, but I know Amanda Harris was integral in Queer Appalachia, too. I loved the concept of the language she used around being “migrated.”
Yeah. That was her life's work. Amanda is the bitch that talked me into doing this. Like, "We got to do this. We got to do this." But she called me up and pitched it, and then she left us, too. I didn't understand how much suicide was in the queer community until it came for me in my life, and Amanda and Bryn are definitely parts of that. Now I have this platform. The Instagram alone gets about 10,000 DMs a day. We don't even have enough money to pay people to do it ethically. It's just impossible to get to at all, but so much of it is just rural queers that are isolated, that are alone; that can't be out; that can't be in because of whatever reason—their voice or mannerisms. It's all people just trying to survive with family that doesn't treat them like family and community.
There’s just something so incredibly niche and yet so personal about this project. That's a lot like the art that you put out.
That's us. We document our community. [Now,] we curate maybe more than we ever did at the start, just because of the volume. I have a really broad concept of art. Anything is art to me. You can't weird me out. You can't gross me out. And I just started putting those up there, and we got so much response that it was more than enough for a dozen zines. To me, that's what's revolutionary about the project is that in a time when so many people speak for other people, we have this unique way to speak for ourselves.
And that's never been done before for our population, so it means that people see images like they've never seen before. We celebrate and do this work in a geographically complicated place that is—it's a food desert, it's a healthcare desert, and the other side of that healthcare desert coin is it's a mental healthcare desert. We're literally at the mathematical precise point of ground zero of the opioid epidemic here in West Virginia. This is a very specific mental health pressure cooker, and it can manifest itself in so many ways. People can be spectacularly broken. They can be spectacularly addicted.
The emphasis that your art curation has on addiction is incredible because it really does run rampant, particularly in Appalachia. And you use so much of your efforts and work to bring awareness to harm reduction.
Performative harm reduction is my number one complaint. There are some people doing really amazing inclusive harm reduction work, but the more funded it is, the more it's tied to government. And I can give you some examples of performative harm reduction in my community in West Virginia. Like needle laws. Every county in West Virginia has its own needle laws, and they are not the same. And it just so happens that every needle is a felony in West Virginia, so if I want to do harm reduction and go out and pass clean needles… Needles are small. They come in packages of 1,000. If someone wants to give me a felony for each needle, what the hell?
It goes back to that idea of optics versus access. I have this theory that if you can use a dollar word instead of a five dollar word, you do it because that only opens up access for people to understand what you're talking about.
Exactly. And that's so much of the success of this project, to me, is that we can take something that's weird and convoluted and really complicated and whittle it down to a meme. There's this meme I made a couple of years ago. There were these white students in a library and one was copying off the other, and I just put one Karl Marx and the other Dolly Parton writing "9 to 5." Anytime we can take something that is not accessible, like Marxist canon, and whittle it down to a broad stroke concept for them to be like, "Oh, I got you." I know who that guy is from now on.
Well, in terms of that access, I know when you don't particularly have the voice or the knowledge to speak to something, Queer Appalachia and the Collective has opened up your platform. I know recently, regarding Black Lives Matter, that’s the case.
We got them coming in. They got a lot to say. I think as a white person with a huge platform, that gives me a lot of responsibility. We try very hard to, I guess, to share the platform during appropriate times of the year. We do a thing every November called "No Thanks" with an amazing indigenous queer street artist in Kentucky, Otaes, and we basically just buy whatever art supplies they want. They get to make art out of whatever they want, and then they get to take over the feed for a week and fundraise for charities that are important for them.
We did Black History Month in a way we never did before, where we literally hired 10 people to give us content on the blog, and the content they gave was basically to lift up their friends and their projects. I think that as white people with resources, we need to hand them over and step back more and more. That's what I'm learning.
I can't tell you how surprised some people are to find out that black people exist in Appalachia. Do you still find people stunned by that revelation?
Yes. Whatever Appalachian joke there is, it gets worse the more intersectional lenses you add to it. "Oh, you have teeth in your shoes, and you fucked your cousin." But then it's like, "Oh, you're black and you're from there?" It just gets worse and worse and worse. At a time when there's so much conversation about Trump country and what Appalachia looks like and who Appalachia is, we give a very different narrative of our Appalachia. It looks very different. We try very hard to highlight all of the radical things going on here.
I mean, hell, we're doing COVID testing with sex workers. There's hardly any sex worker outreach going on anywhere around here that's not Christian based. We're hoping to show that there's more going on here than you think, and there could be even more of it if you'd like to get your ass over here.
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