138. The Gay in the South Episode Pt 2: Somebody Had to Build That House, and You Can Build One Too

I'M THE VILLAIN

In last week's episode, we featured the first part of this conversation with Kenny Wical so if you missed it, you will want to take a listen to that one before you listen to this! In this episode, Kenny talks about ways that privilege manifests itself in his life, because there is a lot of pressure to conform to cis-normative standards of masculinity in the South even among people in the queer community. There's this notion that you can always push the shame and oppression to people farther down on the social ladder than you and even though he is genderfluid, there's a lot of experiences he has had where he initially is granted male privilege by a stranger, and the more they talk to him and see how much he doesn't perform masculinity, the more he sees that esteem they originally granted him melt away before his eyes.

Last week we started talking about the common advice that queer people in the South get to move to a more progressive place like New York City so they can be themselves more without the fear of (as much) oppression. While that has long been a really tempting proposition for Kenny, more recently he has been feeling the desire to nurture his roots in Raleigh, NC, because as a queer person it can be super freeing and heady to go to a more queer-accepting place like NYC where there's tons of out and proud queer people having awesome gay parties, but those same houses and parties need to be built in the South too. It obviously takes a lot more work and community-building can be a very thankless job, especially when you are dealing with a population that has more general trauma, which can make a lot of community-building really difficult because it's a process that inherently requires trust.

But it's a necessary task. There's so many people in the South and other places in the world who don't have the privilege, financial, stability, or interest in just picking up and moving to a more progressive place, and if more people did that, those places in the South would be that much worse for the queer people left behind. This is that investing in your community looks like.

Links:
Kenny's website: http://kwical.com/
Kenny's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/okaykennyray/
Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.

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