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Saturday, February 25, 2006

Remembrances of Road Trips Past

Posted by on February 25 at 12:30 PM

There’s a fun, front-page story in the national edition of The New York Times today about the strange goings on in Loving County, Tex., the emptiest county in America.

It’s a doubly fun story for me, because it reminds me of a Stranger-funded road trip I took to Loving County two summers ago. As today’s New York Times story notes, there’s not much of anything in Loving County. No bank, no doctor, no lawyer, no cemetery. But there’s something else Loving County doesn’t have, something not mentioned in today’s Times article, and it’s the reason I went to Loving County in 2004. Loving County has zero gay couples.

This seemed significant two summers ago, back when a lot of noise was being made by gay rights groups about newly-released census data showing that gay couples live in 99 percent of America’s counties. The message from the gay rights groups was: We’re your neighbors, and we’re everywhere.

My idea was to flip the focus, and look at the 1 percent of American counties where there are no gay couples. According to the logic of religious conservatives, who argue that a culture without gay couples is by definition better, these few counties with no gay couples should be utopias, right? I wondered if that would prove true.

And can you guess the results of my little experiment? Here’s what I found on my trip through what I assumed would be Conservative Paradise. The trip began in Loving County (where I had a long talk with the sheriff featured in today’s New York Times story, and listened to a friend of his say, in the Sheriff’s office, “I’m fixin’ to get down on all fours and get fucked”) and then proceeded to Cimmaron County in the panhandle of Oklahoma, and finally concluded a few days later in Cheyenne County, in eastern Colorado.

I won’t give away all the dystopic weirdness I experienced, but I will tell you: I have never been as glad to get back to a big city as I was at the end of that trip.


CommentsRSS icon

Ahhh, the lesson of Brokeback Mountain.

If you're young and gay--

GET THE HELL OUT OF TEXAS
GET THE *HELL* OUT OF WYOMING

I have family in Cimmaron County and, growing up, my family reunion was held there every year. One year, a gay second cousin of mine brought two gay friends of his to the reunion. As far as I know, all of my family was polite to their face, but I am still amazed at their bravery in going to a conservative family's reunion in one of the most conservative counties in Oklahoma.

So it seems there is space in Texas for several more large cities?

I seem to hear an urban myth that all the space for a growing population is gone.

Very funny actually. Some water - one good Hi way - light speed cable / electric utility - and Voila.

GAYS STILL EVAUATE FROM KEN, AUBURN AND ENUMCLAW, THANK GOD FOR SEATTLE- FEWER RUINED LIVES

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