Remembrances of Road Trips Past
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.
Ahhh, the lesson of Brokeback Mountain.
If you're young and gay--
GET THE HELL OUT OF TEXAS
GET THE *HELL* OUT OF WYOMING