Finding Holiness

In his foreword to Queer Communion: Religion in Appalachia, Willie Edward Taylor Carver Jr. celebrates the writers who contributed to the collection and the way they represent “so many queer Appalachians who manage not only to find truth in the universe after being raised in a world that condemns them but also to find holiness in it.” Part of the University Press of Kentucky’s Appalachian Futures: Black, Native, and Queer Voices series, this volume, edited by Davis Shoulders, offers varied perspectives on growing up in Appalachia and growing up in the church. Each writer wrestles in their own way to that universal truth and holiness while acknowledging the unique pain or trauma of their story.

The churches are not a monolith — Baptist, Catholic, Church of Christ, evangelical, Pentecostal, Seventh-day Adventist —and neither are the writers who were raised up under their tenets. Some remain closely tied to a church community, like Matthew Jacobson who earned an M. Div. and has built a long career as a hospital chaplain. Others have found their way into a different kind of faith, one that holds fast to the rituals and bonds that shaped them while releasing the judgment and hostility that threatened and shamed them.

Jarred Johnson’s powerful essay “Role Play” explores performance and gender as he tracks his progression from a young man performing in church dramas and writing worship music to embracing his queer identity and developing his drag persona Coal, the Appalachian Queen. Johnson braids the different aspects of his life and his identity, moving from family anecdotes to church performances, from his first kiss with a guy on the dance floor of a gay bar in Nashville to the lip-sync battle fundraiser hosted by his queer kickball league. He closes the essay considering a different kind of communion: “[P]eople like me, who had gone through similar hardships, stood together, in the South in this case, in a place that seems to want to reject us, with our eyes focused on the same stage, watching other queer people dance and twirl, and we sang along, believing in the power of community, feeling, after years of not, a sense of belonging right there where we were. That’s church.”

Some contributors write of turning away from the rigid and harmful structures of religion, like Chelsea Bock who describes the shadows lurking at the private Christian school where she worked after graduating college: “When you’re told over and over that there is only one right way to be a righteous person, secrets swirl in the water like sediment. People commune in the whispers behind doors, the breaks in the narratives.” But for Bock, as for many others, the decision to break away is empowering, freeing her to make her way into what she calls, “a better future. A future of our design.”

The collection opens with an abecedarian poem from Raychel Kool, modeled after “What Home Is” by Ashley Hope Perez. It rolls beautifully, linking languid descriptions of home as “algae-green cow ponds and apple pickin with aunts in Mawmaw’s backyard” and “beagle barks that bounce off the hills” before pivoting with “But home is also / changing from my binder to my bra in the gas station bathroom.” Despite its harder moments, the poem closes with a note of undeniable love, honoring the “zero-stoplight town” the poet calls home, the place “that holds me with hands that are calloused but not callous, flawed but tender, learnin, reachin.”

Carver rightly identifies the common thread of this collection when he writes, “Love is, over and over again, what the speakers in Queer Communion seek to create and find. It is the lens the spirit needs to witness truth lurking behind the brokenness of this world.” This love — for place, for themselves, even for those who have done them harm — is the guiding force of Queer Communion, a welcome set of voices, raised together, each contributing their own part.