Tagged: strange fruit

Vicco, Ky., brought national attention to the state this week by becoming the smallest town in the United States to pass a fairness law. Like many of you (we're guessing), we'd never even heard of Vicco until the news broke. So we invited Fairness Campaign director Chris Hartman to join us this week and tell us more. 

"It's about three and a half hours east," Chris explains, "and several hundred feet up."

Hartman and others from the Fairness Coalition worked directly with Vicco leaders on the law. He said folks in Vicco are what we might call "non-traditional allies" who may not fit our idea of what LGBTQ-rights supporters are.

"But that may just be because we all have some inappropriate stereotypes about what rural Americans are like, about what Appalachian folks are like, and about what people who live in coal country are like," Hartman said.

It's a story we heard several times during WFPL's Defining Fairness series: a young person leaves his or her rural town for college in a bigger city, meets other LGBTQ folks, and comes out! But for some folks, when the holidays roll around and they head home for Christmas... they have to go back into the closet. 

This week we spoke with Dr. Stephanie Budge from UofL, who recently taught a workshop on coping with the holidays as an LGBTQ person. She says while some families do overtly antagonistic things (like using the wrong pronoun for trans folks, or refusing to let their LGBTQ family member bring a partner to holiday functions), what she hears about the most is simply ignoring. A young person might come out as queer to their family only for the response to be silence, and an unwillingness to acknowledge their identity.

Dr. Budge gave us some coping strategies we can all use during moments of holiday stress and family conflict, how to take full advantage of your chosen family's love when your family of origin doesn't support you, and how to tell when things are so bad or unsafe it might be better to skip going home altogether. 

The immigration portion of the second presidential debate got attention for what the candidates said, but also, for how they said it. Undocumented? Illegal? It made us wonder: How much do words matter? How does what we call someone affect how we think about and treat them?

The Louisville AIDS Walk is this Sunday, and for many, it's a time of solidarity and celebration. But AIDS activism in Louisville faces a big challenge: apathy. There are more people living with HIV in Louisville now than ever before, but the disease doesn't make the headlines it once did.