Jensen Smith is the Events and Communications Coordinator at Alliance for Full Acceptance (AFFA), an LGBTQ+ rights organization based in South Carolina.
I was too little to recall, but I hear there were yellow butterflies at my first birthday party. Eastern Tiger Swallowtails, no doubt. At my college graduation, Palmetto trees framed photos of me with my degree. My whole life, I’ve been surrounded by the glorious and burdened beauty of the South. I remember playing in puddles of red clay, and seeing the heat create cracks in the mud at my family’s junkyard. My favorite people in the world smell like home; scents of red dirt and mountain air and a day of hard work wafting towards me as they walk through the back door in the evening. 
My life has been shaped by the South – much like continental collisions, erosion, and the tectonic plates shaped our land. I grew up attending church, riding go carts, playing make believe under the shade of summer foliage. I learned to swim in freshwater lakes, learned to drive in rusty old pickups on highways emblazoned with orange tiger paws. I learned to love another person under starry skies lit by the Big Dipper.
Of course, just like this land – it wasn’t easy getting from there to here. Just as thousands of years of rain has dulled our mountain ranges, years of bigotry dulled my queerness. Growing up, I learned that taking a woman as a lover was something to be hidden – like crawdaddies hiding in their underwater caves from a fisherman. No longer. Now, it is not just my right, but my duty as a Southern queer person to be out – to be proud of not just who I am, but where I come from.
I remember running out into the woods on our property when I realized I was gay – and realized what being gay would mean for me, living here. It was freshly springtime, with busy bees floating on the passing breeze. There were wild onions poking up around me and the trees were finally putting on their greenest drag. My grandmother had told me that I wouldn’t be shunned in her home. My grandmother, who grew up playing in the same creeks and hollers I played in, who was raised in a devoutly Baptist home. I felt very heavy and very light at the same time.
I consider myself lucky that I have never been shunned by my family for being gay- and I certainly have never been shunned by the foothills I call home. Table Rock, looming to the west on my horizon, has never looked down its rocky nose at me. The oak trees and their acorns have never called me a slur. The shark teeth I hunt for on Kiawah Island have never whispered about my damnation. No, the South has never passed judgement against me.
The South is my home. I learned to walk and talk and sit on the commode here. If I have the privilege of growing old, it will be in these hills and hollers. My life – though short by many standards – has been spent wandering through mountain trails and beachy shores. I’ve travelled – yes. But I know I’ve gotten home when I see the familiar peaks of the Blue Ridge Mountains rising above the skyline, when I can smell sweet tea brewing on the stovetop.
The South is my home. I learned to walk and talk and sit on the commode here. If I have the privilege of growing old, it will be in these hills and hollers.
My friends and deepest loved ones contemplate leaving this land. The place of our forefathers, where our kin has laid to rest for generations, and they want to leave. I simply will not. I couldn’t leave this place, as it will always be in me. In my drawl, in the way I cook my cornbread, in the way I search for Mountain Laurels every spring.
Southerners have fought – generation after generation – from times before we called this place “the South”. When this was simply and rightfully Cherokee land, Catawba land, and Waccamaw land, it was fought for. When this was land commandeered into a colony, and when this land rejoined the Union, it was fought for, tooth and nail. Why should we not fight for it now?
Of course I will stay and fight for our home. No one born and raised here gives up easily. We’re tough – bred with the coal they mine from our mountains lit inside our chests. No man in a suit, waving a gavel around in a stuffy room can tell me that I do not belong here. The movement did not start here – our sisters who threw the first bricks in the cold, unforgiving North have lit our way. But the fight certainly cannot end here. Not with us.
Of course I will stay and fight for our home. No one born and raised here gives up easily. We’re tough – bred with the coal they mine from our mountains lit inside our chests.
Everything about me has the scent of red dirt and mountain air and a day of hard work. I wake up every morning and hear our Carolina Wrens singing me hello, and go to bed listening to tree frogs and bullfrogs croaking goodnight. My people – Southerners and queer folks – are not meant to be estranged. We’re not meant to hide away from each other in our separate boxes on a shelf. We’re meant to be out, proud, fighting for our home – together. The fight will be hard – yes. But what Southerner ever shied away from a fight worth having?
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