In my fantasies, another semi-closeted babe would see my patch while I was having coffee on the quad, and she’d immediately know I was gay and we’d become friends and possibly make out somewhere safe and away from hetero eyes. They moved away.Īs I, a very stubborn person, realized I was gay and there was nothing I could do about it, I decided I was going to do what I could to safely assert my identity, even if it was just a small patch on my bag. Later, when I was in high school, a house belonging to a pair of lesbians in my town was set on fire, and the couple, along with their young child, escaped out a window. It wasn’t just a horrifying instance of virulent homophobia and hatred it was a cautionary tale for those of us in the West and Midwest who thought we had the right to be who we are like those coastal, city queers. Then, those men killed Matthew Shepard in Wyoming. Everything that made a boy or man uncomfortable was “gay.” An openly lesbian high school athlete was met with a chorus of “Dyke! Dyke! Dyke!” from the opposing crowd at a basketball game in town. This message came through loud and clear from the church pews, and from my peers. As a sixth-grader, I watched my state’s Legislature make same-sex marriage unconstitutional, and I remember bumper stickers crossing out two woman symbols intertwined with one another.
I’d learned early on as a young teen in Montana that the world as I understood it in rural areas was not kind to a visible LGBT community. It didn’t have rainbows that would be too obvious.
Let’s get down to brass tacks: No one in Helena, Montana was looking at the patch on my backpack, and if they were, they likely weren’t recognizing it as an indie music label created by a - hold on, let me check to make sure the coast is clear before I say this - queer person who makes queer music. The patch wasn’t much bigger than a quarter, but in my 19-year-old mind, it was a huge, pulsating target I was attaching to my backpack. I’d purchased an Ani Difranco album, you see, and it was supposed to come with a small patch sporting the RBR logo: a woman in a dress and combat boots flexing her arms above her shorn head.
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