Trevor Ladner knew he was queer before he knew he was gay. He enjoyed dressing up, playing with dolls, and other activities that members of his family and rural community in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi considered “girly.” When his sexuality became more clear to himself despite not having the knowledge or language to identify what he was experiencing, he started watching Youtube videos of queer media personalities living their lives in LA. Trevor wanted the same for himself. 

“It just seemed like a dream to me to have this cosmopolitan life and have the freedom that they had,” he said during an interview at a local coffee shop in West Hollywood.  

Being raised in a conservative rural part of Mississippi and as the son of an evangelical pastor, Trevor grew up in a life with many restrictions.   

“I went to a very small, private Christian school that was at my church and it was very much like Billy Graham fundamentalism,” he said recalling his early memories back home. “We only listened to American Family Radio. I wasn’t allowed to listen to secular music. There were a lot of TV shows I wasn’t allowed to watch, like Harry Potter, or anything with witches or vampires. So I was very sheltered when I was young.”

His family eventually left the church which gave him the chance to explore new types of media. “I was able to be more exposed to pop culture and have a little bit more freedom,” he shared during a lengthy conversation about his upbringing. 

Like many young adult consumers at the time, Trevor started reading books like Twilight and the Hunger Games. His media diet eventually evolved to include more queer content, like RuPaul’s Drag race. He would soon discover that these fantasy worlds he would escape to in books and on TV were closer than he realized.

“When I turned 16, I was doing musical theater. I had a friend who was in the show I was in with me, who was a little bit older. He had played Angel in Rent before that, so he had already done drag before. And one day he, like, brought me a pair of fake boobs, and was like, ‘take these home.’” 

Trevor did. And out of sight from his family, he began to explore things he had only seen on TV.

“I got in drag in my closet. And then a few months later, he took me to a gay bar in Gulfport, Mississippi. I was 16. He was probably like 20. They didn’t ID us because we were in drag. So we just went and had a blast. And that was mind blowing for me, as my first time seeing a live drag performer and going to an explicitly queer space outside my hometown.”

The seed was planted in Trevor’s mind. If this was what he could experience in a nearby town that was slightly larger, he figured that meant there was an even larger world out there with even more opportunities to connect with his queer identity. Living his authentic life was no longer a fantasy to escape into, but a reality worth pursuing. 

Trevor decided to go to Harvard after graduating high school, sacrificing the closeness he had worked to build within his family and conservative community in favor of a place he hoped wouldn’t require a negotiation for acceptance. Unexpectedly, this wasn’t the case. 

“As soon as I got into college, way more than my queerness, I felt so marginalized as a first-gen student from the Deep South,” Trevor said. “This narrative that the South was all kind of like dumb, racist people, which just ignores the demographic diversity of the South. There’s the issue of the South being regarded as this place where progressive change isn’t possible.”

The trend continued when he eventually made his way to Los Angeles, the type of large metropolitan city he had long sought to land in as a young boy back in Mississippi. 

“It’s often like,  if I say, ‘I’m from Mississippi,’ then they’re like, ‘Oh, how horrible was your childhood?’” Trevor said of the assumptions people he often meets in L.A. make about him and his complex upbringing. 

Trevor’s experience is one echoed by countless young adults with similar backgrounds. Oftentimes, these people feel a strong desire to leave their past and hometown behind and radically embrace the potential they see in urban areas elsewhere. Large cities entice them with the unspoken promise that their grief will automatically be relieved if only they’re brave enough to accept the call. 

But all too often is the case that when they arrive in a place long imagined to be a safe haven, many experience the feeling of coming up empty handed once these places don’t fulfill the expectations that’ve been spoonfed to them by popular culture. They feel tricked and naive, caught in a trap that forces them to choose between a community that’s outright unwelcoming or a community that feigns acceptance. The transition doesn’t mean the grief is gone, it’s more so replaced by a sense of guilt. The yearning to leave home simply transforms into a yearning to go back. 

“It’s hard because I do have a lot of nostalgia for being back home, but I also know that when I’m there, there are things that I miss out on from being [in Los Angeles]. The things that I would like to do in the world aren’t [in Oklahoma], which makes me feel kind of guilty for leaving,” said Kelso Becktol, a 27-year-old Ph.D candidate who moved to L.A. in 2017. 

Originally from El Reno, Oklahoma, Kelso has found that L.A. is not as accepting as it’s typically made out to be on the internet and through popular media. The people they’ve connected with in the area tend to share a similar attitude toward queer people with rural backgrounds, such as themself. It resembles an unnecessary form of pity.

“They almost look down on you,” Kelso said of the assumptions people had made to them in conservation with queer transplants to the city. “It’s ‘You’re not like us, you’re not as educated as us, you’re not as progressive.’”

And while this misplaced sentiment may convey the idea that these people have Kelso’s best interest at heart, Kelso has also witnessed a distinct difference in the types of values and degree of empathy among those residing in rural versus urban spaces. Essentially, they feel that rural people are less inclined to ignore the misfortune of those around them.

“I think there’s a thing that happens when you live in an urban space that you get so used to seeing all the inhumane things that are happening in cities” said Kelso of the contrast they experienced and their own journey of becoming desensitized to issues like homelessness in ways that would have been uncharacteristic back in their hometown. “In rural spaces, you all need each other. I found I needed everybody in my community. I did need my neighbor who was going to teach me how to fix my tire, even though I didn’t agree with them politically.”

To Kelso, some people in L.A. are far more concerned with their image and hold a much more individualistic mindset in comparison to the people in their hometown. Trevor has noticed a similar difference when exploring L.A.’s drag scene. Growing up in Mississippi, drag shows were community-centric and focused on providing the best entertainment for crowd members who may be unfamiliar with the artform. In Los Angeles, Trevor found that drag queens are much more competitive and can sometimes be more focused on the economic opportunity they’ll be provided with as a result of their continued performances. 

Since making their moves to L.A. from their smaller enclaves and settling into new communities, Kelso and Trevor both say they have grown to appreciate their roots and the day to day life of their towns bonded together by proximity. It was a great risk to leave home with the thinking many parts of their lives would improve. 

In some ways it did. 

But at the same time their nostalgia for home materialized in ways they didn’t expect.   

They missed the deep meaning and intimacy of the relationships formed rurally, but after moving to an urban area, they encountered the bittersweet realization that they’d go to bat for the same community that might not always do the same for them in return. Nearly half of LGBTQ youth in rural areas find that their communities are somewhat or very unaccepting of the identity, yet there’s still an urge instilled in some of these queer folk to defend the honor of their hometowns when it’s challenged by other queer folk who don’t understand what life is like in rural towns. 

When Trevor is confronted with skepticism and judgment he responds defiantly: “I’m a proud Mississippi Gulf Coast native,” he says with a sense of pride that he began to experience when members of a community he revered as welcoming began to pass judgment on all the things he cherished in his childhood. 

Trevor, who had long sought to flee to a larger city, has found himself defending a place in ways he could not have imagined years earlier. 

The choice presents itself for rurally grown queer people: Do you live a life of “public service” by staying put and investing your time into being a trailblazer or agent of change for a culture that may or may not be receptive? Or do you take the risk of leaving to live a life you’ve dreamt of although it may end up being just as harmful? Either way, the decision inherently comes with sacrificing some piece of themselves in order to simply pursue feelings of love, acceptance and joy. 

“How fucking devastating is that choice?” Kelso said bluntly. 

No matter which side the millions of queer people living in rural areas choose, they’re faced with misunderstanding. The solution? There may not be one, but recognizing the unique position rural queer people are placed in and granting them the chance to write their own story free from both prejudice and preconceived pity could be a productive place to start. 

“They’ll be like, ‘How do we help them get out?’” said Kelso of people unfamiliar with the needs of queer people experiencing the rural lifestyle. “But not everybody wants to leave. There is this idea, to live a successful life, to live a safe life, to live a like, an open life, where you get to really be who you are, you have to be in an urban space. And I don’t think that that is the case. Why can’t we create space and allow space for those stories to exist that maybe offer us something new?”

Growing up, Trevor dreamed of moving L.A. to find freedom. Ironically, a sense of freedom is what he misses from his childhood.

“When I was a kid, I would go on drives at midnight to the beach,” Trevor said, reminiscing on memories while traffic sped by in a busy L.A. neighborhood. It’s not lost on him that something he once sought and thought could only be found across the country was available to him in rural Mississippi all along.

“Driving from rural southern Mississippi down to the coast, and it’s just a long highway with no one driving on it. I would just blast Lana Del Rey. And sometimes I miss that to an extent, it’s a freedom of having space and time.”