The South raised me in contradiction. It taught me tenderness and toughness in the same breath — how to love the land that sometimes refuses to love you back. I’ve spent years learning to hold that paradox in my body: queer, multiracial, nonbinary, and still fiercely Southern.

To love the South is to wrestle with it. It’s waking up to news cycles that make you question your safety, then walking outside to neighbors who wave, offer you tomatoes, and say, “We take care of our own.” It’s to exist between hostility and hospitality — to see how easily one becomes the other depending on who you are and who you love.

The Politics of Home

Kentucky, like much of the South, is thick with contradiction. We’re watching policies pass that erase trans existence from classrooms, that turn healthcare into a battleground, and that tell queer youth they don’t belong. It creates tension so heavy you can feel it hum under your skin.

And yet — I stay. Not because it’s easy, but because leaving would feel like letting go of the fight for transformation. I work every day as a community advocate, helping people find stability, dignity, and purpose in systems not designed for us. I’ve seen how policy becomes personal when you’re helping someone fill out a job application, or sitting with a young queer person trying to imagine a future in a state that keeps trying to legislate them out of existence.

Still, I refuse to see Kentucky only through its pain. I see the resistance — queer artists, Black farmers, drag performers, teachers, parents, organizers, people like me who believe the South is worth saving because we’re already remaking it.

The Outlaw Spirit

When I think about the South, I hear music first — outlaw country, where rebellion and compassion meet. Artists like Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, Dolly Parton, and today, Tyler Childers and Orville Peck, sing for the misfits, the poor, the addicted, and the tender-hearted.

Outlaw country isn’t conservative nostalgia — it’s rebellion with empathy. Cash sang in prisons because he saw humanity where others saw sin. Parton built her legacy on radical kindness and working-class feminism. And when Orville Peck croons about queer love behind that iconic mask, he reclaims a genre that once exiled us.

That’s the South I love — the one that still hums with rebellion dressed as tenderness.

Transforming Through Love

In a world where queer people are constantly politicized, our love becomes an act of protest. I know this intimately — as a queer, nonbinary person in an interracial relationship, I often feel caught between worlds. The gaze from both sides can be suffocating. But I practice what transformative justice has taught me: that love is not escapism; it’s evolution.

Our liberation won’t come from winning debates. It will come from reimagining belonging — from refusing to let hatred define the borders of our hearts.

bell hooks wrote that “love is an action, never simply a feeling.” For me, loving the South means holding it accountable while still believing in its capacity to heal. It’s standing on red clay ground and saying: I belong here too.

What Deserves More Attention

We need more stories that center the intersections — the queer Black farmer, the trans coal miner’s kid, the Appalachian artist making protest art in a church basement. The federal and corporate powers profit off division, but our shared struggles — poverty, loss, hope — are where solidarity lives.

It’s time to name capitalism as the system that benefits from our separation. The same forces that deny queer rights also deny fair wages and healthcare. The same wealth that funds political hate is built on our labor. Our power has always come from community, from remembering that we are the beating heart of this country — not its problem, but its pulse.

 

A Love Letter to the South

I don’t write this out of anger. I write this out of devotion. The South taught me how to survive, but queerness taught me how to live — how to love without apology. My hope is that we continue to create spaces where these two lessons intersect: the fierce endurance of the South and the radical tenderness of queer life.

To be queer here is to live like an outlaw — not outside the law, but beyond its limits. It’s to look at the mess of our history and decide that we are still worthy of belonging. It’s to believe, as Orville Peck once sang, that there’s beauty in the shadows.

This is my love letter to the South: not blind, not easy, but honest. I love this place enough to demand it become what it could be — compassionate, collective, and free.

Author bio: My name is Sophia Lee (they/she), a queer, Black multiracial Southern writer and community advocate based in Louisville, Kentucky. With a background in social justice and over five years in grassroots organizing and content creation, my work explores identity, desire, trauma, and radical healing. I hold an MA in Social Justice & Community Organizing and am currently pursuing a PhD in Transformative Social Change.