I have friends who moved far, far away because “the south is so oppressive and backwards,” and I wonder: Who is gonna fix it if we all leave? I played this awesome space in Seattle called the Vera Project. It’s a youth center where they ask for preferred pronouns [of attendees], and volunteer teens run the soundboard, and I thought I could move there and work there. Then I thought, “Memphis could use one of these.” Somebody has to start it. Someone has to stay and bring something new. I choose to stay in the south because I think it’s redeemable.

Being from Memphis, other people’s skewed perception of it really bums me out—like, “Nashville is so cool, and then you guys have Graceland and a high infant death rate.” I grew up there, I think when you grow up somewhere you familiarize yourself with the culture of the city besides just going to Beale Street and drinking a big-ass beer. When I think of music in Memphis, I think of Smith7 and Midtown and Otherlands and Republic, which just closed sadly.

I didn’t grow up on country and blues, I was just a kid listening to VH1 and then I realized I needed to expand my musical horizons. Now I have a deep appreciation for southern heritage music. I played “So Lonesome I Could Cry” in Oxford. I love Hank Williams, he’s the original emo kid. Some of his lyrics remind me of, like, Promise Ring lyrics.

The touring we have done as Forrister was primarily in the south, in places that had pockets of progressive mindsets, which is something that is happening more. Instead of moving away to a more accommodating market, people try to start shows where they are. We played podunk towns in Alabama and Louisiana. There’s a weirdly large appreciation for emo music in Chattanooga. But that’s been a big change [with my solo touring]. I think of my music as being for sad alt kids with too many feelings, but then I play shows and get an audience of folks that wouldn’t normally go to shows. So there are things that I might usually feel at liberty to say, and when I’m in the south, I wonder if all these people know I’m gay, and I wonder if I’m at liberty to make a comment about it.

Ultimately, I’m not going to change my behavior to accommodate that fear. I would rather be authentic and risk making people uncomfortable. That’s a boldness engendered in me by the people I’m surrounded by. I have this rainbow guitar strap, and I used to switch guitar straps when I played at church, and now I know I have a home there—they don’t care. But it was an internal fear of being perceived as too gay—until I started wondering, “Why am I afraid of being too much the thing that I am?” Why am I afraid to buy Doc Martens because I’m afraid someone would call me a dyke? Yeah, that word would hurt my feelings, but I like how I look in Doc Martens. It’s not like I get on stage and introduce myself as a queer musician, but anyone who reads anything about me knows I’m queer.

One of my friends at Holy Cross [Baker’s church in Murfreesboro, Tennessee] is a social worker, and she sent me this graph that showed the homosexual populations in the U.S. overlapping a graph of laws with negative impacts for homosexuals. There was a disproportionately higher instance of homosexuality in the south. And I wonder why. That sucks. I should find a better way to say it, but perhaps it warrants the honest exasperation of “that sucks.” We are here in such high numbers, and yet we are encountering the most opposition. Maybe it’s higher reported because it’s reactionary. We can’t agree to disagree when people’s lives are at risk. It’s important. If we try to behave ourselves into a society where it’s a non-issue, we’re assuming an ideal that doesn’t exist... yet.