It's been more than five years since I last lived south of the Mason-Dixon Line, but even still, some nights — if it's hot enough outside, if I leave my bedroom window open, if a firefly drifts by on a breeze, my dreams loan my Southern accent back to me. My Texas drawl returns. The G's and D's on the ends of my words dissolve faster than sugar in a pitcher of sweet tea. The "o" sounds round themselves out. And the word "y'all" has room enough for all of us.

"Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition," James Baldwin famously wrote in Giovanni's Room. I'm inclined to agree. Being born in Tennessee, raised in Texas, and college-educated in Kentucky with a brief detour through Georgia, it's not lost on me that the condition now known as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) was once simply referred to, by Civil War–era physicians, as "nostalgia."

What I'm saying is, current San Francisco zip code be damned, I'm a Southerner — kind of.

As I've written before, I left the South because I saw no way to be my absolute self while living there. Like so many legendary children, I headed for New York City as soon as I could afford it. Five years and myriad lessons learned later, I don't regret my decision. I do, however, regret the lack of nuance. When I left the South, I did so because I hated it — all of it. "The South" was a monolith, a singular horrifying terrain and idea. But places are just as complicated as people. The tendency to write entire states or regions off because of virulent social politics — Hello, Texas! Hi there, Virginia! — strikes me now not only as immature but cold.

Last year, North Carolina voted by a margin of 61%–39% to pass a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage (which was already prohibited in the state). I followed the news, hoping against hope that President Obama would speak out in favor of marriage equality before the vote. (He did not.) The only thing that stung worse than the sheer embarrassment of watching another state write hate into its law books was reading the deluge of tweets like these in response…