A Homo In the Heartland

How I wound up in Iowa

Maybe I should go back to the beginning and tell you how a big old genderqueer butch wound up in Iowa. In 2019, I’d accidentally fallen in love with a woman who feels about Iowa City the way I feel about Portland, Oregon. She taught at Michigan State in East Lansing for 30 years, retiring just two months after we started dating long-distance. She had always planned to move to back to Iowa—her heart home and where she’d completed her PhD—and bop back and forth between Lansing and Iowa City, waiting for a sign or feeling that told her which place harbored the better community for ageing in place.

She spun stories about the arts community in Iowa City: night after night of free live music within walking distance of the snug, oak-floored house she’d purchased on Bloomington Street. A bookstore to rival Powell’s—or at least Broadway Books—and literary events galore. I mean, Iowa City is lousy with writers because the Iowa Writers Workshop resides there, or here, rather. Oh, and John D’Agata runs the Nonfiction Writing Program (don’t get me started on why the Workshop only allows poets and fiction writers…that’s for another piece).

All throughout 2019 and most of 2020, the drumbeat of Iowa’s eventuality vibrated in my chest. I was born in Minneapolis, and three generations of my matrilineal line lived there. My father grew up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. But my parents met in 1960s San Francisco. They returned to Minneapolis to marry and start a family, but after three kids and seven years in Minneapolis, movers packed a giant Beacon Van Lines truck with the contents of a three-bedroom house and two cars, and drove the truck back to Northern California. My parents planned to return to the Midwest for summer visits and, ultimately, in pine boxes. “Those provincial beliefs would have killed you,” my mother once said.

So, in October, 2020, at the end of the first year—maybe the scariest year—of the pandemic, I moved halfway across the country to live Iowa City while at the same time pretending to not see this change coming. I said, how bad can it be in Iowa? In the Midwest? Even as I continued on with my locked-down life in Portland. We wore masks, I waved to friends from my balcony, we sat outside on separate park benches in order to visit, and I concocted my own hand sanitizer and packaged it in artisanal glass bottles. My writer pal and I created an online literary series with the goal of helping people find shelter in words from the pandemic raging around us. What I’m saying is, I lived in and with my community in Portland even as I lived alone in my townhouse, even as we were social distanced from each other.

Moving during the first year of a pandemic is probably not a good idea. Moving to a blue pinprick in a sea of red, 1900.8 miles from the Anarchist Jurisdiction of Portland, Oregon is probably an even worse idea.

But there I was (or, maybe, here I am): in Iowa City, Iowa.

I spent a long time berating myself for it. For not considering more deeply the implications of moving away from everything and everyone that I knew. For not better researching the politics of the state. For not speaking up and saying I had changed my mind when I saw this May 2020 headline from the local paper: “Opening for Business: Soon you can dine out, work out, and get your hair cut.” The header itself was in 72 pt bold sans serif. The subhead was likely still 60 pt. The large lede at the top of the story read: “Iowa continues grimmest week yet for COVID-19 deaths.” Not even after this did I speak up and say we need to figure out a coastal-interior arrangement.

Instead, I willingly participated in the plans and dreams for the 131-year-old Iowa City farmhouse on a quarter-acre lot ringed with trees and a gently sloping lawn crying out for a civilized game of croquet and some gin and tonics. In my defense, however, I believe I heard my beloved say we’d do this for five years and then move back to the west coast. She believes she said five to ten years. Also, I came to realize that I held some old beliefs about the stillness of Midwest summers and the (false) idea that humidity, thunderstorms, and cicadas would quiet my busy mind, ease my busy self.

Almost immediately I felt out of place here. The list of reasons is long—some relate to my own implicit bias, some to COVID lockdown in a house with not enough doors, some with physical and psychological safety. I could not pinpoint the knowing that told me Iowa was unsafe, but I felt it. People weren’t overtly homophobic or trans-masc phobic, at least not in Iowa City. I simply felt too big, too liberal, too coastal. I think I’m louder than the average Iowan (basketball games notwithstanding). I certainly drop the F-bomb more often. If some car does not accelerate fast enough after the stoplight turns green, I lay on my horn. I have no problem telling anyone who asks that had I known that 72% of water segments classified as impaired by the Iowa Department of Natural Resources have remained in that classification I would have never moved here. I can’t kayak, I can’t paddleboard, I just can’t even.

After I got here, I mostly refused to enter small town gas stations to use the restroom because I didn’t want the clerk to shout over the donut case and the pizza-go-round, “Hey! That’s the women’s room.” I didn’t want to explore the state and its small towns and get my ass kicked by some homophobic heartlander, visions of Brandon Teena danced in my head. I didn’t want to go to museums during the first two years of the pandemic because the state of Iowa did NOT have a mask mandate. (In fact, the governor was suing the mayor of Iowa City for instituting a mask mandate.) I didn’t want to—period end of sentence.

Four-and-a-half years later, I’ve found some queerdos and people who will go deep fast. I’ve discovered that Iowa City has a town-and-gown mentality with writers, but nevertheless made a few literary friends. And I learned that wearing a Carhartt jacket here is not ironic, but probably keeps me safe, identifying me more with farmers than faithless hipsters. And I find that when I’m in Portland, I miss Iowa City. I miss my wife and animals, of course. But I also miss the ability to walk most places, the ever-changing weather, the different plants blooming in the yard, our big back deck, and the fact that if you ask, almost anyone will meet you for coffee.

But I can’t get past the politics. I met a new friend recently. She told me about being in Southern California earlier in the month. She said it was the first time she told a waiter she was from the Midwest and didn’t call out Iowa by name. She actually said, “I just couldn’t. I didn’t want to be judged on the politics of the state.”

I understand that. I cringe a little each time I tell someone on the west coast that I spend more than half the year in Iowa, dubbed by the Washington Post “the Florida of the North.” Admittedly, part of this is simply coastal elite snobbery: the idea that nothing great could possibly happen in the middle of a sea of genetically modified corn and soybean fields. But most of it stems from the politics. Even my cousin one state to the North has texted me to see how my beloved and I are “handling the politics” and when we’re moving to Minneapolis instead.

I wish I knew.