Nice People Live Here

As posted to my personal, mostly-abandoned Facebook page on Monday, September 19…

So, before my brother David A Kelly died of a fentanyl overdose in 2017, he posted about feeling uncomfortable about 24E Group Fitness in our hometown of Gardendale, AL showing Fox News on their television along with the other sports channels. He said it was time to get a new gym, but I don't know that he ever did.

The fact that David was even attempting to work out is an indication to me that he was taking his mental health seriously and trying to get better. At least that's some hope his overdose was accidental.

So, I go to that same 24e Fitness in Gardendale this morning to work out… because I’m feeling frazzled and need to work out for my mental health. I'm keeping my parents dog while they're on vacation, and I've been staying at their house. Trying to be of service.

So, I pay the day rate and go to work out. And there is Fox News. It triggered major anxiety in me remembering how my brother felt so alienated with that on the TV when he was just trying to hang on in this community.  On top of that, Candace Owens led an attack on me, personally, in January of this year calling me a pedophile and child molester because I ask people to have compassion and understanding for LGBTQ+ youth who either have the bravery I never had to come out or can’t try to hide it, which is what I consciously did every day of my life until I could leave Gardendale two months after turning 18 years old. This is the same Gardendale written about in this New York Times piece that would go on to be included in the foreward to the book The 1619 Project, which Candace Owens doesn’t want you reading either.

I started out my workout on the rowing machine, and just thought I needed to get past it. Excusing it and saying, "They don't mean to be hateful to me," but I legit felt like the people behind me on the treadmills were staring at me and could just tell I was the enemy.  I knew I hadn’t worn my gay sunglasses into the gym and was code switching as best I could so I didn’t come off as gay. But I seriously started getting short of breath and just panicked.

I’ve told mom and dad I won’t be coming to Gardendale as we get closer to the 2024 election, but I have been trying to see people here as much as possible while the culture wars of a national election are still a ways away. But they're never gone. We are in a mid term, so that's why you see all of this ratcheted up now -- even in that supposedly untouchable world of country music I work in.

So, I decided to just go make the request to see if they could change the channel from Fox News at the gym because I really needed to exercise. I didn't come from a place of judgment, but I did relay my personal experience. I explained that Fox News commentators have come after me personally and that had led to death threats.  The girl behind the counter seemed understanding, but the cishet white man running the place told her they couldn’t change the channel from FOX News.

That's when I got my money back and seriously bolted in full fight or flight mode. I couldn't figure out how to unlock the door to get out. The girl was trying to tell me where the green button was to unlock the door, but I was so frazzled and scared as if those people who follow Candace who threatened to anally rape me with a broom stick and then stick it down my throat so I could taste my own blood were literally behind me.

I’m writing this in the parking lot of the Target thinking about going in to buy some free weights so I can exercise at my parents house alone. I really want to just leave now. I’m a 41 year old married man with a great job, and host of friends and a purpose in life. But this experience in my hometown just reduced me back to being a scared 8 year old who had just been called a gay slur all over again.

This is what is being perpetuated across the right wing machine and at the church I grew up in, Gardendale First Baptist Church, every time they speak out against marginalized people.  I went and watched that church’s 4th of July service online  and the sermon taught by the pastor there was literally like watching Fox News. Lies about the founding fathers’ faith not backed up in any of their own writings. No reckoning with slavery. And terrorizing queer people as part of the “liberal left” (that phrase was used from the pulpit) and using them as political pawns instead of actual human beings who are loved by Jesus Christ.

I don’t recommend you watch much of it, but the continued mind control of the pastor telling the congregation to run away from anyone making them think for themselves, as if God couldn’t handle their questions, is chilling. For anyone telling me this is just one service and they can’t be judged on it, well, I sat through 18 years of hearing this same exact message of exclusion and anti-intellectualism growing up. So, don’t tell me the sky isn’t blue. And yet my parents still attend this church.

So, this is why I don’t like to be in my hometown. This is the place where the bigotry of Christian nationalism still has access to the core of my being, and I just can’t take it anymore.

I do want to say thank you to lights in my life like Amy Grant and Preston Shipp and David Dark and Derek Webb and Linford Detweiler and Semler and Brandi Carlile and Rissi Palmer and Holly G and Maren Morris and my folks at Apple Music and 92NY who let me know I’m not alone. And that I’m fully loved by my higher power and queer at the same time.

Also realizing I’m just now connecting the dots between this experience and some of the good trouble I got into with Amy Grant last year after she appeared on Proud Radio. See below! I’m gonna split hell wide open, y’all! HA HA HA HA