October was LGBTQ History month thanks to a history teacher from rural Missouri. Rodney Wilson made history in 1994 when he came out as gay to his St. Louis high school classroom, not far from where he grew up in rural Potosi, Missouri.
August 1994 cover of The Riverfront Times, the local St. Louis newspaper. (Photo courtesy of Rodney Wilson)
Wilson didn’t plan on coming out to his students that day. But while explaining the pink triangles used to forcibly identify queer people in concentration camps during the Holocaust, he felt compelled to tell his students that had he lived there at that time, he might have been marked with one too.
Wilson’s coming out sparked backlash in Missouri and across the country. But Wilson remained firm in his efforts to humanize himself and his community, going on to establish a nationally recognized month commemorating LGBTQ+ history.
He was not alone then, nor is he now. Across the state, queer Missourians–teachers, historians, journalists, and ordinary people–have fought for decades to document and preserve the stories of their peers, elders, and ancestors that would otherwise be erased or unheard. The people continuing the fight are speaking up about why it matters more than ever.
In the Classroom
For Wilson, coming out to his students meant becoming something that he never had as a kid in Potosi: an openly queer teacher.
“Growing up, I didn’t know a single LGBTQ person,” Wilson told the Daily Yonder in an interview. “There was no one out in that town that I was aware of.”
Wilson and his parents pose outside in Potosi during the summer. (Photo courtesy of Rodney Wilson)
This doesn’t mean, of course, that queer people didn’t exist in Potosi. They were always there. “Even on television, queer people came into our living rooms through television in the 1970s. We just didn’t recognize them,” Wilson said.
Today, Wilson teaches full-time at Mineral Area College in rural Park Hills, Missouri, a school he used to attend as a student in the 1980s. Back then, he said, the current infrastructure didn’t exist for LGBTQ+ students and faculty.
Throughout Wilson’s teaching career, he has included LGBTQ+ history in curricula.
To Wilson, this isn’t a radical idea. It’s just telling the truth. “When we talk about the 1950s, we talk about McCarthyism and the Lavender Scare,” he explained. “When we talk about the 1960s, we talk about the women’s movement, the Native American [movement], the Latino [movement], and the African-American [movement], and the LGBTQ movement.”
While recognizing the positive change in his community in recent decades, Wilson still sees work to be done. He dreams of intentional spaces for queer folks in the rural area where he grew up and currently resides, including its own chapter of PFLAG, a national LGBTQ+ advocacy group.
Spaces for queer people should be as ingrained in the community as it’s nickname, “mineral area,” which was coined after the influence of lead in the region. “The school I teach at is a Mineral Area College. I grew up on Mineral Street. I used to pick blackberries in Mineral Point,” Wilson said. “We need a mineral area PFLAG,” he concluded.
Beyond educating people about LGBTQ+ history, Wilson feels passionately about electing public officials who understand it. There is much work to be done on this front too, Wilson said. Representatives in the Republican-controlled Missouri Senate and House have maintained a steady siege on LGBTQ+ civil rights in recent years, focusing their aim primarily on transgender people. Beyond restricting queer rights, they have also aimed to silence queer history, forcing the removal of an exhibit on LGBTQ+ history from the state capitol in 2021.
From the local to national level, Wilson does not feel that his government officials represent him or the other LGBTQ+ people in the county. “I think that’s one of the struggles that we who live in rural areas have,” Wilson said. “We’re not well represented.”
Wilson is working to change that. “We’re really trying to make sure every race is contested now,” he said. And after the Missouri House passed a new gerrymandered congressional map in May of this year designed to ensure more Republican seats in the 2026 midterm elections, Wilson and 85 other St. Francois County residents took to the streets.
“We’re here today to stand up and remind our neighbors that there is dissent,” Wilson said on the steps of the St. Francois County courthouse a few days after the bill passed. “There are people here in St. Francois County who disagree.”
Wilson holds a sign while protesting at the St. Francois County Courthouse Square. (Photo courtesy of Rodney Wilson)
Though Wilson feels unrepresented in the halls of government, he has found community in St. Francois County. In his neighborhood of not quite 60 homes, he knows several openly queer folks. “You can absolutely find community now,” he said, something that his younger self growing up in Potosi would have never imagined.
Wilson returned home to Potosi in June of 2024 for the town’s very first pride event organized by a gay couple who owns a coffee shop in Potosi.
Going home to Potosi, even for pride, feels complicated. While Wilson said he didn’t have a bad childhood in Potosi, he doesn’t have rose-tinted lenses about his upbringing either. “[It’s] where I lived when this secret had to remain a secret, where I didn’t know any other LGBTQ people, where my father didn’t understand certainly initially what it meant to have a gay son,” Wilson said.
Wilson and his father in Potosi. (Photo courtesy of Rodney Wilson)
On the other hand, Potosi is home. The pride event was held at Wilson’s childhood park, the place where he once spent hundreds of hours playing little league baseball, swinging on the swingset, and splashing in the creek.
Photos: The first pride ever celebration in Potosi, Missouri in June 2024 [Photos by Hillary Hermann]
“It was deeply meaningful to be in that park where 40 or 50 years prior, no one would in any way dare speak a word about gay rights,” Wilson said.
It’s moments like these where Wilson finds it important to resist the narrative that the queer community is urban.
“We’re everywhere,” he said.
Even when queer people from rural places leave for a time, as Wilson did, they often come back.
“And some don’t leave at all. They want the peace and the quiet, the streams and the rivers, the trees and the katydids,” Wilson said.
The first pride ever celebration in Potosi, Missouri in June 2024. (Photos by Hillary Hermann)The first pride ever celebration in Potosi, Missouri in June 2024. (Photos by Hillary Hermann)The first pride ever celebration in Potosi, Missouri in June 2024. (Photos by Hillary Hermann)
For Wilson and other queer folks in rural areas, the answer to efforts to silence their histories and stifle their civil rights is not simply to leave for bluer pastures. The answer is to hunker down and invest in their communities.
In the Archives
For historian Stuart Hinds, archives are not places where old documents collect dust. They’re living, breathing places where stories come to life. In 2007, Hinds helped to found the Gay and Lesbian Archive of Mid-America (GLAMA) at the University of Missouri-Kansas City (UMKC). Hinds, who grew up in a town of about 6,000 in the Ozarks just 20 minutes north of the Arkansas border, created an archive that is a breathing product of the communities from which it was collected.
“It has been insanely successful beyond our wildest expectations,” Hinds told the Daily Yonder. Hinds has been pleasantly surprised by the volume of material the archive has received from the community, as well as the level of engagement with the archive by students, faculty, and community researchers.
“Young people are so hungry for these stories,” Hinds said, referring to the considerable interest amongst young people in both the archive and the queer American history class Hinds teaches at UMKC. “They want to know the stories of their ancestors.”
Hinds is not alone in his efforts to document these stories. Another spirited public historian is Steven Louis Brawley, who founded the St. Louis LGBT History Project in 2007, which works to compile collections from queer Missourians to put in local history organizations, archives, and museums. The goal, in Brawley’s words, is “queering the archives.”
Brawley’s fascination with history started in rural Branson, Missouri, where he lived part time growing up. A sixth-generation Missourian, Brawley took it upon himself as a child to become the family historian, using family reunions as an opportunity to discover and document his family’s journey into rural Missouri.
His historical lens turned toward LGBTQ+ communities when he started going to gay bars and parties as a young adult. “When I was out and about, I would encounter these elders, and they would tell me these stories,” he said.
He wishes he wrote more of them down. Whatever regret he has about that, he’s remedying it with the rigorous documentation he is doing now. Documenting queer history anywhere is meaningful to Brawley, but documenting it in the Midwest has particular importance. It’s too often the “flyover land,” he said – it gets skipped over in the broader national narrative of LGBTQ+ history in favor of coastal cities.
While much of Brawley’s and Hinds’s work focuses on the St. Louis and Kansas City areas, respectively, both historians are passionate about documenting queer history in surrounding rural communities. Their passion, in part, can be attributed to their instinct as dutiful historians to fill an archival gap in rural queer stories.
The gap does not exist because the stories don’t exist, said Wilson, who voiced similar concerns. “There are all sorts of queer people in rural areas who have collected the material of their lifetimes,” Wilson said. But due to personal or familial shame or just poor recordkeeping, too many queer rural stories have been erased or thrown away. Some, Brawley said, were “just never written down.”
The difficulty to obtain artifacts of rural queer life just makes them all the more precious. One cherished artifact within GLAMA’s collections is a 1976 footage reel of a queer philanthropic and social club throwing what Hinds calls a “pasture party” on a farm on the outskirts of Kansas City.
A lesbian rock band takes the stage at a 1976 pasture party on the rural outskirts of Kansas City, Missouri. (Photo from the Gay and Lesbian Archive of Mid-America the University of Missouri-Kansas City, courtesy of Stuart Hinds)
The party was thrown by the 10-400 Club, the name of which Hinds believes to refer to the address of the land where some of the parties were held. Although it’s difficult to tell the exact location of the parties from the sources available to Hinds, Hinds believes that, based on the address, they would have been located in what was a rural area at the time.
The footage depicts a celebration of both rural Midwestern life and queer life.
It begins with people playing classic Midwestern yard games like egg tosses and sack races. “It’s like 100 people spread out from each other, just down this hill, out in this field, tossing these eggs to each other. And eventually, you get down to the two people who are two couples who are battling it out, and then the one wins, and they get a big jug of vodka. Surprise!” Hinds said.
People participate in a sack race and egg toss at a 1976 pasture party. (Photo from the Gay and Lesbian Archive of Mid-America the University of Missouri-Kansas City, courtesy of Stuart Hinds)People participate in a sack race and egg toss at a 1976 pasture party. (Photo from the Gay and Lesbian Archive of Mid-America the University of Missouri-Kansas City, courtesy of Stuart Hinds)People participate in a sack race and egg toss at a 1976 pasture party. (Photo from the Gay and Lesbian Archive of Mid-America the University of Missouri-Kansas City, courtesy of Stuart Hinds)
Cut to a lesbian rock band with a woman playing drums on a makeshift stage constructed from what appears to be a wooden pallet. Cut to drag queen performing out in the middle of the field.
Drag queen Ray Rondell performs. (Photo from the Gay and Lesbian Archive of Mid-America the University of Missouri-Kansas City, courtesy of Stuart Hinds)
It all seemed so natural to Hinds. “It was natural to go out to a field and have a big party and do an egg toss or do a sack race or whatever. It was just part of what you did, living in a rural space,” he said. It was also natural for the people at the party to watch performances from queer members of their community.
After Hinds described the footage on an episode of comedian Caleb Hearon’s podcast “So True,” he explained that the footage illustrates a certain reality of coming of age in the rural Midwest: one that is tied to the landscape, to the people, and to cultural traditions that are not necessarily queer. Paradoxically, this feeling of connectedness to the land and culture often coexists with feelings of not belonging to it.
This resonated with Hearon, who grew up in rural Chillicothe, Missouri. In moments of doubting his belonging in the rural place where he grew up, Hearon said the pasture party footage is “evidence that that’s just not true.”
“We’ve always been here,” Hearon said to Hinds.
This is the power of studying queer rural history: cultivating a sense of belonging even in struggle.
Amidst rampant attacks on LGBTQ+ rights under the second Trump administration, Hinds believes this history has even more power. “For times like right now, those stories help us understand that what we’re experiencing now isn’t new – that our predecessors dealt with situations that were even uglier,” Hinds said.
“I feel like I’m standing on the shoulders of my Lavender ancestors,” Brawley said. “So I need to be strong and have the next generation stand on my shoulders.”
To Brawley, building strong shoulders to stand on means documenting the struggle in real time. “If there’s testimony in Jefferson City at the State Capitol related to anti-trans legislation, we need to make sure all those testimonials are preserved. If posters and flyers are made, we need to make sure to preserve that, ” said Brawley. It’s a “strategic form of activism,” he explained. Keeping a historical record helps society learn from history.
“Let’s say 50 years from now, there’s some more craziness going on. [Younger queer generations] can go back and say, hey, what did they do in 2025 when this happened? What happened in 1978 when this happened?” said Brawley.
“There’s a mentorship to history,” said Brawley. “If younger folks know what the elders went through, it’s kind of like, ‘We’ve been here before. We’re not saying it’s pretty, but this isn’t our first time at the rodeo.’”
In the Newsroom
A Gen-Z journalist from Mokane, Missouri, is working to learn and record the stories of her queer elders. While reporting at the Springfield News-Leader, the local paper in Springfield, Missouri, Greta Cross routinely covered the struggle and joy of local LGBTQ+ communities. Since moving to national news as a National Trending Reporter with USA Today, she continues to cover queer Missourians in her work.
“I really still make a point to connect with people who still live here who can represent the queer community for a national audience,” Cross told the Daily Yonder.
At every stage of reporting – from choosing a topic, to selecting people to interview, to framing her work – Cross is thinking about “the visibility that [she] didn’t have growing up [in Mokane].”
“Queer communities were never written about,” she said.
And when they are written about, Cross said, mainstream media outlets tend to focus myopically on stories of hardship. “Those hardships need to be discussed and reported on, of course. But there’s also queer joy happening in these spaces,” Cross said.
While Cross has reported on queer people who left rural areas for bigger city queer experiences, she also finds it important to write about the ones who have stayed. When there wasn’t a community already built for them, “they have to make that community for themselves.”
Cross is documenting some of those communities in her upcoming podcast series “Tucked Away: Drag Communities in Rural Missouri.” Hosted and produced by Cross, the podcast’s three episodes will trace her tour of drag bars and their communities across small-town southeastern Missouri.
Along the way, Cross visited the oldest gay bar in Missouri. It’s not in a downtown area of St. Louis or Kansas City with a glitzy sign out front. As with many of the bars Cross visited, you won’t find it if you don’t know what you’re looking for. It’s on the second story of a daycare in small-town Cape Girardeau, with a gravel parking lot out back. Off the beaten path, unmarked.
Smoking was still allowed in some of the bars Cross visited, evoking another era, allowing her to imagine what it might have been like for people who came to the bar decades ago.
“Missouri has such a rich drag history,” Cross said. “There’s a lot of stories.”
Each episode of ‘Tucked Away” will feature some of those stories, told by current and former drag queens and kings, owners of closed and open gay bars, and other queer people in the community.
Cross particularly enjoyed her interviews with older generations of queer communities, bridging what she perceives as a generational gap between young queer people and their elders, a gap that Hinds and Brawley identified as well.
“[The podcast is] about drag, but naturally, in these small communities, it kind of becomes the whole queer community,” Cross said.
Throughout her reporting, Cross discovered a strong sense of loyalty within small-town queer communities. There’s a commitment to keeping them going that is informed by a deep understanding of their unique hardships: hardships as routine as finding hair, makeup, and costumes. While queer folks in some big cities might have specialized stores with many options, queer folks in rural areas may have only what’s available to them on the shelves of their local Walmart.
Still, they make it work. This is the spirit of the communities Cross covers in “Tucked Away:” ordinary queer people, living in the places they grew up, protecting each other and making it work.
Cross is compelled by the ordinary when it comes to telling queer stories. She took this approach in a recent piece she wrote in response to the ongoing campaign to appeal gay marriage in the Supreme Court, which features queer married couples telling their love stories. Her takeaway from it: “queer people are just people, just like anyone else.”
“It’s possible as a queer person from a small rural area where maybe you didn’t have any representation to do great things,” Cross said, referring to pioneers of LGBTQ+ rights like Wilson.
“These people are doing the groundbreaking, historical work, but they also had an experience that might just be like you or me,” Cross said.
Groundbreaking work can look like a lot of things. People don’t have to make headlines to make history. For queer folks, especially those in rural communities, just “[living] their lives authentically and happily” is groundbreaking too.
Queer folks who dwelled in small-town drag bars were groundbreaking. Queer folks who raced in old potato sacks at pasture parties were groundbreaking. Queer folks who quietly lived their lives in the mineral area were groundbreaking. For queer people living in rural communities, staying, existing, listening to the peaceful sounds of the streams and katydids is groundbreaking.
“We have to tell these stories,” Cross said, especially in the face of efforts to dehumanize the people they belong to. It sends the message that “these people exist and that their lives matter.”
The post ‘We Have to Tell These Stories:’ The Architects of Queer History in Rural Missouri appeared first on The Daily Yonder.
