“Gay Poems for Red States,” by Willie Edward Taylor Carver, Jr. Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky, 2023. 120 pages, $19.95 (paperback).

“Gay Poems for Red States” is a collection as complex and beautiful as the hills and hollers Carver himself hails from. Simultaneously a love letter to Kentucky’s people and a warning to those who seek to suppress them, the sentiments in this collection jump from the pages nestling quickly into this reader’s heart and mind. In a world where we’re deep in a complex election season and LGBTQ+ issues are on the forefront of many peoples’ minds, Carver’s voice in this memoir-focused collection is a welcome one among the overwhelming noise of political unrest in our country.

Dive into these poems to follow a gay kid from Appalachia sitting silent in the classroom, either unnoticed or teased by the peers around him, who will eventually grow up to become the Kentucky Teacher of the Year. His journey may surprise you.

The collection opens with an epigraph, an Appalachian proverb, “The truth will stand when the world’s on fire.” This epigraph rings true in a nation at odds and certainly sets up the collection for some intense ideas of what might come in the proceeding pages. This isn’t going to be an easy journey, he promises, but it will be an enlightening one. He furthers this warning in a preface that gives the reader a bit of his own history and reasons for writing this collection. He doesn’t hesitate in telling the reader that living in Kentucky as a gay boy and eventually a gay man was – and is – not an easy life.

He shares the warning he received from a previous employer, “I just want you to understand. In this community, you will be crucified. No one will protect you, including me,” a statement which will ring far-too-true. But amid the pain and the struggle and a brief bit of time spent in Vermont running away from it all, there is beauty and growth and a whole lotta love. Perhaps most importantly, there are people here in the Bluegrass State worth fighting for.

Carver found he himself was worth fighting for, his husband was worth fighting for, and his students were worth fighting for most of all. As an educator, he could be the difference in just standing by as a witness and not allowing one more adult to overlook that LGBTQ+ kid in the back of the classroom, quietly trying to pass the day by unnoticed, unloved, forgotten. He chose to be seen in his life and with that seeing came a lot of risk and a heck of a lot of reward. “Gay Poems for Red States” is his story.

In Culver’s preface he discusses how, as an LGBTQ+ person, he must confront “ … working within a problematic, dysfunctional, or toxic system [asking himself if he] can continue to resist that system while maintaining dignity and integrity. There comes a time when any minoritized person asks, ‘Am I safe here?’ ” As an educator in Kentucky, and as a person who has asked this question of themselves, I resonated with this statement strongly.

American politics have taken an extremely divisive turn, a division that has been growing since I moved to Kentucky in 2017. Laws limiting LGBTQ+ rights began increasing, my wife and I had frank discussions about what the tipping point would be for us. When would we know we were no longer safe in the state we called home? When would we know it was time to get out? For how long would it be worthwhile to stay and fight? These are questions we continue to ask ourselves as the world shifts in concerning ways.

We have hope, yes, and we continue to work to form a Kentucky we believe in, that we feel safe in, that we love. But when will we know if it’s time? Carver asks similar questions as he battles his need for safety and acceptance against the harsh reality of a homophobic, increasingly fundamentalist world.

Throughout the collection, Carver observes, he grows into himself; he learns who he is in some pretty surprising ways and gathers the people who support him throughout the journey. In his poem, “Thank You, Jerry Springer,” Carver begins, “I didn’t hear the word gay in class. – I didn’t hear the word gay in books. – I didn’t hear the word gay in songs. – I didn’t hear the word gay in kids’ shows. – I did hear the word gay in church, but only when they talked about monsters.” He then goes on to discuss how some of the first LGBTQ+ representation he saw in media was on Jerry Springer.

He saw himself there – albeit a messy, demeaned, spectacle-driven version of LGBTQ+ life – it was there on the TV in front of him. How many of us first saw ourselves on that TV set, glowing in the living room on a day we were home sick or just because our mom or dad wanted to watch some “trash TV” – that daytime marvel of chaos and forbidden relationships? We watched. We felt a little bit seen, however forbidden that seeing might be. Carver felt seen again in a video game he played as a kid in his poem, “Clubhouse Character,” where the young male character saves the world and then expresses to another boy that he really likes him. A fleeting moment – sixteen words – of LGBTQ+ expression. Carver played the game over and over again, saving his own inner world each and every time he did.

Carver’s story might not be your story. You might not be that LGBTQ+ kid in school or have a child who is part of the rainbow family, but I assure you that you love someone who is, whether they have felt safe or ready enough to announce this fact or not. There is some kid somewhere playing a video game, watching a rerun of Jerry Springer, hearing a sermon in church, and hearing exactly what the world means for them to hear – good, bad and extremely ugly. I hope you all take the time to read Carver’s words to see the beauty and the ugliness of one Kentuckian’s story.

A story about a gay man who is still very much that boy from the holler, carefully placing stale ramen packets in moving boxes in the poem, “Ramen Noodles,” carting them from one house to the other because one day the creek might rise. You can’t take the holler out of the boy, Carver posits, and why would you want to?

– Reviewed by Jess Folk, M.F.A., Associate Professor of Creative Writing, WKU