Coming Out in the Country

By Kevin Fedarko

The Rev. Lois Van Leer lives in a secluded region of Oregon. "We have three acres outside the city," she says of the home she shares with her partner Karune Neustadt near the small college town of Corvallis. But people know her -- and know how to find her. Ever since the youth minister of Corvallis' First Congregational Church came out as a lesbian and an advocate for homosexual rights, she has regularly received death threats. "We're very visible, and the police chief said these death threats were some of the ugliest things she's ever heard in her life. When people talk about coming after you with baseball bats and putting you in your grave, it's very frightening." Neighbors have also spread rumors that she and her partner are witches. A Fundamentalist Christian living nearby has accused the couple of performing animal sacrifices on his lawn. But Van Leer is adamant about being "out" in the countryside. "You just have to decide that if you don't speak out now, it'll only get worse."

Gay life has always been seen as a phenomenon of the big city, a place where homosexual men and women can gather and find safety in numbers. But civil rights activism has led many to reveal their existence in the countryside, hoping to change the minds of their neighbors and bring the movement home. That also involves tremendous risks. Says Rod Harrington, a gay farmer in northwest Missouri: "The idea in rural America is that gays and lesbians exist -- we just don't want to know about them." And while the grass-roots strategy may win friends and influence neighbors, it can also bring about taunts, threats and injury -- if not worse.

"I've thought about leaving," says Donna Taylor, a lesbian who lives in Talent, Oregon. And she has had good reason to want to. More than 20 years ago, before she came out, she was raped by an acquaintance "who knew enough about me to know I was a lesbian. The man said he was going to teach me how to act like a woman if it killed me." Taylor is still subjected to rude remarks on street corners. Tomatoes have been mashed inside her mailbox. Her partner's daughter has been harassed. But Taylor will not change her life -- nor will she leave. "All of my family lives in the area. I feel I have the right to live in my own hometown. But I also realize there's a danger in that."

Prominence does not mean protection. In Melbourne, Iowa, a town of some 700, part-time mayor Bill Crews announced that he was homosexual and took part in April's gay civil rights march in Washington, D.C. Declared Crews: "I am marching to put a face on gay America." When he got home, he discovered that somebody had thrown a fire extinguisher through his family-room window and spray-painted his house with graffiti: MELBOURNE HATES GAYS. NO FAGGOTS. QUEERS AREN'T WELCOME, GET OUT. Says Crews: "Our effort is to be strong and persevere so our message can get through. The most important thing a gay person can do is come out -- and it is tough."

Yet local activism, even solo advocacy, has paid off in the face of adversity. Three years ago, John Broussard, a former Air Force medic, stunned the tiny Louisiana farming town of Welsh when he announced on local TV that he was gay and had AIDS. After the broadcast, his home was pelted with rocks. Local doctors refused to treat him. Baptist neighbors crowed that he was going to hell, and his parents, he says, "went through more rejection by friends in one year than they ever had in their entire lives."

Then Broussard began dropping into every store in town to socialize -- even when clerks gave him a cold shoulder. He also addressed the local junior high on AIDS. Slowly the town changed. Students started cutting class to hear him speak, and parents appeared in the back of the lecture hall to listen. When Broussard's health deteriorated, a physician in nearby Jennings, John Sabatier, confessed that he knew virtually nothing about AIDS but promised to learn as much as he could as fast as he could. Seventh- and eighth-graders sent letters saying they would never tell a dirty gay joke because they now had a friend who was gay. People who once avoided Broussard by crossing the street began asking how he was doing and if he needed anything. "They began to see that I was a person with a disease," Broussard says. "I wasn't some three-headed thing."

When a local college student recently inquired why he came out in the way he did, Broussard paused for a moment. It was a question he had never been asked. "I figured somebody had to be the bush hog and clear the path for people who follow," he eventually replied. "I've had a job to do in whatever way I could do it -- to educate people."

With reporting by Adam Biegel/Atlanta, Dan Cray/Los Angeles, Julie R. Grace/Chicago, and Erik Meers/New York