“Tar Hollow Trans” Is Beautifully Goth and Full of Appalachian Queerness https://ift.tt/tNiIYos
In only the first few days of his presidency, President Donald Trump scrapped approximately 78 executive orders previously signed by Biden, leaving minorities, the LGBTQ+ community, and specifically trans people uncertain about their future in America. This new — and the more vehement — Trump presidency is an inexorable time to uplift and read LGBTQ+ books like Stacy Jane Grover’s Tar Hollow Trans.
Tar Hollow Trans is an essay collection about spending one’s life on the margins. It takes a look at Appalachian folkways, familiar artifacts and myths, and the narratives an individual crafts in order to support themselves in an environment that rejects them. Grover creates a deep, new sense of Appalachian queerness, and at the same time establishes a complex archive of experiences and meditations that remind those who reject the LGBTQ+ community that the community has — and always will — exist.
Trans people have long held a place in Appalachian history, but their path to finding equality and solidarity has not been easy, if — in many areas — existent whatsoever. They face a lack of support, healthcare options and access, and affirming social networks. Grover discusses in her essays that beyond Appalachia, an Appalachian transgender person can also face different types of ostracism, even within the LGBTQ+ community.
In “A Position Which is Nowhere,” Grover acknowledges that, during her very early years, she felt more at ease and more comfortable while working in the kitchen with her female cousins and aunts. She draws on the story of a gender stereotype-defying relative, Bessie — a gorgeous, intelligent young woman who could also work as hard as any man on a farm and who died at a young age after being shot in the head. Grover never reveals why someone shot Bessie, and she allows enough interpretational space for readers to assume that it was because Bessie — much like Grover — defied Appalachian expectations for women of her time. Bessie emerges as an ancestral spiritual guide to Grover.
Interestingly enough, another guide manifests in Grover’s essays. However, it is not the usual guide — personal, spiritual, ancestral — one might think of as leading a person to self-awareness. Rather, this guide is a subculture — the gothic subculture It is yet another entity Grover describes as being scrutinized in the small, insular town from which she hails. Grover’s essays are rife with the significance of hex symbols in rural Appalachian towns like the one Grover grew up in Southeastern Ohio. These reflections fuse the gothic subculture’s embrace and incorporation of supernatural and folkloric elements with deeply ingrained Appalachian and Pennsylvania Dutch traditions that contribute to the region’s culture and identity. Grover also attests to the community and the advocacy the gothic subculture allowed her to engage in while in high school:
The five us stood out so prominently that the school paper dedicated a special issue to exploring the ‘goth presence’ at our high school… The rumors around the school and village were that we practiced sex magic, Satanic blood rituals, dark Wiccan magic. People thought we’d shoot up the school because our floor-length trench coats from Hot Topic, obviously inspired by The Matrix, made people inaccurately reference the Columbine massacre.
Grover states, too, that another reason she and her friends “garnered such attention” is because they “were openly not heterosexual or cisgender.” Grover portrays the gothic subculture as a safe space for gender nonconformity, a place where Grover and others could explore their sexuality and gender identity as well as other socio-political issues that contradicted the area’s predominantly evangelical Christian values. A quiet affection for the subculture seeps poetically from Grover’s writing:
We drank in barns, had sex in barns. We wandered the dark woods that led nowhere. We dreamed of escape, of never leaving. And in the dark of night, around bonfires under bright moons, we made pacts to stay together forever.
A mysterious demeanor, an at-one-with-Nature emotion, and a deep separation from the mainstream society in which Grover and her friends lived make these sections of Grover’s writing distinctively — and beautifully — goth.
Community is another essential discussion point in Grover’s essays. Grover writes about her “lost Appalachian community” — an “imagined Appalachia” that “exists in childhood or the time of ancestors, of grandparents, most certainly a time of today.” This discussion is interesting considering Grover admits that, for a long time, she did not identify as Appalachian. She discusses how the Appalachian identity — even the one she attempts to reconstruct — “builds on stereotypes and assumptions about the region’s history.” Grover successfully highlights how these stereotypes and assumptions continue to hurt Appalachia and how, by becoming more inclusive to people of other cultures and gender identities, Appalachia works toward defying these harmful tropes.
Thus, Grover’s essays serve as a call to action, one that encourages Appalachians to resist the negative stereotypes non-Appalachians frequently apply to the region and those who inhabit it.
Grover herself is the image of a progressive, inclusive Appalachia. The existence she shares in Tar Hollow Trans’s pages encourages those who feel they have no home where they exist to make a home and bloom where they are planted, so to speak. Tar Hollow Trans winds and turns, much like an Appalachian road through the mountains, and establishes Stacy Jane Grover as a necessary — and refreshing — voice in contemporary Appalachian literature.
Non Fiction Tar Hollow Trans
By Stacy Jane Grover
University Press of Kentucky
Published June 20, 2023
Paperback March 04, 2025
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