Hometown Pride

In my small Indiana hometown, people are showing up and showing out against Christian homophobia.

Want to support my work? Join the email list down below to receive each post directly to your inbox, for free! If you can afford it and want to show additional support, consider becoming a paid subscriber for just $5 a month. For Pride Month only, I’m also offering full year subscriptions for $35 instead of $55. If you’ve been thinking about subscribing and supporting independent queer writing, now is a great time to do so! 

Or if you'd rather send one time support, click here.

I grew up in a small town in rural Indiana.

If you take I-69 south through Bloomington and keep going for about 45 minutes, you’ll pass by it amidst corn and soybean fields and gas stations. Growing up it had a population of roughly 11,000 people, but considering for other people in the county it is “the town with the Walmart” I think Washington still counts as “small.”

There are things I really liked about growing up there, even if I did get out as soon as I could. I cannot imagine going to schools like my friends from the Indianapolis area did where there were so many people you might not even know everyone from your own class. My friends talk about their giant high school marching bands, and I try to imagine that compared to my own, which could crowd into one person’s living room with relative ease. For better or worse pretty much everyone knew each other, and while sometimes that can be a disaster, sometimes it means that the social worker meeting you at the ER when your mom dies is your high school mom’s best friend.

But it wasn’t perfect – as I said, I left the first opportunity I got, and likely will never move back. Beyond the fact that it’s been economically wrecked since the coal and rail industries started dying, it’s one of the most conservative parts of an already very conservative state. While I was not the first person in my school to come out as any form of queer, there were very few of us that were out when I was a kid (though a lot of my “straight” friends from high school are now out as queer, unsurprisingly.) Those of us that were out faced a ton of bullying and discrimination. Some of it was the more direct stuff you would expect: slurs, physical violence, threats, etc. But some of it was more subtle. I cannot begin to tell you how many people invited me to their church youth group or Bible study with the intention of “saving” me from my homosexuality and transness. Or how many kids told me that their parents said they couldn’t hang out around me. The bullying was deeply harmful (though for transparency’s sake it wasn’t all related to my queerness), and something I’m still unpacking in therapy, but by the time I was 15 my family had pretty much accepted that when I left for college, I probably wouldn’t be coming back for anything more than short visits.

All of that being said, in 2025 it’s not the bigoted cesspit that many people want you to believe about the rural midwest. Yes it has its problems, but I’ve personally witnessed massive changes in the past 15-odd years.

I went to high school in the era of “Glee” and the “It Gets Better” campaign, and people were slowly but surely starting to come around on the idea that people should just mind their own business on gay and trans people. In 2014, a year before the Obergefell ruling legalized same-sex marriage nationwide, Indiana and Wisconsin’s bans on same-sex marriage were making their way up through the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals, leading to…well at least light confusion as to whether or not same-sex marriage was or was not legal in Indiana that summer (the Circuit Court ruling didn’t come until September.) During that time a gay couple seeking a marriage license was turned away at the Clerk’s office. 

Looking back now as a licensed attorney, I do sort of understand why this happened. It was genuinely unclear with the appeals in progress what the right course of action would have been, especially when the county probably had no expectation that a gay couple would try to get a marriage license during that time. I doubt that they were even thinking about it as a possibility that they would need a plan for when the decision came at the district court level.

Regardless of what the legally correct course of action was though, it was an opportunity to point out that the fight for same-sex marriage wasn’t just for big cities in blue states, but it was also for people in our very own backyard. So at 17 I got my dad to drive me 7 minutes across town to Walmart, bought a poster board and some paint, and I joined a group of maybe ten (if that) protesters outside of the county courthouse for baby’s first queer rights protest.

Now that's a small group, but you have to remember that in 2014 in rural Indiana, taking that stance may have been safer than it had been in years past, but it was still a risk. We had our fair share of counter protesters, had to sit through an uncomfortable prayer from a pastor and his wife in the name of “civility,” and got questioned by a handful of cops, but for the most part the protest occurred without incident.

Fall of that year, my senior year of high school, I finally won my multi-year fight with school administration to start a Gay-Straight Alliance. Our membership was basically the bare minimum to be considered an active club, but there were a shocking number of people who came to tell me privately that they wanted to join, but were worried about how their parents would react, a sure sign that generational change was coming. At the annual meeting at the end of that school year for seniors to discuss procedures and dress code for graduation, one of the teachers took me aside to tell me I was exempt from the requirement that girls wear dresses, something I didn’t even mention or ask about. Actually I wore a dress anyway because why would I wear dress pants underneath a polyester graduation gown in a hot, crowded gym if a skirt was an option, something I think we should all have the right to choose regardless of gender.

The summer of 2016 we were facing the first Trump campaign, and I came home from my freshman year of college a pissed off and over eager political science major. I got involved in the resurrection of my county’s Democratic party and ran media for a woman challenging now Indiana Governor Mike Braun for his seat in the Indiana House of Representatives. I was 19, unpaid, had absolutely no clue what I was doing, and pretty much was only given responsibilities because I was one of a small number of people there and willing to do things. But still, people in the area seemed interested. I remember tabling at the county fair that year and talking to a lot of people who were life-long Republicans and surprised to learn about the realities of Democratic politics compared to the Republican fear mongering they’d heard all their lives. Since then, due in large part to the pushback against the radicalism of Trump and the MAGA crowd, more and more people have gotten involved in the county party, and increasingly local level races that were once guaranteed to be uncontested formalities for a Republican “Old Boys’ Club” are now becoming fights that would have been completely foreign to the county ten years ago.

In the time since I’ve completely left Washington, queer folks have established more of a presence. There’s been Pride celebrations downtown, and there are more and more queer families living there openly, raising their kids, and participating in their community the same as anyone else.

So while people from other places might be shocked, for anyone familiar with the community, it wasn’t that much of a surprise when in response to a local Christian teen center publishing a homophobic and misogynistic tirades from its director, Tracy Cook, the community showed up and showed out to say: “We don’t do that here.”

The Powerhouse has provided critical services for youth in Washington, Indiana for two decades. Towns like Washington generally don’t have much in public funds available for things like youth and community services, and thus heavily rely on churches to fill those gaps. It primarily functions as an after school community center for junior high and high school students, providing them with meals, tutoring, and a safe, clean, drug free place to gather when school is not in session. It is a Christian organization with an explicit mission of “build[ing] relationships with Junior High and High School youth in order to share the Gospel,” but pretty much anyone in town will tell you it’s not just Christian kids who attend, nor are the Christian kids who utilize the Powerhouse a part of the same denomination. There are religious elements, but for the most part, it’s just a safe place for kids to hang out, and its after school program alone serves an average of 60 youth on any given day. I myself went there a handful of times growing up.

Now they cross some lines in the state-church realm, something I personally have pushed back against before with the local public school. They’re given regular access to the public school students in the form of access to the football team each week to “provide a meal and a Gospel centered message to the football players, coaches, and managers” and their “The Real Truth” or “TRT” program, in which they are permitted during the junior high lunch hour to preach to students who voluntarily attend the program (to my knowledge no other group is given these privileges, though I don’t think any other group has tried.) But the fact remains that it is one of the only places providing services to high risk teens in the town. Taking the good with the bad alike, they’ve still historically done what a lot of us wish churches/Christians would do with their time and money over the past twenty years. Yes, there should be secular options available for these same students, but that’s simply not the active reality in towns like Washington.

The Powerhouse has become such an institution in my hometown that earlier this year they received a $250,000 grant from the county’s “Our Community Foundation” , a private 501(c)(3) to get them over the finish line for its $1.5 million expansion project. Looking at the Powerhouse’s most recent available form 990 (courtesy of ProPublica), it doesn’t seem like they reported receiving government funding at least in 2023, but there has been substantial concern raised in the community about public tax dollars going to the organization in the past couple of weeks.

This concern came about after community members noticed a preview for a blog on the Powerhouse’s substack, titled “Homosexuality- the Degradation of the Family.”

This preview was met with huge community backlash that I don’t think anyone working at the Powerhouse expected, and certainly not Tracy Cook. It seems that the post they were planning, in that form at least, was never published as a result. But on May 30th a different post was published on the Powerhouse substack, condemning homosexuality using all of the usual though easily debunkable “biblical” justifications.

The post isn’t anything new, and wouldn’t be even necessarily worth talking about, except for the fact that the Powerhouse had never engaged in this type of rhetoric before, at least not in such a public format.

Yes, they preached, but they never really got involved in the so-called “culture wars." And in an historical moment where Christian nationalism is on the rise and (often religiously motivated) violence against LGBTQIA+ communities is rapidly increasing, this raised a lot of alarm bells for people in Washington, most of whom do not support this type of anti-LGBTQIA+ thinking. It’s not that a Christian organization, even one that works with youth, said something homophobic in the lead up to Pride month that enraged the community. If it had been one of the youth ministries for any of the truly astounding number of churches in town, people would have likely said “well, I guess that’s their right to share their doctrine.” They might have avoided sending their kids there, but that’s about it. The issue is that this organization, which serves kids of all backgrounds and beliefs, is clearly taking a radical and very public shift into a form of extremism that had never really been a concern prior to this year.

I cannot emphasize enough how different of a tone the Powerhouse substack is taking from the Powerhouse of my youth, seemingly as a result of the direction of Tracy Cook, who also is an elected member of the Daviess County Commissioners. Other posts encourage women to submit to their husbands, and take on a distinctly conservative to fundamentalist tone in its politics. While there had been some previously reported incidents of volunteers being asked to leave due to their sexual orientation, compared to the more typical “hey Jesus is cool, God loves you, sin (generic) is bad, don’t do drugs” preaching the organization has typically engaged in, to see this type of hyper public anti-LGBTQIA+ sentiment was a pretty major surprise to much of the community.

In response to the backlash, Cook posted the expected non-apology “apology,” stating:

“At The PowerHouse, we believe the Bible is God’s Word and foundation for truth. That means we affirm what Scripture teaches about identity, sexuality, and family—not because we’re trying to exclude anyone, but because we believe God’s design leads to life.”

And

“We cannot affirm any lifestyle that goes against God’s Word—whether it’s sexual behavior, gossip, pride, or anything else. That’s not because we reject people—but because we believe in the gospel.”

Amongst a litany of bible quotes discussing not putting one sin above the other and the usual “hate the sin love the sinner” nonsense that homophobic Christians love to hurl.

Still, the Powerhouse’s substack and social media presence has not changed its tone, and luckily the community has not fallen for Cook’s chicanery. 

A group formed, now known as the Daviess County Equality Coalition, and organized a grassroots protest, with members of the community gathering on Main Street on June 5 with signs reminding the youth in the community that they are deeply loved and wanted exactly as they are, even if they are gay or trans, no matter what the leadership at the Powerhouse tries to tell them. Now to those of y’all who have been to large protests and Pride events, you might still think this group is small potatoes, but for this area, and for how quickly it was organized, it was an impressive turn out. 

Since then the Facebook numbers for the group have grown, with its private Facebook group listed as having 252 members, and played a vital role in organizing a massive turn out at the Washington City Council meeting this past Monday, June 10. Retired educators Carol Olsen, and my own junior high science teacher, Mike McKittrick showed up to give impassioned speeches against potential future city funds going to an organization that would tell queer youth that they are destroying their families, and that they are going against “God’s design” by merely existing. Those of you familiar with small town government meetings will know that turnout is typically small, with only a very small number of community members typically bothering to show up, but on Monday, the room was overflowing, primarily with people wanting to show their support for LGBTQIA+ youth in the community. 

This is what Pride in 2025 looks like. This is what Pride in the places mainstream liberals ignore looks like. This is what Pride in the places that have been written off by the left as “lost causes” looks like.

It looks like people coming together on their own with what little resources they had and building something bigger than themselves, to show the next generation that they will always be loved, and that the adults around them will not allow hatred and bigotry to go unanswered. This is proof that it doesn’t matter where you live, if you are brave enough to stand up against bigotry in your own community, you’re going to find a lot more people behind you than you expected.

In liberal and leftist spaces, there’s massive derision for the people who live in red states and conservative communities, as if the people living there are inherently morally inferior instead of dealing with the cycle of systemic voter suppression, wildly underfunded educational systems, and constant economic crises deliberately designed to keep a certain group of people in power. We write off the Midwest and South as hellholes that should simply secede from the Union so that we don’t have to deal with them, completely ignoring the massive numbers of marginalized people that call these places home. We refuse to put resources into this area, and when we do, we steamroll the leadership of local organizers and their understanding of their communities, which ultimately only results in resentment, rather than progress.

If this group, in the past two or so weeks, has been able to organize this much, imagine what they could do with the respectful support and resources of the larger organizations that typically refuse to engage with rural communities.

Many of the faces in that protest photo and at that meeting are familiar to me.

Many of the people who have stepped up and fought this are people I’ve known since I was a child. And while I may not physically live there anymore, Washington will always be my hometown. And despite the jokes I both make and get about where I am from, they make me proud to be from Washington. They make me proud to be from Indiana. They make me proud to be from the Midwest. Rural LGBTQIA+ organizers are amazing, and can get real work done in the most conservative corners of the country, there very places where we need to make progress the most if we are going to dismantle American fascism. This Pride, it’s time for the rest of us to recognize local level organizing and get on board.

If you like my work, don’t forget to subscribe to my free email list, share this piece, and if you can, consider upgrading to a paid subscription for just $5 a month. And for Pride Month only, yearly subscriptions are $35 instead of $55. Your contributions help me continue to do this work independently. You can find more of my ramblings on Bluesky under katdene and on TikTok under chucklelemon.

Kat (they/them) is a queer lawyer, activist, and theorist focusing on the intersections of law, queerness, religion, and politics, with the occasional bit of theology, political theory, and legal theory thrown in for good measure. Originally from rural southern Indiana, Kat earned their B.A. in Political Science in 2019 before continuing on to earn their J.D. in 2022, both from Indiana University- Bloomington. A former Equal Justice Works Fellow for the Freedom From Religion Foundation, Kat has spent their professional career fighting for the separation of church and state and LGBTQIA+ rights. Outside of work you can find them at a ballet or contemporary dance class, sipping on dirty shirleys at their local gay bar, or playing video games with their cat, Merlin.