CULTURE: Growing Up Gay and Trans in Appalachia!

Tyler Watts remembers having a happy childhood: His parents gave him everything he ever wanted, but as a young teenager growing up in Hindman, Kentucky, a small town of around 700 people, nestled in the Appalachian mountains, Watts was also fighting demons. Comments and jokes -- both from strangers and even some members of his own family -- about "gays" and "fags" would jolt right to the pit of his stomach, but at the time, Watts wasn't quite sure why, writes Alex Hannaford  in The Atlantic.


Looking back, the 37-year-old says he was terrified of admitting who he really was because of those comments he had heard growing up. "I was worried what people would think of me," he says.

I hated it with a passion. In my head I was thinking 'You're dressing me like a girl and I'm not a girl'." Watts was born Tammy Watts, but for the last three years he has lived as a transgendered man. And thanks to an oral history project spearheaded by the nonprofit StoryCorps, whose mission is to provide Americans of all backgrounds with the opportunity to preserve the stories of their lives for posterity, and the Kentucky Equality Federation, which is focusing on sexual orientation in rural Kentucky, Watts is about to share his tale of growing up in rural Appalachia in the hope it can help other people like him. The stories are to be preserved at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress.