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People of Earth, the news cycle does not quit. I stutter to a halt, and restart only to be thrown by yet another story that I can’t tell if it is true or a publicity stunt (over $4 million has been raised in 2 days on gfm), and I wonder if wondering about it will become a treasonous act punishable by internment. Let’s remember the real violence of poverty, of genocide, of homo/transphobia, of deadly misogyny, of elders being robbed by the medical system, of gaslighting entire populations into thinking that other poor people are the Enemy. Mic and I were deeply stirred by the people we met in Cookeville, Tennessee. Their dedication to community care continues to inspire. Thank you so much for the go fund me donations to help pay off the tour, every drop goes into the bucket. Thank you Cookeville.
Our Kentucky friends sent us off to Cookville, Tennessee with hugs and extreme weather warnings, and recommended that we take the freeway; our Cookeville host called several times trying discern whether we should cancel based on incoming wild storm predictions. Mic and I, not having a context for 'extreme weather' that was not ice or wildfires, opted to continue. We would be charged for the housing whether we stayed in Cookville or not, and we had to get to Nashville eventually, so we voted to go forward.
For once, the app routed us on the warned-against back ways, which turned out to be perfectly safe, except for all the gigantic white crosses. Once again, the south creeped us out; what the hell were these enormous monuments to Christianity about? It turns out that those particular crosses are the work for the last couple decades of a financially successful contractor and developer named James Potter of ‘Cross Ministries.’ His specialty for years seemed to be identifying what regional ordinances permitted—Somerset Kentucky, where this cross is, originally limited erections like this to 50 feet—and then challenging them legally. News reports from 2015 reveal that Potter was happy to spend three to five years in federal court to get his way; it was hard to watch the story pitched as a ‘man against the machine’ struggle with no reporting from people who might object.
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Potter, who passed away in 2020, has in turn inspired several other giant crosses, including one spearheaded by a pastor in Brookhaven, Mississippi that—at 150 feet,—is the tallest in the state and cost $200,000, according to a WLBT3 News report from March of this year. In the report, Baptist pastor Hal Kitchings shared his 'vision' of constructing a giant cross as a symbol of hope; he got the money within a year. Brookhaven is a small town with a median household income of $32,000—$21,924 for individuals. Potter is not alone—there's huge crosses all over the bible belt and as far north as Wisconsin, and for some reason the particular christianity of the region inspires people to erect enormous crosses to spread the "message of love, forgiveness, hope and eternal life through Jesus Christ, with as many people as possible through programs, activities, and the symbolism of the Cross." As a queer person with a uterus who prefers Samhain over Christmas, in the current climate of white christian nationalism I am skeptical of how these messages of love and forgiveness seem to be missing a phrase something like 'as long as you live they way we think you should and you look/talk/act like us.' Apologies to christian readers who support body autonomy, offer reparations to Black and Indigenous citizens, create safe spaces for trans people, work to support each other in climate collapse, and fight for the right of queer children and people to exist; it's possible that these giant crosses really do represent a level of acceptance that embraces all humans but it did not feel that way in my body as we drove by them. Like, why? Why not just learn to listen to the land itself, rather than erecting a huge phallus to the sky god of the death cult? (Again, apologies to christians who may not believe that the body is a source of sin and pollution, and that our lives here on our gorgeous planet are meaningless because it is only in death we will get our true reward.)
I believe people should be free to do what they like with their money, but when that money is used to impact a landscape that all people use, with the beliefs of a few people, when we are facing a real threat of a theocracy here—I don't feel love, forgiveness, or hope. It feels like terror, especially to those of us who have been variously abused within the power structure of religious institutions; I'm thinking of boarding schools that separated and incarcerated generations of Indigenous children from their families and their culture as a specific and stated tool of genocide.
The crosses made for thoughtful conversation within our travel bubble, especially since that night's event was scheduled to be in a Unitarian Church located in a storefront in the 'micropolitan' city of Cookeville, population 34,800 and seat of Putnam county. Micropolitan is a new word for me; it signifies a smaller city that functions as an important regional economic hub. My friend and fellow substack author Cindy Crabb reached out to several of her friends in the southeast when I shared that we were looking for tour venues, and before long I heard from Andy 'Sunfrog' Smith.
Back in my days as an anarchist info shop collective member, I hosted Sunfrog, his partner and their tiny little baby of three months on a visit from their home in Detroit where they organized with our comrades at the Trumbullplex. I remember how my roommate—a straightedge self-described red diaper baby and fierce organizer covered in tattoos—stared adoringly at this little human grub on the sofa of our garden apartment in the West Town neighborhood of Chicago. In those days, insecure in myself and terrified of being trapped, I stayed far away from babies, almost as if they were a contagious disease; I almost felt like the baby was an abomination, so soft, so vulnerable when I was so careless of myself and others. But Sunfrog was a wild thinker, endlessly pushing ideas as far to the edge as they would go, and so was his then-partner Lisa—though at that time I remember her as being mostly deeply tired and very happy. It expanded my understanding of possibility, to add a baby to the equation and compound the activism, when until then it seemed like a baby subtracted parents from activism. Some years later a southern friend and I visited the rural queer sanctuary at Short Mountain in Tennessee to visit with Lisa and the child to enjoy one of the best Halloween parties I've attended. At the time, Lisa was the only female-identified person staying on the land, and she was grateful for a visit from a couple of city women. It's a potent connection, when we know people on land, and can move back and forth, connecting rural people with urban sensibilities, connecting urban people with the gifts of living on land, trading our wildnesses. There were several ancient elders, beautiful wizards who had lived fabulously gay lives pre-Stonewall, who were surviving AIDS, who were tolerant and calm, and went out of their way to thank us for our silliness and the song we sang at the lantern parade.
Since that visit almost thirty years ago, Sunfrog has established himself as a professor at Tennessee Tech in Cookville, and continues to participate in rural queer life. He's an intelligent, restive, exuberant person. I enjoyed several conversations with him while he lobbied his organization to approve us as speakers. On one call he told me that some people from the church asked that we accept sponsorship from the Democratic party, would we be open to that? "Absolutely not" I said, and burst into gales of laughter at the thought, it struck me as hilarious. I'm all for coalition building but as an across-the-table experience, as a we're-under-the-umbrella-beside-each-other kind of thing. Not as a sponsored by Democrats thing.
"Oh Moe," he said, "Your laughter is medicine to me!"
He asked that we have the event on a Wednesday, "Because that's when all the haters are in their church services." He asked if we would be open to having it in a park, so we could bypass permission from the church. Mic and I were hesitant; if he was specifically asking us to do the event under the radar of haters, would we be safe in a park? Eventually Pastor Deanna Lack was able to calm the ruffled feathers of the liberals that were so infuriating Sunfrog, and we were all set to go forward with the event in the church.
Enter the tornado.
The United States is peculiarly suited to these wild weather beasts, with an annual average of around 1,200, more than any other nation in the world, though tornados have been recorded on every continent except Antarctica; Canada is a distant second, with around 100 per year, mostly in the northern prairie regions. The cold, dry air from, say, the Rocky Mountains interacts with warm wet air sucked up from the Gulf of Mexico; when a strong wind mixes in, bang! Tornado time. The word is a bit of a twister itself—etymologists posit that it comes through a 16th century word alchemy mixing the Spanish word tronada, thunderstorm with the word tornar, to turn; twister and cyclone are also used.
It was blowing when we arrived at the church, and we unpacked our merch with an eye on the sky; the gray clouds did not signify anything to me other than rain, but the street had an electric feeling that rises when people batten down for a storm, with few pedestrians scurrying for cars on mostly empty streets. For some reason the level of concern the parishioners brought to the prospect of our simple little talk—including a fear that we would somehow conduct the whole thing as some sort of hiphop experience—led me to believe that the church resembled the only other Unitarian churches I've been in—big, grand churches with soaring interiors, vestibules and lots of other churchy architecture. Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Cookeville has a street-facing display window crammed with varied welcoming faith-based iconography, including a Buddha and rainbow flags. The door from the street opens directly into a space between the nave and the pulpit, with three rows of stackable meeting chairs arranged facing two chairs where Mic and I would sit. In the back was a kitchen prep area, a storeroom, a bathroom, and a table for us to set up merch. I immediately dialed back my understanding of the congregation, recognizing that this was probably a lot more like the info shop I helped run back in the 90s than any church I had ever attended, based entirely on the people and the community rather than the place.
Pastor Lack welcomed us to the evening with such an air of gravitas and respect I felt like I was in a cathedral; Sunfrog then introduced us as his guests, piling on accolades that—while true—almost made me look behind me for the actual hero that he was talking about. Given the tornado watch the audience was pretty small; depth and kindness of the welcome created an anticipatory hush that recollected to me the holiness of our gathering. We really were in a church.
People were very attentive. When we were forty-five minutes in, engaged in some chewy discussion, a front row parishioner who never looked up from the weather app she was monitoring said, "That's it. Get to the back!"
We stopped abruptly and while Mic and I gaped, the dozen or so people swiftly moved to the back of the room, away from the windows. As a kid, I learned about tornados from the Wizard of Oz, and always assumed I would just go into a basement and wait out the storm. This is when I learned that due to the high water table and limestone bedrock, basements in Tennessee are a rarity; Cookeville is in a 'high karstification' area, meaning there are a lot of caves, sinkholes and underground streams. Putnam county has over 2,700 known caves! No basements.
The alert shifted from 'watch' to 'warning' when the active tornado was within 20 miles. At first we were all sort of hushed and I for one was giddy and nervous, but we quickly resumed several lively discussions branching off from our talk. After about 20 minutes, we were back to 'tornado watch' which was still scary! I sold books and t-shirts while an older man dashed home to check on his dog; he later texted that a tree had fallen on his house and car, but the dog was fine.
People peeled out reluctantly, still wanting to connect. We had been so worried about violence in Cookeville, and we were not wrong, but it was the neutral violence of erratic weather in our increasingly unstable climate. When we went outside Mic made a short video of the dramatic weather, singing, 'Tornado Alley' while I hooted and lightning blasted the purple sky.
Mic and I were deeply moved by the activists of Cookeville. Each person there seemed to represent a specific community for whom they advocated—Indigenous, unhoused, rehabilitating after prison, queers, the environment—and they seemed to be also generally there for each other. A heavily tattooed white man told us he was a sort of peer support counselor for men coming out of prison, and considered helping men deprogram from toxic carceral whiteness to be a big, though unofficial, part of his job. There was an enormous white man with him, also heavily tattooed, who never spoke but put all the chairs away, helped with every chore, and shook both our hands in wordless gratitude. These folks seemed to have no ego, and were truly eager to discuss effective ways to protect from and respond to racial terror. One of the more challenging aspects of Cookeville was the sad fact that local white supremacists managed to get Black churches on board to close down the local gay bar in response to a tiny but vibrant drag scene and various Pride events. I'm sorry that the tornado prevented us from getting deeper into strategies around this, and yet at the same time neither Mic nor I wanted to navigate the extremely rocky ground of queer people vs. Black people, especially in our role as outside agitators—albeit very mild versions of that. My heart goes out to Cookeville, and to all communities struggling to find common ground in this crossroads, especially to rural Black queer people who are too located in impossible situations. I think what I hate most about white supremacy, religion, imperialism is the violent drive to dictate outside norms and confine people to them, giving rise to the ‘cop in our head’ that urges us to constantly police other people, exploiting our human need for belonging. It is truly evil. It twists us, and we are all susceptible.
We made it back fine to our housing, the only time we did not grab something to eat after the gig, and the morning dawned calm and clear. We were staying a short way out of town with a sizable back yard. The soggy ground was the only indication we had been through a storm, and when I splashed through the grass to get a closer look at a big tree, I saw my first cicada of the trip!
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There are 5 or 6 thousand kinds of cicadas, including about eight or so species of that are known to be 'periodical,' or the kind that spend many years underground as nymphs before emerging to molt into adulthood and fly around screaming for about six weeks in order to mate before they die. Entomologists group them into different 'broods' based on their cycles. 2024 is a very special year, with broods on two different schedules emerging in the same summer, which evidently has not happened since 1803. Tennessee is host to Brood XIX, so the cicadas I saw in the back yard had been underground since 2011. What a different world, in many ways. Plenty to scream about.
Stay tuned for brief tour of Nashville!