Identity, Authenticity - Do they conflict?

[Dance-with-me]

Martina, wow, thank you for writing that. Yes, our Appalachian roots are somewhat different but the experience of connection yet rejection and the deep love for the beauty and so much of the cultural heritage of that place is very familiar to me. My dad's family was edging towards white collar by the time he was born (g'mom was a school teacher - though with just a HS education - and g'dad was a supervisor at the plant where he worked), but my mom's was poor. My Granny really was raised in an eastern KY holler - two rooms, 7 kids, no plumbing or electricity. My gr-granny (Little Granny) was married when she was 14, Granny when she was 16, mom when she was 17. Mom spent half her life without indoor plumbing until my grandparents finally had scraped together enough money to build a house in Franklin Furnace in 1954 when my mom was 14, and there were people in that neighborhood who still had outhouses and hand pumps when I was a young teenager in the early '70s.

I could write so much more but I don't want to monopolize this thread. Thank you again. It's very good to hear from someone who really gets what that part of me means to me.

[Dance-with-me]

OH I did want to make one comment on the class issues at elite universities: I did a year of graduate school at Tufts (83-84) and I was completely unprepared for the class difference - at least a University of Cincinnati I was able to meet and bond with folks from a similar class background. I will never forget a meeting at the "Tufts Lawn and Garden Club" - their euphemism for the lesbian and gay club - where someone complained that the meetings need topics since all they usually did was just sit around and chat, mostly about their fear that mom and dad would cut them off if they found out they were gay. One person suggested that at the next meeting we discuss what it was like to be a gay person in the different countries where they'd traveled in the past year. I honestly thought that they were joking, until I saw the nods and heard others agree that was a good idea. I cracked up laughing and asked them if Kentucky counted as a foreign country -- because at that moment, to me, they felt as completely foreign to me as the folks in other countries felt to them. They looked at me like I'd had a psychotic break. I never went back.