Jason Aldean? Please spare me the small-town nostalgia. By Brian Broome

www.washingtonpost.com

5 - 6 minutes

I’m not here to talk about Jason Aldean’s country song “Try That in a Small Town.” I’m not a fan. I’m just here to pat you on the back if you’re one of the many Americans, like me, who ran from small-town life and never looked back.

I’m from a small town in Ohio. I’ve blocked out many of my memories of the place. I spent my childhood there in the 1970s and 1980s, and I do remember playing outside and being surrounded by friends when I was a child. I remember the summers when we got sprayed with the garden hose and the winters full of snowball fights and forts.

But none of that makes up for what the place really was.

All the Black people lived on one side of town and all the White people lived on the other. Our churches were separate. We went to school together, but it was at school that I was called or heard the n-word from White students on a weekly basis. The racism of my small town was naked and powerful; seething hatreds were baked into its soil. And when all the steel jobs disappeared, leaving many on welfare, in poverty or desperate, those hatreds deepened and the n-word flew more freely than ever.

As I got older and realized that I was gay, my small town became for me a coffin lined with razor blades. But it wasn’t just my sexuality that made it uncomfortable. I was different. I thought differently. I began to question the things that I had been taught and I found no one in my hometown who offered good answers. I was just told to be quiet: by my teachers, by my friends, my church and even by my parents. And then the smothering feeling set in, the wondering if there was more to life than what I was being shown. And I knew I had to escape. I wanted to meet different kinds of people. I wanted different experiences, I wanted to learn new things, and none of that was going to happen in a small town in northern Ohio. I couldn’t wait to leave.

My story isn’t unusual. There are many like me in this country. People who could not wait to put their small hometowns in the rearview mirror because they couldn’t or wouldn’t fall in line. People who dreaded the thought of going back to them on holidays because, at the moment your feet land on the ground where you were raised, the memories come flooding back. You dread the moment when you run into someone from high school who wants to talk about how great it was. But you have nothing to add to this conversation because you don’t remember the glory days in quite the same way. And you dread the assumption that many will make that you somehow think you’re a big shot simply because you ran for your life.

You were the “weird girl” who had an opinion and had no interest in being a cheerleader. You were the boy who couldn’t play sports. You were the one who thought just a little too much outside the box. I see you. You were different. For you, these places represent the mind-set and mores you were so keen to put behind you.

You can see our national mythology around small towns shot through our culture. It is everywhere, in every Hallmark movie where the successful, young city woman returns to her hometown because her urban life is an empty one full of loneliness and streetlights. In this version, the real meaning of life comes from being surrounded by men in boots and women in housedresses. Nothing could be further from the truth.

I have had awful things happen to me in the city. But nothing more awful than things that have happened to me in the country. And we need to start shedding this idea that purity and goodness only reside in the places with one stoplight.

So, all you weirdos out there who escaped your small town? I see you. I know what you went through. And I hope that you have found a place where you feel at home and comfortable enough to be yourself. You were never a weirdo. There was never anything wrong with you. You are not depraved. Sometimes we’re just born where we don’t belong. And someone creating an idyllic and violent fantasy of “community” of the place you had to leave behind doesn’t change that one bit.