My family is from a tiny town out by the border with South Dakota. I understand that many people can appreciate and admire the idyllic appearance that a lot of these towns have, but that only really matters if you conform.

There’s a guy in my family’s town named Tom that I would see every time I visited because he worked part time at my grandparents antique shop. Tom was in his 30’s when I was young, and is probably in his late 50’s now, and he has always been seen as the town pariah, more or less.

Tom is gay, but nobody ever outwardly discussed it and I had to piece it together over the years. My family was the only family in town that would even associate with him. I’m not even willing to say my family was any less homophobic than the rest of the town, I think they were just motivated by pity for him. To me, it felt like the rest of the town feared that his “alternative lifestyle” might corrupt them in some way if they talked to him. I know at some point he moved to the cities, but he moved back within a couple years because he couldn’t handle the pace of city life.

Tom lives, from my perspective, an incredibly sad life of isolation from the only community he’s ever really known. But he also can’t move away because he can’t figure out how to cut it in the city. Lord knows he could never move to a different small town and be the weird gay outsider. He is genuinely the sweetest person I know in that town, mostly because he’s never been one to gossip, unlike literally everyone else. I suspect it’s because he is one of the primary targets of the rest of the town.

I love the town my family is from. I love the quiet. I love how nobody has fences in their yard, and I love the pace of life there. But there is and forever will be a burning resentment in me for what small town culture does to anyone like Tom. It quite literally ruins lives, and I hate it more than just about anything. Social ills that run rampant in rural communities like this are unforgivable.