I had a similar interaction just a few months ago at a local shop in my rural western Michigan village. The cashier was a young person with purple hair sending what looked like deliberate gender-bending signals. They wouldn’t have stood out in a crowd in Detroit, but up here …

The third or fourth time I saw them, I asked them very quietly to forgive me if I was being rude but that I’m LGBT and I wondered if they were too.

They nodded enthusiastically and we could not stop grinning at each other. We had several very quiet conversations over the next few weeks about the difficulties of living out here.

Not long after, they fucked off to a bigg-ish city a couple hours away.

I also know a retired gay couple with a lake house about a half hour from here. They zoom around on their twin Harleys in warmer weather and often eat at our local restaurant, which is popular with bikers.

They love living out here, because they’ve always dreamed of living in the country and it’s kind of their retirement paradise. I can see how it is, but for younger people it’s a pretty different, often isolating, story.