Before I had a name for it, I had land. Red dirt and hayfields. Skinned knees and peacock feathers. The sharp smell of cattle, the shimmer of heat above the highway. And over time, I learned that the Oklahoma prairie has its own way of marking you.

I grew up knowing the names of things that didn’t show up on school tests: scissor-tailed flycatchers that sliced the sky, rose rocks that bloomed out of red clay like buried valentines, and buffalo grass that could hide a rabbit in August. I knew how dust settled into your pores after a combine rolled through a wheat field, and how the air turned metallic before hail.

The prairie didn’t need permission to be itself. It gave you color when it could—blue flax in spring, Indian paintbrush on fencerows, golden wheat just before cut. Then it would take it all back with a wildfire or windstorm. Some years, the only things that lasted were fence posts and peacock feathers caught in barbed wire.

That was the language of home: dirt that dyed your socks orange, rain that smelled like tin, and birds that balanced beauty on the ends of their tails like a dare.

Some boys get baseball bats and mitts. I got books.

* * *

I grew up by seasons, not clocks. Spring came with electric storms that made the dog crawl under the bed. Summer, with cracked ground and light that bleached the color out of everything but the weeds. Fall brought the smell of wheat dust, diesel fuel, and something richer—earth turned up for peanut harvest. You could smell it before you saw the diggers: warm, nutty, a little sweet. The whole town shifted around it. Kids missed school to work harvest. The bank sponsored lunch for the co-op workers. Even the air felt different—fat with dust and pride.

Not everywhere could grow them. Peanuts were particular. They liked loose soil, late freezes, and just the right blend of hot and not-too-wet. It was only because of the land—this exact land, with its sandy loam and stubborn generosity—that we could coax them from the ground. We didn’t say “bioregionalism,” but we lived it. We knew our place by what it would grow and what it wouldn’t. The wrong seed in the wrong field was just waste. The right one meant a trailer full of something you could hold up and say, “We made this.”

Migrant families came with the harvest. They arrived like weather: brief, necessary, often unacknowledged. Their children sat beside me in school for a few weeks each fall. Some yearbooks printed their names in the margins, without pictures. As a kid, I thought that meant they didn’t want to be seen. Now I wonder who made that decision for them.

Our town didn’t rally around football. We had baseball. Johnny Bench was from here, and that meant something. His name was spoken like a deity. We had baseball fields and Bench memorabilia, and dads who could name batting averages but struggled to say “I love you.” I fought to survive Little League, when what I really wanted was to be home reading my books.

The rhythms of this place were unspoken but strict. There was a right time to cut hay, a wrong time to plant, and a kind of moral weight to wasting anything. We didn’t use words like sustainability; we just knew not to leave the faucet running while brushing your teeth. The pond might be dry next year. Granny saved butter tubs and bread sacks. Pappy sharpened everything twice. “Use what you’ve got,” he said, not because it was trendy, but because you might not have it tomorrow. Still a product of being born during the Dust Bowl.

In May, the tornado drills and church potlucks tangled together. You’d hear a siren at school and someone’s mom would show up in hot rollers and a housecoat, pulling a Tupperware of deviled eggs out of her purse, just in case. Every part of life had a seasonal logic to it. Even queerness.

I couldn’t name it, but it followed the same cycle. Dormant in winter. Anxious and blooming in spring. Wilting in summer, when every layer of clothing felt like a lie. By fall, I would rehearse again how to be normal. Put my voice back in its lowest setting. Study boys the way farmers study clouds—trying to read patterns, never getting too close.

But even then, the land offered clues. The first peep frogs in March. The redbuds glowing like a dare. The subtle changes in light that meant you’d survived another year. Prairie time doesn’t move in a straight line. It circles. It asks you what you’ve learned.

I learned that the world didn’t need me to be loud to be alive. That even the smallest shifts—an ant bed rebuilt after rain, a single bloom through caliche—meant survival was still happening. That was queerness, too. Not just the performance of difference, but the persistence of it. The rooted, cyclical, soft refusal to disappear.

* * *

I grew up on land that had already been punished once. This was Dust Bowl country—scorched by bad policy, poor farming, and drought so cruel it made grass a memory. People fled. Crops failed. The wind stripped the topsoil like skin. But some stayed. And from what was left, they rebuilt.

But the story doesn’t start there. Long before the dust came, this land had already borne other violences. Just down the road is a tribal headquarters—quiet now, sovereign, still here. This was the end of the Trail of Tears. A place where stolen people were told to begin again. And not long after, even that land was taken too—cut into parcels, opened to a Land Run that turned someone else’s sorrow into someone else’s opportunity.

I am fifth generation on some of this soil. My people were among the ones who stayed. Who claimed. Who built. That’s part of the story, too. I was raised with pride in that legacy, but also with the silence that often comes with inheritance. No one talked much about what came before us.

But the land remembers. The same wind that carries topsoil across fields also carries memory. You can pretend not to hear it. But it still sings.

And somewhere along the way—quietly, steadily—my own voice found a new register. One that doesn’t echo the silence. One that knows this place is borrowed. One that grieves what was taken and refuses to forget.

* * *

Church was the first place I learned how to be watched.

Our family didn’t just attend—we participated. Wednesday night suppers. Sunday School. The Christmas pageant. I was a sheep one year, a wise man the next, always itchy and off-key, desperate to disappear into the velvet curtains behind the baptistery.

We were Southern Baptist, which meant we loved Jesus, distrusted dancing, and took pride in never missing a potluck. The sanctuary smelled like hymnals and White Rain hairspray. The pew cushions were worn at the corners, and the ceiling fans never really worked. But we knew every lyric to “The Old Rugged Cross,” and we sang it like we meant it.

Church taught us about dominion and sin, about heaven and hell—but mostly about control. You controlled your tone, your posture, your appetite. I learned to cross my legs like a boy, even when it hurt my hips. I learned that crying was holy during an altar call but inconvenient during the sermon. I learned that God loved all His children, but preferred the quiet ones.

We were taught to care for the Earth because God made it—but not to love it too much. That was idolatry. You could marvel at a sunset, but not linger. You could plant a garden, but only as a lesson in hard work, not delight. Beauty had to be functional. Wonder had to be theological.

Still, something about the land always felt more honest than the sermons. I believed in thunder long before I believed in prayer. I saw grace in fence rows and forgiveness in the way rain made everything smell clean again. Even the dust seemed to know more about resurrection than some of our deacons did.

There was guilt, too. About waste. About being a burden. About leaving the lights on or flushing twice. We didn’t use the word “ecology,” but we understood consequences. You don’t litter when you know you’ll be walking that same roadside tomorrow with a feed bucket in your hand. You don’t waste water when you’ve watched a neighbor’s well run dry.

The guilt got bigger as I got older. Less about trash, more about truth. I couldn’t un-know what I was, but I could recycle it into something palatable. Polite. Non-threatening. Saved. My queerness became something to compost—to bury deep, turn over, pray into usefulness.

Church was where I first felt visible and wrong at the same time. Where I learned how to sing with a smile and confess without saying what really needed confessing. Where I memorized scripture and hoped it would overwrite my body.

Still, I stayed. For a long time. Because if nothing else, church was a place to rehearse being loved. Even if the script wasn’t quite right.

* * *

Drag in Oklahoma isn’t just performance—it’s adaptation.

You don’t come to it with boxes of wigs and Sephora points. You come with what you’ve got: a curling iron from a garage sale, a maxi dress your aunt left behind, and eyeshadow from the endcap of Dollar General. You learn to contour in the side mirror of a truck or a gas station mirror. You learn that sweat-proof is a myth after June. You learn how to tape, tuck, glue, and shimmer with whatever’s in season.

Out here, drag is not cabaret. It’s climatized. It’s rural couture. And it’s sacred.

My first rehearsals were in barns and bathrooms. I’d study country music videos on TNN and try to match their posture. Reba, Dolly, Tanya—they all knew how to take up space without apology. I’d sneak a slip from the laundry basket and practice walking across the linoleum, counting cracks like runway beats.

I didn’t know I was building a persona. I thought I was building a way out.

When I first stepped onstage as my persona, it was in a nightclub—it was a Turnabout show in Tulsa. Fluorescent lights. Wobbly heels. A karaoke track with a skip in it. But the crowd hollered like it was Broadway. I made something out of nothing—dollar bills and duct tape, borrowed lashes and too much blush. It was beautiful.

The prairie shaped that beauty. You learn to pick fabrics that breathe. You don’t wear six layers unless you want heatstroke. Hair has to hold through wind. Jewelry can’t snag on barbed wire if you’re walking from the car. And always, always bring backup tights.

Making was the only way I knew how to survive.

Not just making costumes or pageant numbers, but moments—those brief, fragile instances when something ugly turned beautiful because I insisted. Because I refused to leave it broken. That, too, is bioregional. Queer or not, country people know how to fix what’s been dropped. We patch, stitch, hot-glue, weld. We tape the mirror back together and keep using it.

My queerness taught me that creation is kin to care.

To make something lovely in an unloving place—that’s resistance. That’s prayer. That’s how you stay soft without being erased.

People think drag is escape. For me, it was return. To color, to voice, to exaggeration as truth. It wasn’t about hiding; it was about showing what had been there all along.

Like prairie wildflowers after a burn, drag rises from what survived. It doesn’t need permission. It doesn’t ask to be taken seriously. It blooms anyway.

Queer joy in the country doesn’t arrive with a rainbow flag. It arrives in pieces. It’s the relief of air conditioning in a small-town library, the smell of old pages and possibility. It’s the moment you find a Judy Blume or Armistead Maupin book no one has banned yet, or a dusty novel with two boys who almost touch hands. It’s the silence of reading in the corner while the world spins loud and wrong around you.

Joy is catalog-shaped. It’s the day the International Male catalog came in the mail, and no one opened it before you. It’s flipping through those glossy pages with the blinds drawn, studying the men who looked like gods and also maybe like you. Joy was the secret knowledge that your desires had coordinates—even if they were mislabeled as shame.

It was the chill of an oscillating fan on sunburned skin. A song on the radio that made you feel dramatic and understood. The smell of Pond’s Cold Cream, the glint of rhinestones on your grandmother’s dresser, the smoothness of satin ribbon in a sewing kit.

Joy was a glance in a hallway that lingered one second longer than it should. A shared smirk in choir. The quiet understanding between two kids who wouldn’t speak of it out loud, but who knew.

It was the way the light hit the wheat just before harvest. How the red dirt clung to your sneakers. The way locusts screeched like they were trying to tell the truth.

Even in places built to erase you, joy found cracks. It slipped in with the summer dust, settled on your skin, made a home in your lungs.

I didn’t know that joy could be queer. I thought it was a mistake I kept making. But now I see it clearly. Queer joy is just joy that insists on existing where it’s not supposed to.

And the prairie, for all its austerity, never told me to stop wanting beauty. It just asked me to notice it when it showed up—coiled in a garden hose, reflected in a hubcap, tucked behind the neck of someone who didn’t know they were your first love.

But before that return, there was a choice to stay. A quiet one, maybe. But deliberate.

Plenty of folks left. The ones who could. The ones who wanted more than dust and silence. I watched neighbors load up U-Hauls and drive toward cities that promised better pay and fewer eyes on your business. Some days, I envied them. Other days, I pitied them. It’s hard to want a life you can’t see.

But I stayed. Or maybe I just stopped running. Hard to say the difference.

And I started to pay closer attention—not just to myself, but to the land. The same dirt that swallowed fenceposts was also holding the roots of everything I loved. The cedar trees that scratched my arms when I was little now offered shade to quail. The dry riverbeds still bore the shape of water, even in drought.

Bioregionalism isn’t a word I grew up with, but I know what it means. It means you stop pretending the land is just backdrop. It means you learn its moods. Its limits. You plant at the right time because the soil tells you when. You haul water in August because the creeks don’t lie. You grieve when the cedar chokes out the native grass and cheer when the milkweed comes back.

To dwell in the land is to know that your story isn’t the only one that matters. The larkspur has a story. So does the lightning bug, the terrapin, the wind. So does the creek that runs dry every third year like clockwork.

I used to think being queer made me different from this place. Now I think it’s the reason I can see it clearly. Both of us overlooked. Both of us misnamed. Both of us still here.

* * *

Coming back wasn’t triumphant. It was quiet. No one threw confetti or apologized. No one asked where I’d been for more than twenty years. But the wind still knew me. So did the gravel roads.

There are more wind turbines now—tall, white ghosts spinning above the fields like mechanical sunflowers. The gas stations have touchscreen drink machines. The diner changed owners, but the coffee still tastes like metal, and someone still brings their own salad dressing in a purse.

Some of the old-timers remember me. Most don’t. A few tilt their heads when I introduce myself, like they’re trying to place a song they haven’t heard in years. They don’t say much, and I don’t force it. Out here, silence isn’t always judgment. Sometimes it’s just the way people hold space for what they don’t have words for.

I drive the backroads now, just to see what’s left. The rusted-out truck by the cottonwood tree is still there. So is the creek where we used to catch frogs and dare each other to jump. So is the billboard for a truck stop cafe that closed fifteen summers ago.

The land has softened in places and eroded in others. So have I.

I don’t need it to be proud of me. I don’t even need it to understand. I just needed to know it would still be here—that some things stay, even if they don’t stay the same.

Now, when I walk through the feed store or order a burger at the Dairy Lou, I don’t flinch. I don’t check my voice. I don’t round off the corners of myself.

I know where I am. And I know what it took to come back whole.

I’ve been other places. I’ve worn other names. But there’s something about returning to the same café, the same streetlight, the same late-summer silence that says: if you survived this place, you can survive anywhere.

Some people are shaped by where they live. Others are forged by it.

I was born Corey—with an E. At least that’s what my parents intended. But somewhere between the delivery room and the county clerk, a nurse made a clerical decision. The birth certificate came back as “Cory.” No E. No warning. No apology.

We didn’t notice until I was nine and needed a Social Security card. My mom looked at the certificate, blinked, and said, “Well, I guess you’re Cory now.”

At school, I started crossing out the E on worksheets with a giant X. My teacher docked points for being dramatic. But I wasn’t trying to be dramatic. I was trying to be heard. It was the first time someone changed something fundamental about me without asking — and expected me to smile and move on.

It wouldn’t be the last.

I’m Cory with no E. And this time, I chose it.