'My family made the pilgrimage to this town in 1999 just after we lost our cotton gin* to a corporate competitor, long after the town had transformed itself into a place for retired Chicagoans and Southern fundamentalists to buy cheap property where it was safe to keep and bear arms and brag about it. In the five years since we'd moved, my parents had leaned how to fit in with some of the Northerners, talk with a slightly nasal accent, smile less. People came here to change their live for the better, to live at a different pace, though later I would learn that a change of scenery would never change somebody like me..... '
'I hadn't felt truly natural since junior high, when I first saw my handsome neighbour walking his dog down the street: a moment that had me begging secretly for a leash. "I don't want to talk about it' I said
"Your friend what's-his-name didn't have a problem talking about it." Friend. The word sounded cavalier, without a trace of irony, landing smugly between the blinker's ticking like a hard fact. It made me want to want jerk the wheel in the wrong direction, slam the gas pedal and drive us into the side of the nearest building.".
*A cotton gin, or cotton engine, is a machine that quickly and easily separates cotton fibres from their seeds, enabling much greater productivity than manual cotton separation.
Three quotes from the spare and haunting 'Boy Erased' by Garrard Conley.
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