Feb. 17, 2022

Everywhere Radio: Skylar Baker-Jordan

Skylar Baker Jordan

This week on Everywhere Radio, we welcome writer Skylar Baker-Jordan.

Video interview

Episode Transcript

Skylar Baker-Jordan: 

It was really easy in my urban bubble as an openly mobile, openly gay person to not only forget those roots, but to other the people back home and the people in rural America to blame them for the sins of the entire nation. 

Whitney Kimball Coe: 

That’s Skylar Baker, Jordan today’s guest on Everywhere Radio. Everywhere Radio is a production of the Rural Assembly. And I’m your host Whitney Kimball Coe. Each episode, I spotlight the good scrappy and joyful ways rural people and their allies are building a more inclusive nation. Well friends, this interview today, it feels a little bit like I’m coming full circle. This interview’s the result of a serendipitous meeting I had with a guy named Skylar Baker-Jordan several months ago. He and I ran into each other in a small Coal Miners Museum in rural Tennessee. Skylar walked into a video interviewers conducting for another Rural Assembly program that we call Everywhere Extra. And I was with my friend, local community organizer, Austin Sauerbrei, and he and I were interviewing Boomer Winfrey, who oversees the Coal Creek Miners Museum in Rocky Top, Tennessee. 

Whitney Kimball Coe: 

So Skylar walks into the Museum just as we’re starting the interview and he joined us to listen to Boomer tell the story of the convict lease system in east Tennessee and how it sparked the war in the heart of Tennessee’s coal mining region. And at some point during that interview with Boomer, I learned that Skylar who had taken up a perch behind me is a freelance writer from Appalachia. And after the taping was over, we swapped cards and months later, it’s just made me so happy to see Skylar’s byline in the Daily Yonder. 

And at 100 days in Appalachia, and he’s writing about his rural roots and docking what it’s like to be rural and gay and Appalachian and the multitude of other things that we carried with us. So I wanted to get Skylar on Everywhere Radio, because I think he has some important observations and wisdom to share about how we reconcile all the parts of ourselves, who we are and where we live and what we experience taking it out of the realms of simple binaries. And Skylar, let me tell you is a prolific writer. He writes on Twitter, I’ve been following him on Twitter since we met. He writes for American and British outlets on policy, public policy and on many other topics from history to pop culture. And again, it’s just a thrill to really come full circle with this random introduction that he and I had in Rocky Top to this conversation today. So Skylar, I really, really appreciate you saying yes. Where are you coming from today? 

Skylar Baker-Jordan: 

Caryville Tennessee. So just a little north of Rocky. 

Whitney Kimball Coe: 

Yeah. And not far from me, I’m in Athens today. So we’re just a few hours apart. So, I mean, you’re not from Tennessee originally. You’re from Kentucky and I’ve been reading a whole lot of your writings that talk a lot about Kentucky. Remind me how you got to Tennessee. 

Skylar Baker-Jordan: 

Well, I took the long road, even though it’s just over the border. I was born in Dayton, Ohio, which is not too far from Middletown. For those of you who are familiar with the Hillbilly Elegy JD Vance narrative. And I was born to the descend… I’m a descendant of Appalachian out migrants, much like many of the people that I grew up around. And so I split my time growing up between Dayton, Ohio and my grandmother’s hometown, which was in Leslie county, Kentucky. And I say, Leslie county, because there’s no town, it’s just the county, but we were outside of Hyden. And then I ended up going to high school in Hyden and I loved it, but it was challenging as a young gay man in the early 2000s to be gay in Eastern Kentucky. I think it was challenging to be gay anywhere at that time. 

But after college, I went to Western Kentucky University. I spent seven wonderful years in Bowling Green, which she’s a city close to my heart that’s just on the edge of Appalachia. It’s like one county outside the ARC definition of what is Appalachia. And then after I left Bowling Green, I went to Chicago where I spent seven years. That’s where I started really writing professionally while I was working in mortgages. Spent seven years there and then in 2018, I moved to Eastern North Carolina, which is where my mother’s family’s all from. And then in 2019… So that was at the beginning of 2018 and then at the end of 2019, I moved to Tennessee, which is where my grandpa parents had relocated. And this is my grandfather’s ancestral, hometown Roberts and Jordans have been stomping these Hills for about 200 years so I have deep roots here in Campbell county. 

Whitney Kimball Coe: 

Yeah. Oh man. Thank you for telling us about that long route. And I want to get into some of the pieces of it. Well, and first I wanted ask you, because I can’t remember, what were you doing at the Coal Miners Museum in Rocky Top that day? Did you end up writing a piece about [crosstalk 00:05:29]. 

Skylar Baker-Jordan: 

It was literally… I had taken… As a freelancer, you don’t really have days off, but I had taken a me day and I had gone down to the Museum of Appalachia because I hadn’t been in probably 25 years. So that was me going down to the Museum. And then I was like, I’m not ready to go home. Well, let’s go to the Coal Creek Miners Museum. I’ve never been there. And so I walked in right, as you were setting up and I almost walked out, but they said, “No, [crosstalk 00:05:56] stay here you’re very, very generous with your time.” And I’m so glad I did because, what a story Boomer can tell and what a wealth of knowledge. 

Whitney Kimball Coe: 

I know. And for those of you listening out there, you can find that interview with Boomer Winfrey about the Coal Creek Museum and about the uprising in east Tennessee on the ruralassembly.org website. It should be under Everywhere Extra if you go there. But you know, so since you and I swap cards that day, I started following you on Twitter and I love all your nuanced opinions and descriptions of where you are and what you’re thinking about and it just really runs the gamut. So I’m really glad we got our hooks into you for the Daily Yonder because you have a byline in the Yonder now I think the article was in December where you wrote a piece of commentary about this journey you started to describe to us about growing up clear in Appalachia and about moving to Chicago when you were 24 to find more opportunity in a larger gay community, I think. 

I loved the phrase you used, “I was upwardly mobile and openly gay.” And then, you liken Chicago to holy water. At first, when you get off the bus, that was just really a wonderful turn of phrase. But you began to notice cracks when you were in Chicago because well, when you were in Kentucky, you were hiding your clear identity, but when you were in Chicago, you were having to hide your Kentucky roots or at least maybe even apologize for them in some cases. So I just wanted you to talk a little bit about that, what it was like to walk on both sides of that. And also, do you think your experience is common for clear rural LGBTQ young people? 

Skylar Baker-Jordan: 

Well, I never hid. That’s one thing I do want to be very clear about. When I came out when I was 15, I came out to my parents the day before 9/11. So that was a big week for my family. Lots of, I think, shocks for my poor dad who was a retired Marine, but because I came out the day before 9/11, I think it put a lot of things in perspective for my family. So in weird and in a perverse kind of way, and I hate to say it because it was such a tragic day, but I think it made my journey a little bit easier than what maybe other people had. Especially at that time we’re talking 20 years ago, the world has changed a lot. So I can’t speak to what LGBT youth are going to through now. 

Certainly I had a very difficult time in high school. I usually refer to it as a crucible of homophobia. I was bullied relentlessly in Eastern Kentucky, and that was tough. That was tough. But college was a completely different situation. I never felt like my sexual orientation held me back at all at Western and other people that I’ve talked to disagree. They think their sexual orientation or gender identity did hold them back at Western at that time. But I never experienced that. To me, Bowling Green was the first place I ever felt like I could be myself and be free, but it was still a midsize Southern town. And so there were certain constraints. And in the back of your head, you were always thinking if I hold his hand, is something going to happen? I was more than willing to take that risk, probably just because I’m real Goby and I don’t care. 

I don’t know why? I think honestly, I think having gone through high school, the way that I did to me at that point, what’s the worst anyone can say, it’s already been said to me. So that’s really made me very outspoken because, heck what do I care? If I could survive that I can survive just about anything, but not everyone thinks that way. And so for me, dating was hard because I was very openly gay and a lot of people at that time in Kentucky, weren’t comfortable with that level of visibility. And so that was part of what made me move to Chicago. Another thing was, I think this is a very common Appalachian experience, which is we go north looking for work. I was really struggling in 2011 when I left to find gainful employment and I didn’t have any direction and that’s, I think a very common millennial experience. 

I graduated with a humanities degree. I have a degree in history. I knew I didn’t want to go immediately to graduate school, but I didn’t know what else to do. I wasn’t certified to teach. That was probably a mistake in hindsight, but the plan had been to become a history professor until my history advisor told me not to do that because history, what did he say? History professors die in office. There are no job openings. So, I went to Chicago and in Chicago, you know where in Kentucky, I was struggling. I don’t want to say I was struggling, but I felt a pressure to compartmentalize the gay part of myself in order to live maybe a more peaceful life. I was finding myself having to compartmentalize the rural part of my identity, which was even little things like listening to country music. 

You have no idea, the stigma attached to something as mundane as a country radio station to people who have this preconceived notion of what that represents and the symbolism of it. They’re not even listening to the lyrics of the song to them. They hear that sound and they’ve got these notions of backwardness and bigotry in their heads. Unfortunately, country music isn’t doing a whole lot to dispel that at the moment, but there’s a lot more. And I think that those of us who grew up with that music understand it. 

So it was hard in Chicago to try and… I always felt like I was justifying myself a lot. And trying to explain that it’s not as backwards as it used to be. And that got a lot harder during the Trump years, but I definitely found myself missing the cultural aspects of growing up in Appalachia and in a rural area. 

Whitney Kimball Coe: 

So a lot of your writings have been not maybe not in defense of, but just trying to complicate narratives about what it means to be rural, to feel close to your culture. And that we contain multitudes. I think you wrote that rural contains multitudes and so do you, so I wonder how you then went from, I think writing about mortgages to getting on track of changing the narrative in a way about rural people and places. 

Skylar Baker-Jordan: 

Well, I was working in mortgages. I wasn’t writing about it. I was actually doing them and yeah, that’s a… I could talk for hours about the mortgage industry and why I left. It’s a very interesting industry though. And that was, I mean, that was the job I got. I literally took an interview because I thought they were hiring a receptionist. They threw me in and asked me if I wanted to be a sales assistant or an underwriting assistant. I had no idea what either of those were, but underwriting had writing in it. So I took that, and then writing doesn’t always pay well. So while I was building up my name and my career, I worked in mortgages, but beyond that, how did I get into writing about rural America? That really happened when I moved to north Carolina and I found myself having to confront notions that I had about what it meant to be rural. 

Whitney Kimball Coe: 

Notions like what? What did you have? 

Skylar Baker-Jordan: 

I moved to Chicago or I moved to North Carolina rather in February of 2018. So this was just over a year after Trump was inaugurated. And I had up until that point, really compartmentalized Bowling Green as being separate from the rest of the south or the rest of Kentucky. And I really remembered my times in Leslie county as a high school student and thought, “Oh, those people are so hateful. Bowling green was nice, but Ugh.” And then I moved back because my 16 year old, he was 16 at the time, was hit by a school bus and my family needed me down there. 

And so I moved back and I was immediately confronted with people who destroyed the stereotype of the hateful Trump voter. People in my own family, but people in the community who rallied around my brother too and my family to really help us and who accepted me as a gay man without even second thought. They weren’t these bigoted ignorant hillbillies that I think that I had even in the course of living in Chicago, sort of written those rural America off as because it was really easy in my urban bubble as an upwardly, mobile, openly gay person to not only forget those roots, but to sort of other, the people back home and the people in rural America and to blame them for the sins of the entire nation, which I think is something that happens quite often. 

Whitney Kimball Coe: 

Of course. And how, I mean, how do you approach telling that story where it’s not those strict binaries or stereotypes? What are the complications that you like to put in the mix or examine for that narrative? 

Skylar Baker-Jordan: 

Well, to begin with it really involved me eating a little bit of Crow.  I had written- 

Whitney Kimball Coe: 

with humility. 

Skylar Baker-Jordan: 

It starts with humility and the first piece I ever wrote for the Independent, which is a British newspaper I still write for, was right after Donald Trump was elected. I was in London and I wrote half my family voted for Trump, half my family voted for Clinton, and now we can’t stand each other. And that was it. And I wrote about how I wasn’t talking to my family who voted for Trump, obviously that changed when my brother had his accident. And so I had to explain that to my readers. Why did it change, what happened? And that accident put a lot of things in perspective for me. And it moved me back to the south, which thank God it did, because it really took the weights off my eyes. And was I able to see with clarity that things are not as black and white as our polarized politics would tell us. 

I had conversations with my maternal grandmother who lives in North Carolina about Black Lives Matter. She voted for Trump, but she also thought police brutality against black Americans was a massive problem. This was an evangelical woman who came to the conclusion that we needed police reform through a different lens maybe than I was looking through from the left. But we found agreement on that issue. And the more I talked to Trump voters and living in Jacksonville, North Carolina, you couldn’t not talk to Trump voters. 

The more I talked to them, the more I recognized that had far more in common than we did that separated us and that even positions that I might find difficult to understand and that’s being generous. They came at, from a often, not always, but often from a position that wasn’t born of hatred. And so you start to understand that there is a material reality to these people’s lives that has been overlooked by, I think our politics at large. So I’m trying to [crosstalk 00:19:10] that way and say, there are reasons why things are the way they are, and we need to understand if we’re ever going to address them. 

 

Whitney Kimball Coe 

We’ll be right back after this from the Daily Yonder. 

Xandr Brown: 

Hi, I’m Xandr Brown with the Daily Yonder. Check out the Yonder report, a new weekly podcast rounding up the latest rural news produced by the Daily Yonder and public news service. You can listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. 

Whitney Kimball Coe: 

Sometimes it feels intractable trying to write about the bridges and about the shared values and about the ways that our futures are linked to one another. Has COVID deepened that? I wonder if that’s made your work harder in a way. 

Skylar Baker-Jordan: 

Well, on a very practical level, yes. Because I can’t get out in the community the way that I would’ve liked to have gotten out in the community. It’s made those things very, very hard. What complicates that even more is the fact that I live with my elderly grandparents. So I have to constantly keep in mind, is this gathering, is this event going to compromise their health. 

We are vaccinated, we’re boosted. So I’m a little less paranoid than I was a year ago, but that’s still a cause for concern. But COVID has certainly exasperated our cultural wars and our cultural divides. And that’s really a shame because I had hoped something like this would bring us together. And I kept thinking about the sacrifices that people made in the second world war, the rationing and such when all of this first happened back in March of 2020. 

And I thought this could be it. This could be the thing that brings us together. Instead, it’s just served as something else to tear us apart. I struggle with that because it’s hard for me to understand why, because the science to me seems very forward, but again, COVID deepened it, but it didn’t cause it, and it exasperated, I think the symptoms of the problem, which went back to disinformation and the fact that we live in these political bubbles, and that we’re increasingly identifying ourselves by our political position or our political party, as opposed to Kentuckians and Tennesseans or Americans, or even used to be that people identified more along their religious lines. But with religious attendance, decreasing people are looking for new forms of group identity, and politics has become that. The causes go back to things that started even before Donald Trump came down that golden escalator. 

Whitney Kimball Coe: 

So you also keep a blog, I think that is called from Washington to Westminster. [crosstalk 00:22:06]. I know more about that your connection to England, half your heart is in England. 

Skylar Baker-Jordan: 

That blog hasn’t been updated in like a year. I’m actually… I texted my friend’s daughter yesterday. She is supposed to be… Which just makes me feel so old by the way, I’ve hired my friend’s daughter to redo that blog and website. She’s a graphic designer. And when I tell you that makes me feel ancient, I used to babysit this girl. So… 

Whitney Kimball Coe: 

Yeah, its cool. 

Skylar Baker-Jordan: 

Yeah. My love of England goes back to my childhood. I identify it as starting with me, turning on PBS one day and finding reruns of this British soap opera called EastEnders, which I’m sure if you follow me on Twitter, you’ve seen me talking about. I watch like every day and I’m not just somebody who watches it, I’m somebody who like lives tweet it while he watches it. But it’s this soap opera about working class people in east London and growing up in a working class duplex in Dayton, Ohio, other than Roseanne, I had never really seen a depiction of working class people on TV that I could relate to like that. 

And so it really started there. And then of course I grew up in the 90s with the spice girls and David Beckham and then BB Mac, I remember being big when I was in high school, but apparently they were only big in America, not in Britain, even though they’re British. So it started… But it started there. It started in my childhood and then in college I studied a lot of British history because I find it fascinating because heard so much more of it. We do but yeah and then I got really interested in British government and politics and I’ve written a lot about British politics over the years. 

And like I said, I was in London when Trump was elected and started writing for the Independent about that. And you go back to my early work from the independent there’s a lot of pieces about British politics. And I wrote for HuffPost UK and I was a political editor for the Gay UK magazine at the 2017 election. So I interviewed members of parliament. 

Whitney Kimball Coe: 

That’s so cool. I mean, that you started… Your love affair with England just from shows you were watching, not necessarily because you had familial connection or community connection. I feel the same about Ireland. A short side story is that I’ve always been obsessed with Irish heritage, Irish history and even river dance, Skylar. When I was 18, I decided to perform the river dance in front of my high school for a talent show. There’s video of it somewhere. I just thought I could river dance. So I did, but anyway, I never took it to the links that you did of actually studying the country more deeply and being able to converse about the public policy in that country. So I wonder if you have thoughts now about what you’re seeing in Great Britain and I know polarization is real there and divides across economic and all other kinds of lines exist there as well. So are you seeing a lot of similarities? Maybe some differences too? 

Skylar Baker-Jordan: 

Yeah. Yeah. The problems of polarization, I mean, and perhaps Americans can take heart in this. We’re not unique. We’re not. Yeah, we have this notion of American exceptionalism, but in very few ways as America exceptional. These notions of polar… It’s been happening in Britain as well. And I think it’s been happening to a degree in other Western nations. I can’t speak as much to them, but you look at Western alienation in Canada, for example, and there’s the whole… There is a movement, small but vocal for the Western Prairie provinces to secede from Canada and form their own more conservative nation. So you see these problems creeping up in other nations as well. And this is something that we, as democracies are going to have to really grapple with over the coming century. 

China right now really thinks that democracy is on its way out. And that authoritarianism is the way of the future because democracies move too slow. Which, if you look at our government, our government is purposely designed to move at a glacial pace. The founders and framers of our constitution made it so that deliberation was a key part of public policy and legislation. That makes it very difficult for change to happen. That’s deliberate. It’s a feature, it’s not a glitch and authoritarians around the world are banking that in the 21st century with the information age and all of this digital technology, that democracies won’t be able to keep up and we have to figure out a way to do that because right now we’re not keeping up, you see that happening. 

I just finished reading the memoir by Mike, I think his name is Mike Signer and he was the mayor of Charlottesville during the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally. And one of the things that I was horrified by is the sheer amount of bureaucracy and inefficiency in making key decisions that he faced. I mean, he was a weak mayor. He wasn’t the one in charge because he had a… Charlottesville has a weak mayor system so it was the city manager who was really in charge. 

But the sheer amount of inefficiency was startling because things were developing so quickly and they can in social media age where you can have a flash mob in 30 minutes by sending out a Facebook invite. So that’s a problem, not just here, that’s a problem in the UK. I don’t know the answers. If I did, I would be wealthy, but I hope that I hope that our politicians are taking it seriously. In the UK I don’t think they are. I think Boris Johnson was too busy partying during lockdown to really be thinking about the big picture, but in the U.S, I think Joe Biden has a better understanding of it. And to be fair, I think there are some Republicans who also understand that this is an existential threat. We have to be able to develop with the times and right now we have. 

Whitney Kimball Coe: 

So what are you writing about right now? Or what project are you working on that’s giving you inspiration or some hope, or maybe leading you to some answers? 

Skylar Baker-Jordan: 

Well, there’s… I mean, there’s always hope. There’s hope if nothing else. And one of the things that has really given me a lot of hope is these last few months, when I started working with 100 days in Appalachia. 100 days in Appalachia, for those of you who don’t know is a nonprofit collaborative newsroom run for and by Appalachians. And I began with them in October as their, what’s my title, contributing editor for community engagement. I write the newsletter every Tuesday, and then I edit Our Creators and Innovators series. And it’s really been through this that I’ve been able to see people on the ground here in Appalachia doing the hard work. In December I featured a young activist from here in Campbell county who has done a lot of organizing and media appearances around environmental justice, both in West Virginia and here in Tennessee. I went on a mine inspection back in November, and I wrote about that. 

So I’ve really gotten to see that there are people in our communities, and I’m sure this is true across America, not just here in Appalachia, who are really committed to making a positive difference. And a lot of them are working outside of the tradition political system. They’re not necessarily involved in party politics. They’re involved in the hard unglamorous work of trudging through mud to make sure your water is safe to drink. And these are the people who inspire me. And these are the people who give me a lot of hope for the future of not just Appalachia, but up the country. 

Whitney Kimball Coe: 

Do you find that it’s those that work that you’re talking about, the slog of making sure our drinking water is safe or making sure our minds are up to code or those kinds of things. I mean, it’s a slog, but it’s also… Do you see it as being nourishing work? 

Skylar Baker-Jordan: 

Absolutely. I could see easily how that work could nourish someone’s soul and how it certainly nourishes communities, because it shows people want to know that there are others who care about them. And I think a lot of our political problems right now, and a lot of our divide is that much of the country feels like no one cares. You look at places like here in Appalachia, but I mean, the same is true, I think in rural Kansas, the same is true in inner city Chicago, people feel forgotten, people feel left behind by the current system. 

And so a lot of what radicalizes people and a lot of what makes people even just angry and bitter and looking for someone to blame is the fact that they feel like nobody is listening and having folks out there doing this kind of work can nourish our communities by just showing them that there are folks who care. And I’m a big proponent of getting out in your community and doing whatever you can to make a change. Because it’s only by coming together that we’re going to keep one another from tearing each other apart. 

Whitney Kimball Coe: 

I had one more question for you before I let you go. And it’s something that I get to ask all of the people I interview on Everywhere Radio and I get some really great answers. So I know you’ll have one too. What is it that you’re watching right now or listening to, or hearing about maybe a podcast or a book or something that is making you laugh or making you or feel making you feel more inspired? 

Skylar Baker-Jordan: 

One thing I’ve been doing is I just recently restarted the Golden Girls. 

Whitney Kimball Coe: 

Thank you for being with friends [crosstalk 00:33:03]. 

Skylar Baker-Jordan: 

I just restarted it and I’ve seen every episode like 50 million times, but it still makes me laugh, but something that’s new and I have been trying to find somebody to let me write this piece and I’ve never gotten a commission on it, but watch the Connors, watch the Connors. It’s Roseanne without Roseanne, but I think it’s better without her. That’s my controversial take, is she was the weak link, letting John Goodman and Lori Metcalf and Sarah Gilbert do their thing was brilliant. They are hilarious. The writing is sharp. It’s witty. It’s funny. It’s timely. It really speaks to the struggles that working people in this country are facing. And you’ll laugh. You’ll laugh your behind off. It’s fantastic. Every Wednesday night, ABC. It’s the only show that I never miss. 

Whitney Kimball Coe: 

Oh, I’m so glad we were here for that pitch. Somebody’s going to pick that up. 

Skylar Baker-Jordan: 

I hope somebody, let me write about the Connors. [crosstalk 00:34:10]. 

Whitney Kimball Coe: 

We know Skylar. We know people surely. We can get this written. Well, thank you so much. It’s been really great getting to know you a little bit better and seeing you again. So let’s stay in touch. 

Skylar Baker-Jordan: 

Thank you so much. I appreciate it. 

Whitney Kimball Coe: 

If you enjoyed Everywhere Radio, we’d love for you to consider subscribing to the general Rural Assembly newsletter. That’s where we promote new offerings from the assembly. And we amplify the good work of our many partners across the country. We’ve also launched a new policy advocacy newsletter that comes to inboxes on Mondays to help you start each week with a quick take on the top issues that we’re tracking across the nation. Everything from broadband policy to rural vaccinations. Just head over to ruralassembly.org to sign up. If you’re a true fan of Everywhere Radio, please let us know by writing us wherever you get your podcast. If this isn’t your cup of tea, that’s no biggie. It’s fine. 

And we’d like to thank our media partner, The Daily Yonder. Everywhere Radio is a production of the Rural Assembly. Our senior producer is Joel Cohen and our associate producers are Xandr Brown and Teresa Collins. And we’re grateful for the love and support of the whole team at the Center for Rural Strategies. Love you. Mean it. You can be anywhere. We’ll be everywhere.