Review: Hillbilly Queer by J.R. Jamison

J.R. Jamison’s memoir Hillbilly Queer manages a rare feat in contemporary American writing. Jamison, a product of Cowan, Indiana who grew up with merciless hazing from peers because he’s gay, whose father once said, before knowing J.R. identified as such, “all queers go to hell,” goes back to Central Missouri with his dad, to his dad’s 55-year high school class reunion, and attempts to understand the perspectives of the Missourian Trump supporters with whom his dad so readily identifies.

In other words, Jamison makes an effort to understand the political other. He’s a college-educated liberal repulsed by the conservative tendency to turn away and ridicule people unlike themselves. Like many liberals, he has a tendency to respond to such treatment with the same treatment in return for the Trumpers. And yet he understands that if he is to have any kind of relationship with his father as they age, after mostly staying away from home for a couple of decades, he’s going to have to make an effort to understand why some Trump supporters so readily dismiss Trump’s racism, xenophobia, and homophobia and so readily accept the notion that Trump is the politician who will “Make America Great Again.”

The external story of the narrative involves encountering the catalogue of people and places J.R. and dad come across in dad’s old stomping grounds.  The internal narrative, the thinking J.R. does from the inside throughout the book, allows us to experience along with J.R. what it is like to struggle to withhold judgment and understand where his dad and his dad’s people are coming from. And to watch as he observes external hints of a similar, reciprocal struggle within his dad.

The relationship between the narrator and his father is the key appeal of the entire story. Despite each of their everyday human failings, and despite how obviously different from each other the hillbilly father and the queer son are, what kept me glued to the page and finishing the book in two days total is the obvious and heartening affection between the two main figures.

By the end, they do come to understand each other better, and they do come to strengthen a bond of love and affection with each other. In an era in which we hear people say “I don’t talk to my dad because he’s a Trump supporter,” and “I’m not in touch with my son because I don’t approve of his [gay] lifestyle,” J.R. and his father exemplify a path toward reconciliation for American readers, Trumpers and liberals alike.