Founder of Out and About Jason Elliott
says the organization’s newsletter will
soon cross 1,000 subscribers.
Photo by Eze Amos.
Charlottesville doesn’t have a gay bar, but the local LGBTQ+ community is thriving in less traditional spaces.
With the closure of Club 216 in 2012, Escafé in 2018, and Impulse in 2020, Charlottesville’s Queer nightlife and drag scene has become increasingly transient, with pop-up events at various restaurants and businesses in the area. The fate of Umma’s, a Korean- and Japanese-American restaurant downtown that quickly became an unofficial gay bar, is currently up in the air. Owners Anna Gardner and Kelsey Naylor explicitly worked to make their restaurant a haven for the local LGBTQ community, but the possible sale of Umma’s after its owners move later this year leaves questions about the future of the space.
The closure of these Queer spaces in Charlottesville mirrors broader national trends, with roughly 50 percent of American gay bars closing between 2012 and 2019 according to Greggor Mattson, author of Who Needs Gay Bars?.
“When I first moved here, we did have those dedicated bar spaces, and so it does impact … how the community functions in the area,” says Jason Elliott, founder of Out and About Charlottesville, a group that hosts LBGTQ-centric social events. “But I don’t think that it prohibits us from still having a strong community here.”
While the current lack of a permanent, traditional gay bar in Charlottesville does have some drawbacks, Elliott says it also has a lot of benefits.
“The shortfall of not having that dedicated traditional space in a brick and mortar setting is that we can’t just show up. We’ve got to plan,” he says. “Ironically, that planning … is also one of the benefits of not having that space, because when we get together, it becomes a lot more intentional.”
Beyond intentionality, the lack of a go-to space has led to a wider range of community events. This month alone, Out and About’s list of goings-on includes trivia nights, game nights, workouts, drag brunch, and a silent disco.
For local drag scene performers Cherry Possums and Bebe Gunn, the lack of an established venue has opened doors—literally.
“It gives us more of a freedom to go into different places, and if something’s not working out, we just shut that one down and move on to another place,” says Possums. “If there was one specific gay bar, our business would have to be more tied into another individual business.”
The lack of a gay bar has led to the drag duo performing at some unconventional venues, including Solid Core Fitness and Common House. “None of the crowds are the same people,” says Gunn. “The people that come to The Southern are totally different than the people that come to [The] Hidden Leaf. And they are totally different than the people that would come to brunch.”
It was exactly this flexibility that originally drew Possums and Gunn to Charlottesville rather than the established drag scenes in Richmond and their hometown of Roanoke. While the roommate duo is currently living in Richmond, they’ve been looking for a place in town.
“Basically, we’re running this like a business, honey,” says Gunn in half-drag before a show at The Hidden Leaf, passing a blunt with their drag daughter and Possums. All three are heavily painted, sporting elaborate makeup—and Possums her signature goatee.
Across the board, Elliott, Gunn, and Possums emphasize the power and importance of local businesses embracing LGBTQ+ events.
“I think it’s also really important that while we’re talking about the spaces that we don’t have, we do have allies that we wouldn’t be here without,” says Elliott. “That may be the business owner who says we can do a drag show somewhere, the business owners that say, ‘Yes, we’re going to pay our drag queens what they deserve.’ The spaces that say, ‘You know what we want to do something special for your community,’ or, it doesn’t have to be special, but it is safe.”
Celebrate Pride at The Fruit Market, presented by Some C’ville Queers at Visible Records. The market highlights local queer artists and provides an engaging opportunity to support their small businesses. Baker No Bakery, a Latina- and woman-run popup panadería, will be selling baked goods homemade with love and local ingredients. Other area artists, including Critter Butts and Deep Holler Leather Works, will share crafts along with a DIY Pride shirt printing station by Infinite Repeats.
Sunday 6/16. Free, noon-4pm. Visible Records, 1740 Broadway St. visible-records.com
Is the experience of coming out today different than 10 years ago?
Photo by Tristan Williams.
Sitting on the floor of his bedroom, Carter cracked like an egg.
It was December 1, 2020, the doldrums of a Covid year; technically Carter was in a Zoom class, but attending his sophomore year of Charlottesville High School from home had long lost its novelty, so Carter was scrolling through Instagram when a simple square of black text on a white background caused him to pause.
It was a post by the actor and producer Elliot Page. “Hi friends, I want to share with you that I am trans, my pronouns are he/they and my name is Elliot,” Page wrote. “I feel lucky to be writing this. To be here. To have arrived at this place in my life.”
“I felt an immediate panic,” said Carter in a March 2024 interview. “Something in me was just like, that’s what I need to do.”
In the parlance of some trans communities, an ‘egg’ is a person who is trans, but hasn’t realized it yet. The egg ‘cracks’ at the moment of self-insight—the gender epiphany. For Carter, that moment occurred as he read Page’s words.
Three and a half years later, Carter is 19, a second year at UVA, and a trans man. His real name isn’t Carter; he asked to be identified by a pseudonym because many people don’t realize he’s trans, and he appreciates being able to choose whether or not he shares that part of himself with others.
Carter has a quiet but intense energy. His initial email offering to participate in this article was concise; still, it was clear that its emotional current cut deep.
“I would be excited and honored to be considered for an interview,” Carter wrote.
Each recent generation of U.S. adults has had about twice as many lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or Queer members as the preceding generation, according to Gallup surveys. A 2021 CDC survey of U.S. high school students found that one in four identified as gay, lesbian, or bisexual—and the CDC didn’t ask students about gender identity, so the actual number of LGBTQ+ students is likely even higher.
Queer kids (this article, in keeping with many young LGBTQ+ people, uses LGBTQ+ and capital-Q Queer interchangeably) are also feeling more accepted in the school environment than they have in the past. The 2021 GLSEN School Climate Survey found that the rates of harassment experienced by Queer students based on sexual orientation, gender expression, or gender are the lowest they’ve been in the 20 years the survey has been given.
Yet at the same time, there’s a paradox: Teens are Queerer than ever, but they are also sadder than ever—and Queer teens are especially sad. The 2021 CDC survey also found that 75 percent of LGBT high-school students feel persistently sad and hopeless, a 15 percent increase since 2015, and 20 percent higher than the overall teenage population.
Sydney Walther came out as a girl in eighth grade and, pretty immediately, started being bullied by her classmates at Albemarle High School, who taunted and dead named her until she switched schools. Photo by Tristan Williams.
When she was in eighth grade, Sydney Walther decided to come out as a girl. It was 2011, and Walther, who at the time attended Albemarle County Schools, started by telling her close friends, who were overjoyed for her. Her parents were also supportive, though worried about her becoming a target for bullying.
Unfortunately, Walther’s parents’ worries proved founded: When Walther entered ninth grade at Albemarle High School in 2012, she was bullied relentlessly. Her classmates did not use her new name and desired pronouns, and to make matters worse, the administration at AHS refused to allow Walther to use the girls’ bathrooms.
So in 2013, Walther transferred to Charlottesville High School. (This writer was also a student at CHS in 2013, but knew Sydney only in passing.)
“For the time, CHS was fairly accepting and progressive,” said Walther. She was allowed to use the girls’ bathrooms, and her new classmates were generally accepting.
“At least to my face, most people used my correct pronouns and name. There were a few times that I was misgendered or dead-named on purpose, but only a couple of instances,” said Walther.
Walther made new friends at CHS. Meanwhile, encouraged by her parents, she began the medical gender transition process. By the time she was 16, Walther was taking testosterone blockers and estrogen.
But “whether I was at Albemarle or Charlottesville, I was on my own,” said Walther. “I felt like the only openly trans person that had at least started their transition. I didn’t really feel like I had anyone that I could relate to.”
For the most part, Walther said she encountered fewer incidents of harassment at CHS than at Albemarle High school, but the ones that did occur were particularly disturbing. Walther recalled that there was a period of a few weeks when, while walking to her car at the end of the day, another student would shout threats of violence at her in the parking lot.
“I remember being legitimately scared. My mind was in so many other places that it was hard for me to keep up with my schoolwork,” Walther said.
“What used to happen is people would come out to themselves in high school but not tell anyone, tell their friends when they were in their 20s, and only by the end of their 20s tell their parents,” said Dr. Charlotte Patterson, a professor at UVA who studies the psychology of sexual orientation and has worked with LGBTQ+ families and teenagers for decades.
“Today, the average age of recognizing yourself is around 14, telling friends around 16, telling family and parents by 17. Lots of kids are talking about LGBTQ+ issues with their friends when they’re in high school now, which never used to happen,” Patterson said, adding that this shift to coming out younger makes the school environment all the more important for Queer youth.
Logan Hall told a friend in eighth grade that he was gay. That friend told everyone else. “It was not ideal for him to break my trust,” Logan says, “but in the moment, and even in retrospect, it didn’t feel dramatic to me.” Photo by Tristan Williams.
In 2008, while an 8th grader at Tandem Friends School, Logan Hall told a friend he was gay. That friend then told the rest of their classmates.
“I wasn’t that mad about it,” said Hall. “I wanted to be out, but didn’t want to go through the process of telling everyone individually. It was not ideal for him to break my trust, but in the moment, and even in retrospect, it didn’t feel dramatic to me.”
Hall went to CHS for high school and graduated in 2013, and he now looks back on the antics of his adolescent self with amusement, but also respect.
“At the time, I just felt like I really had to put on a display as an act of resistance. Like no matter how homophobic people are, my clothes are going to be as tight as I want, and I’m going to wear makeup if I want to. I feel like I just got a huge dose of self-possession in eighth grade. I was kind of a passive kid, I was bullied a little bit when I was younger, I was quiet and sensitive … Maybe it was fury, but I just suddenly was like, ‘I’m going to be who I want to be and I’m going to get what I want out of life,’” said Hall.
“I think I was just blindly confident,” said Tamara Starchia, who came out as a stud (a masculine Black lesbian) before high school and graduated from CHS in 2014.
“Everyone already thought I was gay,” said Starchia. “So by the time we got to high school, it was like, whatever. I was always sporty. It just kind of made sense.”
Starchia said that she doesn’t remember there being a particularly active Queer community presence at CHS, and even if there had been, she feels that it’s unlikely that she’d have been able to attend any community meetings: Between school, sports, and working at Raising Cane’s, her schedule was booked.
Fortunately, Starchia said she didn’t encounter much bullying at CHS. When she did need support, she went to her guidance counselor, another Black woman, or her basketball coach. Other than her guidance counselor, Starchia doesn’t recall ever taking an issue to the CHS administration, saying, “I kept a pretty low profile.”
And though her family was not immediately supportive of her Queer identity, Starchia credits the trajectory of her coming-out experience to the values instilled in her growing-up.
“I think my experience was as positive as it was because I grew up being told to not care about what people think about me,” said Starchia. “Your family loves you, and you love you. What other people think doesn’t matter.”
“The thing I’m noticing, especially in the last two or three years, is that kids are really flexible with the changes their peers are making with regards to their identities because they’re probably doing a little changing themselves,” said Will Cooke, who’s been the director of the CHS choirs for the past 16 years.
Jason Bennett, an assistant principal at CHS, said, “I think students and, you know, youth and people as a whole are seeing themselves more in the world that they’re living in, and I think that inevitably opens up to people living as their true selves.”
“When I think back even—Lord have mercy—20 years ago when I was in high school, it was a completely different world than probably when you were here in high school, right?” Bennett added.
Sisters Cora and River are almost exactly 10 years apart in age: Cora, the second of four kids, is 28, and River, the youngest, is 18. Cora graduated from CHS in 2014–River, in 2024. Both of the sisters’ names have been changed at their request. Both sisters are thoughtful, reserved in crowds, and more comfortable joking with small groups of friends in large gatherings.
Both are Queer: Cora came out as bisexual during her final year of college; River has been out as Queer since her freshman year of high school and has recently come to identify as a lesbian.
River is grateful to have had the space while still a teenager to contemplate her identity.
“I’ve had the privilege to be self-reflective,” she said, naming the support of Queer family members, friends, and teachers as crucial to allowing her to come to terms with her Queer identity in her own time.
But for Cora, despite growing up in the same family and going to the same high school, coming out in high school just didn’t feel like an option that was available to her.
“There’s a grief for that missing experience, of not experiencing coming of age while having a full sense of my identity,” said Cora, adding that she’s happy that River and her friends get to “explore and learn so much at a younger age.”
“Whereas for me and my friends, we were just not aware,” Cora added.
Every year, more Queer kids find self-acceptance, which seems to make it easier for other Queer kids to “catch” self-acceptance from their peers. Often, a Queer high schooler no longer has to be willing to be the only Queer kid they know in order to come out. They can simply be a regular kid who happens to be Queer.
Despite this, or perhaps because of it, according to the Trans Legislation Tracker, every year since 2015 has seen more attacks on the rights and identities of LGBTQ+ teens in the U.S. via bathroom bills, book bans, “don’t say gay” legislation, and barriers to accessing gender-affirming healthcare.
“A lot of these strategies have a long history in authoritarian lore,” said Charlotte Patterson, who has been tracking social acceptance of LGBTQ+ people for decades. “For many older people, I think when you say the word book ban, it conjures images of Nazis burning books in World War II. And many of the books they burned were about LGBTQ issues.”
Tamara Starchia, who identifies as a stud (a masculine Black lesbian), came out to little fanfare before starting high school at CHS. “I think my experience was as positive as it was because I grew up being told to not care about what people think about me,” she said. Photo by Tristan Williams.
By early 2021, Carter knew that he was trans. Even so, he took his time coming out to his friends and family.
While Carter’s parents were supportive of his decision, his dad was hesitant to allow Carter to medically transition. One time during his senior year, Carter and his parents sat down to talk about Carter starting hormone replacement therapy, and his dad pulled out a stack of papers. He’d printed out a number of studies about the risks of hormone replacement therapy and a few articles from the New York Times featuring concerned parents of trans children.
Carter ended up having to wait until he was 18 to start hormone replacement therapy—which meant that, over the span of three months in the summer of 2022, he started hormone replacement therapy, had top surgery, and began college at UVA.
“I got cut open. I had major surgery in order to feel at home in my body,” said Carter. “I make the intentional choice every week to inject myself [with hormones] in order to grow and be who I want to be … I think that the journey lends a perspective and an understanding of the world that’s valuable.”
“Students have always known the teachers they could talk to, but everyone’s very open about it now. I cannot tell you a teacher in that building who does not have a safe space sticker on their door,” said Cooke, the current CHS choir director. “Everybody has one, and they genuinely mean it. It’s not a signifying thing.”
A few years ago, the CHS GSA sold t-shirts and hoodies featuring a black knight (the CHS mascot) against a rainbow background.
“I have never ever seen a fundraiser that sold actual t-shirts. Everybody, everybody, everybody has that shirt. I don’t think there’s a single teacher, unless they’re new this year, that does not have one,” said Cooke.
“Had there ever been CHS LGBTQ+ pride gear before?” I asked.
Cooke paused, then said, “I don’t think so. Not that I can recall. So there it is.”
It only took a few days after Hestia, 17, told the Renaissance School her new name and pronouns until “all the teachers were using them, and even other students,” she said. Hestia, along with her friends Zina, Quinn, and several of their classmates, recently founded Safe Open Queer Space for Teens, or SOQS4Teens (pronounced “‘socks for teens”). SOQS4Teens’ goal isn’t to improve the community for Queer students at Renaissance School—they don’t need to. It’s already thriving. (Hestia, Zina, and Quinn are being identified by first name only because they are minors.)
But despite their supportive school environment, the founders of SOQS felt detached from the larger Charlottesville Queer community due to the lack of spaces for Queer teens.
“I was 13 when Covid started, so that really affected my ability to make friends,” Hestia said.
“I see SOQS providing a welcoming and nurturing peer environment that will help increase the mental health and wellbeing of Queer teens throughout Charlottesville and Central Virginia,” said Welford L. McLellan Jr., a dean at Renaissance School who teaches a class on civic engagement. “Marginalized people tend to feel physically and emotionally safer when gathered with marginalized people from the same group. Teens are often marginalized in our society and we know that being Queer has a stigma, as well. Queer teens often feel more ostracized than straight teens. I see SOQS as a safe haven for Queer teens,” McLellan added.
Nowadays, Carter’s busy with two majors and a number of UVA student groups, but still, he hasn’t forgotten about the wider Charlottesville LGBTQ+ community. He is a board member for the Charlottesville Gender Expansive Network, and the leader of a new support group for trans men and transmasculine people in Charlottesville.
At first, taking on the role of organizer felt unnatural to Carter, but he felt that the community need was too great to go unattended.
“I saw that it was mine to do because no one else was doing it,” said Carter. “It was more work than I thought. I feel like a lot of the time the people who need the support group the most are the people who are not going to be able to come to the support group.”
As a first step, Carter sent out a preliminary interest form to ask people what could keep them from attending the support group. Carter said he got a number of responses from people about things that could keep them from attending like a lack of childcare or transportation.
“When you try to be compassionate and inclusive in your work, it makes it harder,” said Carter. “But I’m glad I’m taking such an approach.”
Emma Copley Eisenberg will discuss 'Housemates' with Carmen Maria Machado during a virtual event on June 11, hosted by Charis Books. Details can be found at charisbooksandmore.com. Publicity photo.
Though Emma Copley Eisenberg is known for her acclaimed true crime memoir, The Third Rainbow Girl: The Long Life of a Double Murder in Appalachia, she received her MFA in fiction from the University of Virginia, where she was a Henry Hoyns/Poe Faulkner fellow. Her new novel, Housemates, is a queering of the classic road trip story, exploring personal and political expression through art, the transformative potential of community, and the joy and pain that we experience through our bodies. Given the breadth of the author’s inspirations and considerations in writing Housemates, this interview was edited for length.
C-VILLE Weekly: What inspired Housemates, and when did you know that your protagonists would be re-imaginings of Berenice Abbott and Elizabeth McCausland?
Emma Copley Eisenberg: “Sort of by accident, I turned to reading this plump biography of American photographer Berenice Abbott. I knew she was a lesbian and had lived a glamorous queer life in Paris in the 1920s and had had an older man mentor who reshaped her life. I was stopped in my tracks by this section about her meeting her life partner, Elizabeth McCausland, a hot tall fat butch lesbian … Pretty quickly the two set out on a road trip across the southeastern U.S. with Abbott making large format photographs and McCausland writing about it. The two left single and creatively adrift and came back wholly together, romantically and creatively, with a clear sense of the project they wanted to make, which became their famous collaboration Changing New York. What happened on that road trip? I needed to know, yet knew I never would, as those intimate details are lost to history.
“It didn’t take me long to realize I didn’t want to write a historical novel, but rather wanted to know about this duo of the past because of what they might be able to offer me about the present—halfway through Trump’s presidency, and in a moment where America was even more hostile to queer people and artists than ever. How to be a queer woman who was also trying to be an artist in America? How to both appreciate and get free of the old men artists who shaped you? How to be both a separate person and together with someone? These were the questions that kicked off Housemates.”
This is a very corporeal book. As someone who has written about fatphobia, describe why it’s important to you to show bodies, and ways of using bodies, that often remain uncelebrated.
“I always come back to one of my north star truths about writing: If it is part of the experience of being alive, it is worthy of examination in fiction. Having a body is at least fifty percent of being a human being, yet we forget about it in books. And more than fifty percent of Americans are now fat people. If you are writing fiction about America, you are writing about fat bodies, yet I recently ran the numbers about The New York Times’ annual lists of notable books in all categories, and less than one percent of their picks from the last five years have a fat person in them. One percent!
“I’ve noticed that when books, especially fiction, do have fat characters in them, the fat characters are almost always treated with derision or disgust, or their fatness is treated as the central problem the book is trying to ‘solve.’ This is not how my fat body exists for me—it is one important part of who I am, but I also struggle with many other things. So it was important and interesting to me to write a fat main character whose body is on her mind a lot but who is, fundamentally, struggling with other things, like what to do with her life. I wanted to show her in all her complexity—including how good she is at sex and how at home she feels in pleasure, something that is usually denied to fat people. I think both main characters are interested in having a body, so I wanted to show them talking and grappling with that … They talk aloud about picking their noses, which I have been waiting my whole life to do in fiction.”
Describe your research process.
“I did a lot of research for this book, which differed from what I did for The Third Rainbow Girl in that it focused on understanding emotional truths and putting my body in the places that appear in the novel. I did things like visiting the Flight 93 memorial in Stoystown, PA, eating at an Amish smorgasbord in Lancaster, driving up and down the Susquehanna River, and reading Galway Kinnell poems.”
Describe the responsibility you felt weaving together questions of morality, despair, and art’s life-saving potential.
“This book is as much about the costs and rewards of making art as it is about Bernie and Leah … [asking] the question of whether or not art can save your life. I went into the book with that question as an open inquiry, and I think all of the characters would have different answers to it … Yes, it can save your life in the sense that it can make a life more alive, more pleasurable and it can open up seams of love and connection that sustain people, especially marginalized people who have often had less access to material resources. But at the same time, in no way is art a substitute for money, jobs, or healthcare—if you are sick or poor or mentally ill or being discriminated against or harmed on a systemic level, art is not going to save your life … just as America fundamentally does not support healthcare in this country, America fundamentally does not support the arts. We have decided, apparently, that neither taking care of the body nor the soul is important to us as a country. That leaves every person out there on our own to muddle through and build the best, most alive life that we can.”
