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About
The Queer Appalachia Project is (was?) an art, social media, and harm reduction project founded in memory of the late West Virginia artist Bryn Kelly. By taking user-submitted images from LGBTQ+ people across Appalachia and the non-mountain South, the Queer Appalachia Project advanced a vision of rural and Appalachian queer identity which defied the stereotypes of the region as politically and morally backwards.
However, in August of 2020, author Emma Copley Eisenberg wrote an article in The Washington Post, entitled "The Tale of Queer Appalachia," which convincingly alleged that the Queer Appalachia Project had been engaging in financial misconduct, artistic theft, and the censoring of Black Appalachian voices. What followed was a back and forth of apologies, criticisms, retractions, and the deletion of posts and comments. Since August of 2020, no post has been made on the Queer Appalachia Instagram account and the posts containing the group's apologies have been deleted. Queer Appalachia now boasts to have been "decolonized" though no details or proof of this label have been shown.
This project, currently led by queer Appalachian scholar Maxwell Cloe, is an effort to preserve the Queer Appalachia Instagram account, not as a vindication of the group's actions, but rather as an effort to hold the group accountable in the event of any sudden mass deletion of posts. Moreover, the account, with its crowdsourced origins, is an invaluable text for the study of contemporary queer Appalachian cultures, online and offline.
The project is currently in Stage One: the preservation of posts and captions currently available on the Instagram account. Later stages will involve the documentation of Instagram stories and deleted posts.
If you have any information, screenshots, or a desire to help, please feel to reach out to me via email: mmcloe@email.wm.edu.