While marriage-equality wins sweep the nation — minutes before PGN’s interview with author Anne Balay, the U.S. Supreme Court cleared the way for same-sex marriage in nearly a dozen more states — the notion that being LGBT is becoming more accepted is also gaining traction. But, there remain wide swatches of the LGBT community who still routinely face discrimination and harassment.
“There’s a sense in our culture that it’s becoming increasingly easy to be gay,” Balay said. “Marriage legislation is all over TV and especially a lot of young people are coming up thinking, What’s the big deal? But that’s so not their experience.”
The “their” Balay is referring to is the dozens of LGBT steelworkers she interviewed for her new book, “Steel Closets: Voices of Gay, Lesbian and Transgender Steelworkers.” Balay and one of the subjects she interviewed — a trans steelworker from Pennsylvania — will be in town next week for a book-reading event at Blue Big Marble Bookstore.
“Steel Closets” is rooted in Balay’s interest — and experience — in blue-collar communities. The Connecticut native moved to Chicago for college and went on to earn her Ph.D — before switching gears and becoming a car mechanic.
“There aren’t a lot of jobs for English Ph.Ds, and I’ve always been interested in blue-collar work, especially queer people in blue-collar work, so I thought the best way to look into it would be by personally doing it,” she said, noting that she faced much more pushback in her job for being a woman than for being queer. “No one really gave a crap about me being gay, but they did about me being female.”
Balay worked at the car shop for about six years before returning to teaching. After moving to Gary, Ind. — which was founded by a steel company — she said she was prompted to research the conditions for LGBT steelworkers.
“Steelworkers have a really unique life. You’re isolated from your community, the work is really dangerous, and I was curious what it’s like to be gay out there,” she said. “I went to look into it and there was just nothing, no published research of any kind. So based on the weird uniqueness of my own experience, I thought I could possibly get access to people in this community to figure out what life was like for them.”
She was able to attain that access by establishing trust within LGBT circles.
“At the beginning I went to the local gay bars. I went often and got to be a familiar face and, when people got comfortable, I started talking about what I was looking for, how I wanted to do research,” Balay said. “These people were very hidden so I had to talk to them about the stories and keep everything secret, assure them they couldn’t be discovered. But even though they’re hidden, they also know that their stories are important.”
Those stories were often hard to hear.
There was one period in which three subjects in a row recounted their rape.
“These are people with hard lives. After the third person talked about their rape, I had to take a break for a bit,” she said. “But one of the coolest things about these people is their ability to describe their experiences but also their ability to go on having meaningful lives. It was so hard for them to describe the rape, but it didn’t break them. They had these experiences and they didn’t let them stop them or immobilize them or shape how they reacted to other people.”
The subject joining Balay in Philadelphia began working at the steel mill about two decades ago, identifying as a butch lesbian, and transitioned on the job.
“Most gay people in the mills survive by hiding. There’s a huge amount of harassment and hatred directed toward gay people, but if you can’t figure out who they are, you can’t harass them. But, when someone changes their gender, you can’t hide that; all that anger is going to be directed at that person,” Balay said. “The amount of harassment and violence experienced by trans people in the steel mills is really horrifying. But this is someone who survived years, didn’t quit, wouldn’t back down.”
He was later laid off from his position, and is pursuing a law degree.
One woman Balay interviewed was nearing the end of her battle with leukemia and other illnesses contracted from a life in the steel mills. But she didn’t blame the work.
“It didn’t make her hate it. She still felt happy to have a meaningful job, even though she’s dying from it; there’s so much irony to that,” Balay said. “I wanted to condemn what has been done to these people but they didn’t let me; they’d say, ‘No, it’s more complicated than that.’ They have handled some of the hardest things I’ve ever heard of, but they’re still generous and not blaming a world that has been hard on them. It gave me a new understanding of what it means to be a hero, a survivor.”
One of the goals of the workers in “Steel Closets,” Balay said, is to paint a more realistic picture of the LGBT community.
“The media presents one image of what it means to be gay or queer — a white, male middle-class architect — but that’s only one side of what it means to be queer. To be responsible, social-justice-minded queer people, we have to help these stories be told.”
Anne Balay will read from “Steel Closets” 7 p.m. Oct. 14 at Big Blue Marble Bookstore, 551 Carpenter Lane. For more information, visit www.annebalay.com.