Jeff Mann is professor of creative writing at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and the author of several poetry books and the memoir Edge. In Loving Mountains, Loving Men Mann, an Appalachian Mountain man who is also a gay man, seeks to reconcile his two identities. Mann grew up in Hinton, a small mountain town in southern West Virginia. Like many gay men in similar circumstances, Mann left his hometown for the big city - Washington, DC - where he became active in the local leather and bear scenes. “Being gay and being Appalachian sometimes feel to me like mutually exclusive states of identity. So many gay men and lesbians, faced with rural intolerance, relocate to the big city, where urban gay communities provide them with both friends and lovers,” he wrote. However, it wasn’t long before Mann “found myself homesick, hating the concrete and the cars, missing the mountains, missing even my father’s vegetable gardens....Eventually, instead of feeling like a queer oppressed by redneck Appalachians, I began to see the oppression that Appalachians and homosexuals have in common.”

“Sometimes it feels as if my Appalachian roots and my desire for men are two lovers I vacillate between. When I feel spurred by one, I take up with the other.” Only eventually was Mann able to broker a “compromise” between his two great loves. “My compromise has been to live in university towns in Appalachia: Morgantown, West Virginia, for thirteen years, and now Blacksburg, Virginia, for the last fifteen. In such towns, I can feel safe in a liberal, intellectual atmosphere. As an academic, I can even combine my seemingly contradictory passions and teach both gay and lesbian literature and Appalachian studies. And I can stay in the mountains, close to what remains of my family, for, as Loyal Jones so eloquently points out in his famous essay ‘Appalachian Values,’ we hill folk are powerfully attached to our native places and our kin.” Even so, “this sense of belonging can be a shaky construct, and I find myself an occasional outsider in both mountain and gay communities.” Fortunately, after a series of romantic misadventures, Jeff finally found a life partner, John, who is willing and able to share his dual life.

In Loving Mountains, Loving Men, Jeff Mann has “chosen to mix not only regional identity with sexual identity, but also poetry with prose.” While Mann’s prose tells us a lot about its author’s experience as a hillbilly/author/academic/gay leather bear, his poetry allows us to feel it. Mann is obviously fond of his native Appalachia - “the depth of its folk culture, the breadth of its writers” - and is probably too forgiving of this conservative region’s racial, religious and sexual prejudices. Like a lover, Mann accepts his rural home for what it is. For their part, Appalachians - or at least those who read - gave “the Brokeback professor” and his book a warm reception. (The fact that Mann looks and talks like them helped.)

The success of the movie “Brokeback Mountain” has led to new interest in the lives of rural lesbians and gay men. Loving Mountains, Loving Men is an inspiring look at one not-so typical life, written by a writer who is both a scholar and a poet. Like its author, it is a major contribution to both Appalachian studies and gay studies. It is a fitting contribution to the Ohio University Press series in Ethnicity and Gender in Appalachia.

Jesse Monteagudo is a freelance writer and gay book lover who lives in South Florida with his life partner and many books. You may reach him at jessemonteagudo@aol.com.