"Forbidden Friends"
A History of Colonialism in the New World
All Things Forbidden
Part I: All Things Forbidden
The title of this book first originated from my experiences as a gay teenager, but after meeting the African American man who would become my husband, I quickly realized that those things that felt forbidden to me were as much a product of being a farm boy as they were a product of belonging to a cult-like church. I was raised in a universe that was binary. I always knew what was right and what was wrong, but it was never defined in terms of why the good things were to be sought after. Instead, the children in my small town were provided with explanations of why all the alternatives were evil. Cardston, Alberta, Canada was a small town, surrounded by expansive farms and even smaller towns, where over 95% of the residents belonged to a single cult-like religion. Technically, we were all Canadians, but culturally, we were Utahns because all of us were descended from polygamous Mormons who considered themselves religious refugees, fleeing the new law that made the practice of plural marriage illegal in the United States. In Southern Alberta Mormon towns, isolationism was deeply entrenched in our culture, and in many ways, it still is today. The northern border of the Mormon settlements was the southern border of the Blood 148 reservation, now correctly known as the Kainai Nation. It is the largest reservation in Canada, but the Mormons did very little to foster any kind of a relationship with the Kainai people. They bought their supplies in our stores and promptly went back to the reservation. We drove through their land without stopping when we needed to get to Glenwood, where my mother was born. Until they had their own high school in 1988, Kainai students were bussed to Cardston for their last three years of high school, but most Mormon kids chose to only have limited interaction with them. Because the Mormon faith prohibited Black people from holding the priesthood (until 1976 when I was 16 years old), every person I knew was either white or from the Kainai Nation. I never even saw a Black person (in nearby Lethbridge) until I was 13 years old. To further underscore how isolated Mormon children were, I never rode an escalator until a new (modern) shopping mall was built in Lethbridge, when I was 11 years old. The important take-away from my memoir is that my rural town, my extended family, and my religion, are not outliers in America, even today. Rural America is still making the same mistakes that were made in the 1970s, and social media and cell phones have made correcting those mistakes infinitely more complicated. Because fear is a far greater motivator for a click or a swipe than appeal is, the echo chambers of social media, and the monolithic nature of rural communities and rural churches are making it increasingly easier to define who the out-group is. The fear-based click makes it easy for populist religious and political leaders to elevate behavior that poses a threat to those desiring to live their life the correct way. The politics of the 2024 presidential election campaign saw literally billions of dollars being spent defining who the forbidden friends were, not only casting them in the context of being less desirable, but worse yet, demagoguing them. Not only are certain people deemed inferior in the eyes of some, but in the current climate, those forbidden friends were now being referred to as the enemy within.
Section 1: Forbidden by Religion
I am not an expert on religions in America, but I do know quite a bit about church culture and how it can take over the lives of very conservative families.
Some of you may not have had any adverse religious experiences because you were raised by liberal parents in a liberal church. From my own research, I believe that this is not the case for most of us.
All my life I had been told to avoid immoral behavior by avoiding any temptation that would take me there, but my Sunday school teachers didn’t understand one very important thing about being gay. When you are gay, you crave the company of other men with whom you feel an emotional connection.
Going through puberty, most boys are not likely to have the emotional maturity to navigate those feelings while living in an environment that not only denies the very existence of LGBTQ+ people, but also is aggressive in teaching that the kind of people who would entertain those thoughts in their head are living on the verge of committing some of the most heinous sins in the sight of God.
I hesitate to use my own religious background as the primary example in my book because it may narrow the view of some as they read this book, but in the interest of greater understanding, I feel that I must make my own experiences known with absolute clarity.
Please take what is meaningful to you and leave the rest on the table if it does not apply to your own religious upbringing.
The Paradox of Tolerance
I was raised with the idea that good Christians had to tolerate the sinners. We were constantly taught that we had to be “in the world, but not of the world.”
Today, I despise the word. There is an entire Wikipedia page dedicated to research in tolerance. This is the opening paragraph.
The paradox of tolerance is a philosophical concept suggesting that if a society extends tolerance to those who are intolerant, it risks enabling the eventual dominance of intolerance, thereby undermining the very principle of tolerance. This paradox was articulated by philosopher Karl Popper in The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945), where he argued that a truly tolerant society must retain the right to deny tolerance to those who promote intolerance. Popper posited that if intolerant ideologies are allowed unchecked expression, they could exploit open society values to erode or destroy tolerance itself through authoritarian or oppressive practices. (Wikipedia 2025)
This country was founded on Enlightenment ideals that were nascent at the time of the American Revolution, and Elder John Leland, a Baptist theologian and pastor, made it very clear what he thought about tolerance when writing in the Virginia Chronicle in 1790.
Government should protect every man in thinking and speaking freely, and see that one does not abuse another. The liberty that I contend for, is more than toleration. The very idea of toleration is despicable; it supposes that some have a pre-eminence above the rest, to grant indulgence; whereas all should be equally free, Jews, Turks, Pagans and Christians (Leland 1790).
This is the kind of Christianity that we, as a nation, should have been building for the past 250 years, but we have sorely missed the mark.
The culture that I grew up in taught that we (the Mormons) were only to tolerate the gentiles, and yes, I used that word in the context of the followers of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young. We are the true saints that the God of the Old and New Testament was referring to. Including the word saints in the name of the church was intentional. We are the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and we take that word very seriously.
So yes, ironically, only in Utah and the Mormon diaspora are Jews considered to be gentiles.
Section 2: Forbidden by Ignorance
As mentioned in the introduction, the chapters that constitute my memoir are organized in strategic sections. You will recall that in Figure 2 (see page 9), Part I of the book has five sections, and we are now beginning Section 2.
This is where I will make a shift from relating how I overcame the barriers imposed by religion and turn to the barriers attributable to ignorance.
In many ways, ignorance is more difficult to overcome than religious objections. In a religious debate, grace allows me to back away as they retreat to their beliefs. The two of us can choose to adhere to different beliefs and still coexist.
In a religion, we are taught that faith is a belief in things not seen. Life after death is a classic example of a belief that we place our faith in. Different beliefs in what happens in the hereafter should not foreclose a peaceful coexistence.
Going to hell for being gay will be my choice, so please leave me to it. Freedom of religion also means, for some, freedom from religion.
Willful ignorance, on the other hand, is a completely different obstacle that is always more challenging to take on.
The kind of ignorance that I am talking about in this book is a failure to be open to what the truth really is, and the best way to differentiate faith from willful ignorance is to look for the presence of propaganda.
Worthiness Propaganda
Beyond the Mormon Church, there was still a pervasive ignorance that permeated society, and it was there as much due to the propaganda of the times. It transcended religion.
In the Mormon Church of the 1970s, the “moral worthiness” interviews with the bishop start shortly before your 12th birthday, and I remember vividly that my bishop asked me, “Do you masturbate?”
When I asked what that was, he asked, “Do you have a problem with playing with yourself?”
At the end of the interview, he handed me a pocket-sized pamphlet entitled, “For Young Men Only,” and told me to read it, and live by it. The pamphlet made it very clear that any young man who masturbates has a very high risk of teaching himself to be gay.
Section 4: Forbidden by Race
To say I was naive after this point in my life would be an understatement. It is April of 2007, and it has only been 6 months since I've started to date men. The boyfriend that I had when my wife set up our first date only lasted for 2 months, and he dumped me. I started courting another guy that I had hoped might turn out, but after 2 months he also dumped me. The following weekend I started seeing another guy, and after 2 months he informs me that it’s probably not going to turn into anything special.
At this point, I had Easter dinner with a couple of guys who rode with the Stonewall Knights motorcycle group that I’m riding with. They were in their '70s and they told me that, for the gay guys in South Florida, I came with too much baggage. By baggage, they meant I had an ex-wife and four children, and I was incredibly naive sexually.
They told me about a dating site that was probably tailor made for somebody in my position because a lot of the guys on this app were my age or older. Many of them had come out late, and a significant number of them had ex-wives and children. They told me I really should put my profile on this site.
So, after enjoying a wonderful chat and Easter dinner with this gay couple, I went back home to Bonita Beach and created a profile on SilverDaddies.com. By the time I had confirmed my email address and gone back in to check my messages, I already had a response from this racially ambiguous guy that immediately caught my eye.
What became most fascinating to me, after the fact, was that it didn't even dawn on me to be preoccupied at all about this guy's dark skin, broad nose, and texture of his hair. For all I knew, he could have been Caribbean, Latino or African American. He told me on our first date that most people thought he was Dominican.
It just didn't matter to me. What really mattered to me was that he had a 33305 zip code. He lived in the center of the gay universe!
Intergroup Contact
Part II: The Fears of the Colonizers
As a history teacher, who on his best day might be considered a “hopeful agnostic” when it comes to religiosity, I would often want to be flippant about the complex relationship the United States has had with Christianity. What I wanted to say, but felt constrained from saying out of consideration of the various sentiments of my students, was a version of the following meme: “You aren’t the only one who was praying. God answers all prayers. His answer to you was no. His answer to me was yes. Praise the Lord!” I love the meme because it captures beautifully the gospel of the colonizers. I have no idea who to attribute it to. A Shift to Instructive As mentioned in the Introduction, my memoirs continue throughout Part II of this book. As you will recall, I did my undergraduate studies in multimedia studies and mass communication, and my planned dissertation was focused primarily on how technology might be incorporated to help build, manipulate, and disseminate governing narratives. While Part I was designed primarily to be informative, Part II has been designed to be more instructive. Part II is still, however, a continuation of my memoirs because I was doing my doctoral research in part to facilitate my own healing from the trauma of being raised in communities that held cult-like control over everybody’s lives (i.e. governing narratives). In the interest of time, and in recognition that my research into these narratives is in its infancy, some of these chapters will be cursory in nature, serving more as a taste of what is to come rather than an analysis. In these instances, I will direct the reader to the links provided in Appendix II. After I hit the “print” button and publish, I will continue my writing online until the 4th edition is ready for release. A few of the chapters and subsections are, at this point, descriptive placeholders. The four sections of the second half of the book work through the constraints that are inherent in rural life by connecting the existence of these modern constraints to the fears of the colonizers from which they are derived. As my experience taught me, the discussion is best organized by sequencing the chapters under the following sections: • Section 6: Rural America Defined • Section 7: Rural Church Narratives • Section 8: Rural Political Power • Section 9: Allaying the Fears As suggested by the title of Section 9, I will close this book with some suggestions that will guide me in the third half of my life. In Part II, the mistakes that I learned from have less to do with me being a closeted gay man than they do with the mistakes that I made because I did not recognize my white privilege for what it was. For me and others like me, making these mistakes not only came at a very high price to myself and people that I love, but they were mistakes that served to perpetuate the centuries-old marginalization of oppressed minorities. Like my friends who had said to me that, “Mickey sure lives in his Blackness,” my own ignorance, as it related to how the origins were derived from me having been raised to embrace the fears of colonizers, had manifest to my new friends within marginalized populations as complicity. Now it was my turn to do something about it!
Section 6: Rural America Defined
In Cardston everybody in town knew that the mail was completely sorted by 3 o’clock every day, so very few people would stop by to get their mail before then. My town did not have mail delivery, so everybody had a mailbox at the post office.
There was no better place to get caught up on the local news than the post office mailbox lobby. The routine was that mom would leave work, where she ran the office for our dad at the bulk oil business, then stop by the post office, and be home before we got home from school. We all walked home from school because it was just three blocks to the elementary school, and four blocks to the high school.
We kids would all laugh if we made it home from school before our mom got home because we knew she would have gotten tied up in the latest gossip at the post office. Nobody had to wait for the weekly newspaper to find out what was going on in town.
Even though we have to-the-door mail delivery here, Galena is no different. The morning after I accepted the calling to be the choir director for the Galena United Methodist Church, a stranger met me at the post office and introduced herself.
When I introduced myself, she declared, “Oh, I know that. You're the new choir director at the Methodist Church.”
This town is so small that even our dogs have a reputation. When we were considering adopting a dog named Peaches from the local no-kill shelter, strangers would meet my husband on the Galena River Trail or the street and greet Peaches by name.
Section 7: Rural Church Narrative
One reason why Section 7 is so important here in Part II is because Mickey and I have found that the United Methodist Church is one of the most intentional modern churches to recognize the importance of de-colonization. If there is one thing that we can all agree on it is that colonization deepened racial divides across the globe and cemented those divisions into new governments and ancient religions.
Mickey is still a religious person, and he likes to have a connection with God, so after our move to Galena in March 2022 we decided to try out the local United Methodist Church after the newspaper featured the pastor on the front page.
The congregation had voted to become a reconciling congregation, which meant that this pastor had been hired recently with the main goal of diversifying and growing the Methodist congregation by promoting it as open and affirming (Alvaran 2024).
Little did I know at the time that the Methodist Church was still in the middle of its schism. I thought they had worked their way through that, but the COVID-19 pandemic had forced the cancellation of their 2020 general conference.
It was the summer of 2022 when Mickey and I had started attending, and in the upcoming April 2024 conference the Methodist Church was going to decide on whether to change the wording in the Book of Discipline.
I can only hope that the day will come when the Mormon Church and other similarly conservative churches and congregations can find a way to evolve in similar ways to the Episcopalians, Presbyterians, and United Methodists, but I’m afraid that day is a long way off.
Section 8: Rural Political Power
Living in a rural county that historically has been 99% white does not provide a kid with an accurate perception of what it means to be an "American" in the 21st century.
Rural areas have trended more toward Trump style politics, and if we allow the trend to continue, progressive minded people will begin to avoid rural areas, and the population will age and shrink as a consequence. America will be evermore and permanently divided.
If you need an example of how bad it can get, I can simply remind you of the following sentence:
“He’s an Arab.”
If you need a hint, that was a sentence spoken into a microphone that John McCain was holding at a Lakeville, Minnesota town hall on October 10th, 2008, (Martin and Parnes 2008).
While Lakeville is not rural, it is on the very southern edge of the Minneapolis suburbs, but the thinking of this senior citizen is indicative of a persistent problem in rural politics.
Despite trying to tamp down the woman’s blatant ignorance in a firm but gentle manner, the crowd booed McCain when he called Obama a man that he admired and said, “I will respect him.”
One voter even said, “The time has come, and the Bible tells us to speak the truth, and that the truth sets you free.”
This comment was made to infer that McCain was trying to deceive them with his respectful approach to politics.
By March 2011, Donald Trump, recognizing an opportunity when he saw it, jumped on the Obama birtherism train, and he rode it all the way to the White House.
Allaying the Fears
Section 9: Allaying the Fears
One thing that the Founding Fathers were acutely aware of was that each of the thirteen colonies had vastly different dreams and ambitions, so putting together a Republic was going to be very difficult. They were, however, in agreement on one thing: Their white, male privilege! There were a lot of other things that they knew they were going to have to put aside for a future time. None of them would have claimed that the draft Constitution was perfect. This is how Casey Burgat put it in their new book, We Hold These Truths: How to spot the myths that are holding America back.” None of the delegates in the room […] would have called the draft Constitution perfect. In fact, they explicitly admitted it wasn’t. Yet 38 of the 42 delegates present on voting day signed it. In their estimation, a set of compromises, grounded in sound principles and with plenty of opportunity for future revision, was an acceptable starting point – and the only achievable one. (Burgat 2025) When Americans today reference that same document, however, we often exercise none of that balance. In our modern imagination, the Constitution is not a rubric but an edict, written by oracles with unified ideas and indisputable intention, etched in stone. Our challenge today in 2025 is to return to the idea that it is our duty to our children to change how we govern so that it evolves with technology. There is no reason today for voting to be voluntary, mostly because there is no reason anybody should have to leave their home to vote. Every American should be expected to vote, and there also should be no excuse for waiting for days to tally the results. Furthermore, ranked choice voting in the primary elections will ensure that partisan politics no longer determine the outcome in “safe” districts that have been aggressively gerrymandered. The only reason these changes have not already been incorporated into our modern elections already is because the system was designed to advantage the same privileged white men who wrote the constitution 250 years ago. It was designed to bestow an imbalance of power to a minority, and the system is still working as intended! Worse yet, it is the Supreme Court that is blocking much of the change, not just Congress. The other problem today is that the imbalance of power is also privileging rural voters in what coastal elites call “flyover country.” To affect the kinds of changes that are needed to have a true democracy in the United States, we need to get more rural voters to see the inherent flaws for what they are so that we can finally have the free and fair elections that we pretend we have now. Brokeback vs. Stonewall Where I was growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, the grip that Mormonism and cultural norms had on my world would have manifest with vastly different outcomes if I would have been a city boy, like Mickey was. Mickey lived within blocks of a public university, and even though he was still living at home, the freedom he felt to experience a life that he witnessed among his peers during his first year of university changed everything for him. More importantly, Muncie had a gay bar, and nearby Indianapolis had several gay bars. Every weekend gave Mickey the freedom to remind himself that he was not alone. For my part, I had been raised to not only fear all of that, but to also forcefully repudiate it as being inherently evil. I was taught to be “in the world, but not of the world.” Like Ennis in Brokeback Mountain, experience had taught people like me that to experiment with other views of the world would almost certainly result in irreparable harm to one’s reputation. Worse yet, if your parents and loved ones came to your defense, they also risked community-wide shunning. If a person’s challenge to the cultural norms was something as radical as coming out as gay, excommunication from “the church” (any church of the period) was a virtual certainty. Coming out as politically liberal was almost as risky as coming out as gay. I like to joke that I was excommunicated after arriving in Southwest Florida because it correlated with when I exchanged my Texas driver’s license for a Florida one. When I was at the counter, they also took care of registering me to vote in Florida, so the question was asked, “Democrat or Republican?” I had voted conservative all my life, both in Canada, and for the years that I lived in Texas. Suddenly, in 2005, I allowed myself to be more in tune with whether I had been voting in my own best interest or not. “Democrat,” I blurted out. Within a few months I found myself excommunicated from the Mormon Church. Marketing Corridors The final four chapters of this book will each describe what I am currently referring to as a marketing “corridor.” In contact resource management software (notably Streak, on the Gmail platform), pipelines refer to market segments, so I can’t use that word for these next chapters. Perhaps it would be better to refer to these foundational marketing strategies as corridors, from which all marketing efforts, and future pipelines, will emerge. Some of those corridors that may emerge as effective ways to get this message out are: • Universities (as a guest lecture). • Churches (on social justice issues). • Moderate political organizations. • Economic development organizations. Appendix II at the end of this book makes it very clear which marketing corridors and pipelines I am currently considering, but I am prepared to pivot at any moment, based on the response I’m getting.
Chapter 33) An Engagement Engine
In Cardston, when I graduated, I heard somebody talk about the legacy of our small town by describing how, back in the 1920s when my mom and dad were born, the population of the town was about 4,000 people. I graduated in 1977, and the population was still the same. This parent was bragging tongue-in-cheek that Cardston’s number one export was our children.
Estimates, at the time, were that Cardston had “exported” 85,000 children.
The population of Cardston now, in 2025, remains unchanged.
If you live in rural America, your children and grandchildren, after they go away to university, have likely been given no reason to come back to rural America.
If you, like me, want to save rural churches, if we want to save rural America, then we’re going to have to stop misogyny, homophobia, and xenophobia. Complicity in keeping rural Americans fearful of diversity is going to kill places like Jo Daviess County, where I live.
You might be able to drag your child into the doors of a homophobic rural church, but you're not going to get them to hate their LGBTQ+ friends at school. You might be able to preach mass deportation at Thanksgiving dinner, but your kids will continue to have fluently bilingual Latino friends here.
In other cities from the news during the 2024 election, high school kids in Springfield, Ohio, will have Black friends whose parents are from Haiti. Those kids will not buy into the demagogue’s lie that their friend’s family is eating dogs and cats for supper.
Some parents might succeed, but for the most part, parents today are not going to get their kids to hate or fear diversity. What they will do…what they will accomplish, is they will make it unsufferable for their kids to even consider moving back into a rural America town.
That is not how we save Jo Daviess County, and a MAGA Republican is totally wrong for Jo Daviess County.
We live in a solidly blue state, for Pete’s sake, so why do we have 17 MAGA Republicans serving on the Jo Daviess County board? Why did all three elected representatives at the state and federal level go unopposed in the 2024 election?
The answer, I believe, lies somewhere in this book. We just need to work together to put together a plan that can change the narrative in rural counties.
Grant’s Church
I have started working with several progressive groups here in Jo Daviess County, and one of those groups is trying to save their historical church building. It is the Galena United Methodist Church (UMC), and its historical importance is that it is the church where the Ulysses S. Grant family attended church until Grant was elected president.
There are four important paragraphs in the UMC social justice principles that have inspired us to help create (and monetize) an engagement engine aimed at generating supportive social media content (Book of Discipline 2020/2024).
We have named it the Grant’s Church Engagement Engine, and the four guiding principles that are related to Media and Communication Technologies are as follows:
We support freedom of public expression, which encompasses freedom of the press and the right of all societal members to share their perspectives and opinions. We also insist that all media companies operate with civility and respect and adhere to established journalistic standards. We affirm the positive roles that media and communication technologies play in educating the general public, holding government and other societal leaders accountable, and promoting the common good.
We are concerned about media monopolies and the tendency of media control to rest in the hands of a few large corporations, and we encourage individuals, communities, and governments to be vigilant in the enforcement of antitrust policies.
We also recognize that, like every other human endeavor, the media can be used by unscrupulous people to manipulate public opinions, distort facts, and spread misinformation, hostility and fear. We deplore the proliferation of hate speech across social media, broadcast and print news, and other platforms, and we call upon citizens and regulators to do all in their power to eliminate it. We also encourage individuals to take care when expressing their views on social media, recognizing the need for compassion and the harm that can be done to others when such compassion is lacking.
Further, media and other communication technologies lack adequate or diverse representation of marginalized communities, including women, ethnic groups, people with disabilities, impoverished people and others. We believe that media and communications technologies should be open and accessible to all, foster norms that promote civility and respect, and protect the dignity and worth of all people, including society’s most vulnerable (Book of Discipline 2020/2024).
The Grant’s Church Engagement Engine is, by design, apolitical, but that will not inoculate the content creators from being seen as a bit controversial. After all, the goals of the UMC in the modern era have always been at odds with what I refer to in this book as “the fears of the colonizers.”
Indeed, on the same web page as the above goals relating to the innovative use of media, those UMC social justice principles become even more closely intertwined with my goals in writing this book.
The United Methodist Church has embraced their obligation to repair, and the degree possible, restore rights to those that have been harmed by the colonizer mentality:
We acknowledge that the tangled and complex legacies of colonialism and neocolonialism hang heavily over the global fellowship of United Methodists. Colonialism refers to the practice of establishing full or partial control of other countries, tribes, and peoples through conquest and exploitation. Neocolonialism continues the historic legacy of colonialism by maintaining economic, political, and social control of formerly colonized nations and peoples.
Some of us belong to countries and groups that have richly benefited from the subjugation of whole peoples and from the seizure of lands and other resources. Others of us live in countries or are a part of communities that continue to struggle with the ongoing history and impacts of all forms of colonialism, including social, economic, and political instability; widespread malnutrition; illiteracy; disease; and continuing infringements on indigenous and tribal lands.
We recognize that far from being innocent bystanders, the church has often been deeply involved in colonialism and neocolonialism. We, therefore, call on individuals and congregations to educate themselves about the troubling legacies of colonialism and, where appropriate, to seek repentance for our continued involvement. We urge United Methodists to find ways to support those still suffering from colonial legacies, including tangible acts of reparation and active support for sustainable development initiatives.
It is my desire that, as our social justice content creators work with other like-minded individuals from around the world, the Grant’s Church domain will grow and be monetized in ways that will make it capable of financing the costs of owning a large historic building.
I will give John Wesley himself the last word here:
"When it comes to faith, what a living, creative, active, powerful thing it is! It cannot do other than good at all times. It never waits to ask whether there is some good which is to be done; rather, before the question is raised, it has done the deed, and keeps on doing it. [One] who is not active in this way is a [person] without faith" (John Wesley, Preface, Explanatory Notes on Romans).
Chapter 34) Intergroup Contact
According to social psychologists who study trends in social media use, we have lost those spaces that, in the past, fostered positive intergroup contact among strangers.
The second part of my book is a user guide with three broad missions to create opportunities for dissimilar "tribes" to have favorable interactions and engage in charting paths that can redefine the public discourse.
The entry point is to share a superordinate goal, and work toward that as the shared common good. With that in place, accepting the nature of intergroup contact will require that we all encounter discomfort, and we will be asked to “tolerate the intolerable.” That will be tough for me, I will admit that, but without the discomfort, all one has is another echo chamber. It can be agreed upon that the real “hot points” will be put aside in the proverbial “parking lot.”
Doing it this way, one can imagine how a group working together can change hearts and minds, one at a time. The change in entire institutions (like church organizations) will come in time. Always keep in mind that the superordinate goal is prejudice reduction.
This is how I imagine the goals of my SaveRuralChurches.org engagement engine will be able to partner with adherents of a Catholic or LDS belief system. There will more details provided on this mechanism later in the chapter. As shown in Appendix II with the other domains that have already been purchased, the web domain for the Intergroup Contact Collaborators pipeline has been purchased to bring together collaborative research efforts of sociologists and social psychologists who are working on new ways to foster safe and effective intergroup contact.
Written Out of Existence
On January 28, 2025, President Donald Trump signed in executive order that many believe is illegal, but nevertheless, made it very clear that those currently in power wish to limit transgender care for children under the age of 19. The extremists in power want to make it illegal to exist if you are non-binary and experiencing gender dysphoria.
My husband and I personally know many people who are living in fear for the lives of their loved ones and for themselves. We talked to one mother who made sure that her child, now in their mid-20s, had a passport, and she and her husband helped them relocate so that they had easy access to leave the country, should it become necessary.
Transgender people are being made to feel unsafe anywhere in the United States.
As an avid outdoorsman myself, I know that there are many places in the United States that are far enough outside of cities that LGBTQ individuals do not feel safe.
My husband and I are a mixed-race gay couple, and it is obvious to anybody who looks that we are gay. Our bicycles match, we pull a fifth wheel trailer, and there's just the two of us getting out of the truck when we park it. When we go out to dinner, we do not interact like two men on a business trip. We instead look like any other married couple who would be seen at a restaurant.
If we, as men in our '60s, feel uncomfortable in rural America, how much more uncomfortable would it be for young gay couples, transgender couples, and gender non-conforming couples to be out and proud where others are there for recreational activities?
If your manner of dressing and presentation is non-conforming, are you going to feel comfortable on a ski slope, or bouldering, or hiking on a remote trail? Worse yet, at the end of the long day, are there places where you can go out for dinner, or experience nightlife where you are reasonably assured that you won't stand out as a target for those who would do you harm?
This is the dilemma that I face now as I try to put together something that is going to be safe for everybody, while at the same time provide those opportunities that are so essential for intergroup contact.
Without intergroup contact, I am afraid nothing is going to change, but the struggle is, am I getting the cart before the horse?
Returning to the story of the mother of a trans son, her one concern was that her desire to protect her son was going to be at odds with what is best for her son, and what her son himself wants.
No trans person is new to this fight to exist, and it is a fight that most are willing to engage in. Parents who want to keep their trans child safe are caught in a paradox. If they protect their child, in a way, they are asking them to deny their hard-won right to embrace their self-awareness and live a fulfilling life.
To protect our trans community, and everyone else on the LGBTQ continuum, the one thing we cannot ask of them is that they live out their lives as anybody other than their authentic selves.
Intergroup Contact Theory
In similar ways to how Grant’s Church Engagement Engine will become a hub of conversation, my thesis is that the concept of having Driftless Rivers Outfitters build hostels will also facilitate an "engagement engine" and provide opportunities for intergroup contact in a safe environment. In a subsequent chapter I talk a great deal more about the Driftless Rivers Outfitters concept.
The desired outcome would be an environment where new governing narratives emerge from the facilitation of intergroup contact.
Current research is outlining what the important elements are in the expansion of Allport’s intergroup contact hypothesis.
1. Equal status between groups.
2. Common goals.
3. Intergroup cooperation.
4. The support of authorities, law, or customs.
5. Positive contact norms.
6. Personal accountability.
7. Empathy and perspective-taking.
(McLeod 2023).
The proposal to create and grow the membership of the Driftless Rivers Outfitters Membership Co-op will be fundamental in achieving success in changing the climate in rural areas where there exists the possibility of building world-class outdoor recreational opportunities.
I should also mention that, as a fluently bilingual person, this book, and every web domain, will be offered in both English and Spanish, with other languages easily added as demand materializes.
Chapter 35) GYAO
The Driftless Rivers Outfitters marketing corridor is reserved for the membership cooperative that I hope will be seen as the “Amazon Prime” of outdoor recreation. Rather than selling goods, membership in the cooperative will allow members free or dramatically discounted access to an array of outdoor recreational facilities.
My intent is that the membership base will start in the Driftless Area along the upper Mississippi and Wisconsin Rivers, but I imagine it will quickly expand beyond that region as the idea catches on. As a virtual organization like those proposed earlier, there is no reason to turn away anybody, regardless of where they live in the world.
I should also mention that, as a fluently bilingual person, this book, and every web domain, will be offered in both English and Spanish, with other languages easily added as demand materializes.
The GYAO domain has been protected as a secure site that, prior to the release of the 4th edition of this book, will be developed into a mobile application that will serve as the gateway for most active users across all the initiatives that I will be working toward.
Live Life Outdoors
A partial list of activities that would be deserving of having #GYAO attached to them are as follows:
Things you do with a boat
o Fishing
o Wakeboarding, tubing, water skiing.
o Houseboats
o Get to a beach
Things you do in the snow
o Skiing and snowboarding
o Snowshoes
o Snowmobiles
o Tracked electric scooters
Things you do in dirt
o Dirt bikes
o Dune buggies and offroad 4x4s
Things you do on a trail (without snow)
o Hiking
o E-bikes and scooters
o Fish from the shoreline
o Enjoy a romantic dinner (urban trail)
o Enjoy a romantic picnic (city park)
Things you do with a horse
o Day trips
o Pack horse trips
o Multi-day rides
o Meet friends for lunch (with your horse in a safe environment)
National Parks
Hunting
Safe Hostels
By creating hostels and campgrounds that will serve to attract like-minded people into surroundings that allow people to have positive interactions in safe spaces, the membership co-op will not only expose people to outdoor recreation opportunities that they otherwise may never attempt, but, in the same way that an Amazon Prime membership makes shopping on Amazon more affordable and convenient, membership in the co-op will dramatically reduce the cost of travel and outdoor recreation.
The Driftless Rivers Outfitters
Membership Co-op embraces diversity, not because we are a "woke" organization, but because we trace our origins to the Midwest, and "Midwest Nice" is a real thing to us.
If you can't be "Midwest Nice" to people outside of your tribe, this organization is probably not what you're hoping for.