We're Not From Here and That's the Point
“So did you grow up here?” most guests ask when they arrive at Thistle’s Summit.
“We did not,” we tell them. We’re not from Mount Vernon, we don’t go to Cornell College, and we’re not high school students. We’re also not sisters. These are the things we are in the position to explain on weekly, if not daily, basis.
We moved to Mount Vernon almost one year ago with an idea that we would run a bed and breakfast out of a beautiful home built in 1901. Marti and I had both advanced in our careers to what many would consider dream jobs. We were also organizing feminists and socialists in Des Moines. I facilitated consciousness raising groups when I got done with my day job of being a feminist organizer in sustainable agriculture. Marti created and ran huge arts events centered on feminism, queer liberation, and social justice. It was after we’d already become a couple that Marti helped me run a spaghetti dinner fundraiser for the Eastern Iowa Community Bond Project. She cooked spaghetti for more than 100 people and made sure we had plates and utensils for people to use; I made sure people showed up and learned about the injustices of ICE.
By that point we already knew we worked pretty well together. We also knew that we were creatively exhausted and Des Moines, while the largest city in Iowa, was starting to feel a little too small.
So we moved to Mount Vernon, Iowa, a town of 4,500 people on a good day, to open a bed and breakfast.
We kept our decision a secret for a little bit. To be honest, I felt like we were selling out by starting a business based on AirBNB. I also felt some level of shame about starting a business that could provide us with a stable income, as if that would be conforming to the constructs of capitalism. I’ll never forget a phone call I had with a fellow organizer. When I told her we were moving away to start a bed and breakfast she said, “That will be a good spot. People can afford to stay at a bed and breakfast in that area.”
Her comment struck a deep chord of shame inside of me and made me doubt this idea we’d come up with. We wanted to start a queer-owned and queer-forward bed and breakfast. As a lesbian who loves to travel in small, rural, scenic byway towns, I knew what it felt like to stay in a bed and breakfast with my partner. I knew how scary it could be to tell the innkeeper about who you really were. I knew what it felt like to lie and say: “We’re sisters.”
Marti’s therapist understood, too, and she encouraged Marti to leave her job and the city she had lived in for most of her life to create this safe travel space for queer people who might want to get away for a weekend in a quaint, artsy town.
I’ve had more than a few doubts along the way. We wanted to get to the honest heart of something, only possible through revealing layers of paint, linoleum and dust that accumulates in a house that has seen over 100 years of divide and change. But when Marti was stripping the floor of our front entryway for the seventh day, or when she spent almost a month stripping paint from our yoga room, I began asking myself, “What are we doing? And who is this for?”
We opened our doors to guests on August 3, nearly three weeks before we planned to. While we’ve only had a few guests stay with us the answer to that question is becoming more clear to me.
Here’s the thing: We’re NOT from Mount Vernon. We’re the dykes who live in so-and-so’s house. The notorious Dykes of MTV. We live on a highly visible street, adjacent to the living room of Cornell College’s prestigious presidents’ home, with a pride flag hanging off of our front porch. While we do have queer people booking rooms in our home well into 2020, many of the people who have stayed with us so far are straight people from outside of Iowa.
“So are you able to get married?” is one of the first questions they ask us, and they are surprised to learn that Iowa was third in the nation to legalize gay marriage. “What is it like to be gay in Iowa?”
“Do you farm? Are you from a farm?” is another frequently asked question, usually prompted by the Family Farm Defender bumper sticker on the back of my car and Iowa’s reputation for being nothing but cornfields. Before the first cups of coffee are consumed I’m explaining what agricultural parity is and dive into state, federal and international agriculture policy, which leaves guest’s heads spinning.
“What about your neighbors?” they ask, and again they are surprised to learn that our neighbors to the West are beautiful people who we share meals and plants with. When we find out one of our neighbors has aching joints we prepare a salve for him with herbs we harvest from our yard. When another neighbor is potting up her snake plant, a descendent from a plant formerly owned by Iowa’s OG gay celebrity, Grant Wood, she brings part of it to us to make our home more beautiful. We share vegetables, fruit, and herbs between each of our gardens and work together to make this street and this town a more beautiful and welcoming place.
We open our home to guests, and yes they pay a more than reasonable rate to stay here, as a lesbian couple who lives right down the road from a Vote Republican billboard. We open our home as a young, queer couple, in a state that feels more conservative every day.
If I’m being straight up honest with you, sometimes it is scary. The only white, cisgender male guest we’ve hosted arrived at the house triumphantly to declare he saw our “Cusco, Peru flag,” to which Marti and I stared at each other and silently wondered if we were going to have to explain what a Pride flag was.
We show our guests the lives of a young, queer, Midwest family, and all that we try to do to honor the history and ecology of this place but also pave a new, more inclusive path.
It’s because we take the risk to open our home and lovingly grow and trade for Iowa-grown produce that Marti beautifully prepares for guests and we take the time to sit around our dining room table every morning with people we know and do not know—it’s because we are willing to take these risks and put in this work that these conversations happen.
And I’m starting to believe that what we’re doing is even more radical than we realized.
-Ash
@ashgravity