Texas Monthly: Raymond Caldwell finished reading the play that would nearly ruin his life on an early August night in 1999. He reached the last line and sat back in his recliner, which overlooked the backyard garden of his Longview home. He held the script in his hands for a while. And then he put it aside.
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East Texas is such an unadulterated, genuinely beautiful place. Sometimes, growing up in a more progressive area in a large city, it is easy to forget what atrocities lie in the history of my home state. Kilgore is situated only about a three hour drive from where I grew up and is still a fairly conservative place, sometimes seemingly decades behind of what I would consider the norm. During and immediately after the AIDS crisis, there was a lot of anti-gay sentiment and, to a certain point, there still is. There is still very much the idea of “don’t ask, don’t tell” in rural Texas towns that can expose the very ugly side of hidden homophobia in rural communities. Honestly, a good amount of adults in rural Texas won’t even speak about homosexuality simply because they - in some twisted way - fear that they will adversely mark themselves in one way or another.
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