What I Gained from a Year on Substack

"One Hill at a Time," "The Column That Wasn't: Pride 2004" Revisited

The Rolling Desk launched in June 2023 with 31 subscribers. Now, nearly 800 of you are rolling with us. How to mark this milestone? How to show you all what you mean to me? Sharing favorites from the archives kept suggesting itself. Maybe start with the first piece published here—one of my origin stories after all. Reading it, though, I saw that wouldn’t quite do.

I’ve changed over the year. I’ve grown as a writer. And while I could explore a number of aspects of that growth, what rises to the top is you. I say it in editing classes: “As a reader, sensing that a writer trusts me is thrilling; give your readers that gift of trust.” But I could have no greater teacher of the way that trust shapes a writer’s work than the readers I’ve found here. You’ve changed my writing. You’ve changed me. So, I decided instead to reshape that first piece, to make it the piece the today version of me would share.

Expect special features all month. Expect a pouring out of gratitude for all of you. For my 31 originals, my paid subscribers, and my founding supporters, expect something extra in your mailbox. And know my heart will be even fuller if rolling with this desk and the awesome people you can find in the comments of every post, in some small way, changes you.  

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One Hill at a Time: Pride 2004

I’d started my wall of protest a week into the standoff. The rainbow flag above my computer had gone up first. Next came clippings from the Charleston Pride march. Then I’d added a screensaver—two brides, fingers laced.

“He didn’t like that one.” My office mate pointed to my screen, recounting how our editor had come in right after I’d headed out, jabbed his finger at the screen, and launched into a pacing rant. He smiled, like we were just two reporters poking fun at management. He blinked hard and looked away, like we were talking about the man who’d pulled him in and been his mentor for years. “It’s not on you,” he said before I could say how sorry I was.  

But wasn’t it? Wasn’t it me who’d insisted on writing the column in support of marriage equality? Who’d made an ultimatum when the column had been pulled? Me who hadn’t listened when he—who’d lived in this town that was new to me his whole life—had told me they’d never go for it? Me who’d blown him up with false hope?

Looking back, I see it was my own balloon deflating. Fresh out of college, I’d taken a job as a journalist for a small-town paper in rural West Virginia. It wasn’t just my office mate’s hometown; my then husband, too, had grown among the hills of hemlock, black cherry, and sycamore outside our office doors. I thought, if my words could effect change, I could make peace with building a life here, with letting go “unrealistic” dreams of a life exploring ever new mountain ranges.

As seen through the lens of my binoculars in Sutton-Alpine, Alaska, en route from Matanuska Glacier to Denali, August 2021.

Our marriage had been a month old when my husband and I had first arrived here, a stop on our way to school in the northern part of the state, college for me, law school for him. He’d taken me to a lake where his friends—who would become mine—had spent teen afternoons that drifted into nights and disappeared like first crushes and the contents of bottles nicked from liquor cabinets. “Come,” he’d said, pulling me along the railway track out onto a bridge. There was no footpath. But a quarter of the way across the lake, a break in the parapet let you step off the rails onto a small platform. If you turned your back, you could lean over the guardrail to watch the water below. But if you faced the tracks, you could imagine the howl of wind as a train sped by inches from your face. A few of his friends had done it for real. “Did you ever?” I asked. He shook his head. I think both of us knew, if I’d grown up here, I would have. But maybe only one of us knew I still might.

“Come,” I’d whispered, taking my turn to lead. Dropping clothes like burdens on my way down the grassy bank, I’d laughed off his warning to be careful of sleeping snapping turtles and slipped beneath the velvet folds.   

A few years and a degree each later, we’d come back to the town, but hadn’t returned to the lake. He wanted to stay. I wouldn’t have been consoled by skinny-dipping. I’d gone to the newspaper office and asked for a job as a reporter instead. The managing editor had said yes on the spot.

Photo by Steve Johnson on Unsplash

Somehow, more than two years had gone by. I’d tried to feel at home; the paper and my connection with readers had helped. My colleague, hubby, and I drove an hour south to the state capitol for Pride 2004. (The rallies wouldn’t officially be so dubbed for another five years, so I’m not sure that’s what it was called. But pride was everywhere you looked.) Among fringed daisy dukes, bright balloons, and rays that shone through clouds like spun sugar, I felt freer than I had in a long time. I knew what I wanted to write about in the opinion column I’d recently been granted. I just needed an angle.

Then the paper, my paper, published a letter to the editor from a reader saying that gay people who wanted to marry should leave the country. State law defined marriage as between a man and a woman. A 2000 statute had banned same-sex unions shortly after the first legal same-sex marriage had been performed in San Francisco (one of the places I longed to moved to). But some of the people I was writing to were misunderstanding what they should fear. I announced the topic for my next column and took my editors’ raised brows as tacit permission. My office mate had known better. “They don’t think you’ll do it is all.” 

I wrote and rewrote. If I could just speak to hearts, I told myself. I thought of the volunteer firefighters who’d offered me a scanner so I could race with them to right every emergency in town. I thought of my poker buddies, who, I was pretty sure, would bury a body with you and who I knew could hold you up when someone who had a piece of your heart was put in the ground. I thought of the city council members, mostly older men, who’d welcomed me into their offices or homes even when I was teasing threads they didn’t want pulled. I thought of the banjo pickers who made music like magic on the courthouse lawn every Fourth of July.

The day after I turned the column in, it was a go. My editors were wide of eye and pale of face, but they would run it. All day, my office mate and I pressed lips over grins wriggling to escape each time we caught each other’s eye. That night, after everyone else had left the office, we made our way to the lot out back and lit cigarettes with the single flick of a lighter. “Holy shit,” he said. He handed me a bottle of Bud. “Holy shit,” I said. I took a long pull.

The next day, the publisher pulled rank, saying the column would never go to press. My editors’ relief was obvious. I came back hot: Print it or accept my resignation.

“Our advertisers will pull. Our readers will cancel subscriptions.” Give people more credit, I argued. “The haters will eat you alive.” Bring ’em on. “This is not Holly’s platform to build her career.” That one stung. How did my ambitions play a role here? Or was it that I just wasn’t supposed to have any? “There are no gay people in this county.” I spluttered. What’s there to say to the earth isn’t round?

As days passed and my protest wall grew, relief turned to agitation. The same editor pacing and ranting in my office had once backed me when a source tried to call me a liar. I didn’t have the words to make him see how much more his backbone, his loyalty was needed in this moment.

If a copy of that column remains now, it’d be on a floppy disk decaying in a landfill. But I don’t have to see it to know I was trying to get to hearts by way of minds. I’m sure I summarized the history of marriage. I’d have tallied rights afforded married couples—pointed out how an employee of the rolling mill, backbone of the local economy, couldn’t offer her partner the same benefits male counterparts could theirs, despite decades of the same labor. To each their own, right? I’d have cajoled.

I know I didn’t ask readers, ask my editor, What about yourself do you keep hidden or suppressed? What if that part was everything that made you you? Wouldn’t that be like living with your nose to a speeding train—pretty sure that being fully yourself would mean leaning into its path? What if you could get off the train? Help clear the track?

A track at Denali National Park, Alaska.

It wasn’t until a decade later, on October 9, 2014, that West Virginia Governor Earl Ray Tomblin ordered state agencies to comply with federal court decisions on the unconstitutionality of marriage bans. That year, 310 same-sex couples were married in the state, followed by 490 the next.

I had long since delivered a ridiculously long, fiery resignation letter. Shortly thereafter, I’d signed divorce papers. No longer nose-to-railcar with a life I thought I was supposed to lead but didn’t really want, I’d bought and moved into a 26-foot Coachman Leprechaun, with pink shag carpet and a fridge I’d soon learn only functioned when parked on level ground.

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Here’s a link to the original, “The Column That Wasn’t: Pride 2004,” published June 14, 2023. Holy damn was I nervous when I hit publish for the first time on this platform. What’s your next hill? Your level ground? Have you ever gone about clearing your own path with fiery vitriol?

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Thank you for reading, liking, sharing, for transforming me.

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Happy Pride! 🏳️‍🌈