Growing up Gay in Tennessee

Jarred, left and Seth Garrison pose outside of their Winchester apartment. The couple, who attended Franklin County High School, said growing up gay in southern Middle Tennessee was often a challenge.

Photo by Serena Vasudeva

Seth and Jarred Garrison have built a home together in Franklin County.

The garden in their front yard is decorated with small pride flags which stick out of flower pots and line the sidewalk leading to their glass door.

“There’s pride flags hanging everywhere. There’s a lot of LGBTQ+ people here,” said Seth, referring to where they live.

Growing up gay in southern Middle Tennessee, Seth and Jarred married in 2016 after meeting and dating four years earlier. For both of them, life has had its challenges. Seth was sent to conversion therapy as a teen. Jarred suffered a beating at the hands of coworkers. Over time, as the climate has gotten better, both men have healed together. 

Before gay marriage was legalized, Seth and Jarred kept a scrapbook that featured their ideal wedding. They envisioned a Celtic-themed wedding on Christmas, as Jarred is Scots-Irish.

In June of 2015, when same-sex marriage was legalized, Seth and Jarred waited.

“Once they legalized marriage, I was worried as soon as we did it that Tennessee was going to outlaw it. At the time, they were fighting it,” Jarred explained.

What finally persuaded him, however, was his own superstitions. He saw their seventh anniversary as lucky. While the couple was at Planet Fitness in Tullahoma, Jarred proposed in a casual manner.

“It was two in the morning, it was a day or two before our anniversary, and I said, ‘you want to get married?’”

They married on a cold February day in a park with a Valentine’s Day theme. Both wore kilts to the altar.

To his surprise, Seth’s parents showed up for the wedding. When he was 15, they forced him to attend a so-called conversion therapy program, a discredited practice that claims to change a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity.

“It wasn’t the extreme version of conversion therapy that you hear about in the past, like with electroshocks. It was just mental torture,” Seth said.

He attended three times a week after school. During the three-hour sessions, he was forced to “pray the gay away.” His youth pastor often explained to Seth that he wasn’t really gay but instead wanted to be the men that he felt attracted to. Seth was also pressured to make more male companions and exercise routinely, as “the masculine energy would change his way of thinking.” 

“It was tragic and it really messed me up. It made me feel worthless and led to multiple suicide attempts,” he recounted.

Seth said he only lived to tell the tale because of the support he received from family and friends.

“I have this insane fear of churches because of it,” Seth added, “I couldn’t imagine someone being trapped in a conversion camp 24/7.”

Seth was able to leave conversion therapy at 17 when his parents realized that it did not change his sexual orientation. Their new solution was to send Seth to his grandmother.

“My parents did not want me to live with my younger brother. They thought that I would turn him gay just by being in the same household with him,” Seth explained.

Seth’s grandmother ended up supporting Seth emotionally and paid for his schooling. His time with her allowed for healing.

“It was still a learning process for her. She was born in 1944. She experienced gay people being put in prison. She was still more progressive than my parents, even,” Seth said.

Seth has two younger siblings who have both come out as LGBT. He has become their fierce guardian.

“I have made it very clear that if (my parents) aren’t supportive, I want nothing to do with them. That fear, I think, is what straightened them up because they are big on family,” he said.

His parents, meanwhile, have accepted Seth’s happy, long-lasting relationship with Jarred.

Jarred went to Franklin County High School like Seth but seven years earlier. He was only open about his sexuality to his close friends. On one particular day, he overheard some students talking about going hunting. 

Because deer season was closed, Jarred asked what they were after. Their answer made his blood run cold: they were going gay hunting.

“I thought, ‘oh God, do they know?’”

Jarred said students made fake online profiles on websites such as Yahoo Messenger and flirted with male students. If the flirting was reciprocated, an attempt would be made to lure the person into a meeting. When the student showed up, a gang would push them around and hurl slurs.

“The biggest thing was that they wanted to beat them and teach them a lesson for being gay. It really has come a long way, but that shadow’s still there,” Jarred explained.

Thankfully, the students did not know about Jarred’s sexuality. He regularly tried to dissuade students from participating.

“I like to think that me downplaying it as much as I did may have put a bug in their ear that it wasn’t okay, that it was stupid because they’d get in trouble over somebody,” he said.

Around that time, faculty at Franklin County High School began cracking down on fighting by sending students home early as punishment.        

“They saw it as a stronger kid beating up on a weaker kid instead of seeing it for what it was,” Jarred said.

Jarred highlighted that this was a necessity for teachers because they didn’t have the correct tools at the time to address the deeper issue. 

“It wasn’t until after I was out of high school that more people found out I was gay. By then, I wasn’t in an area that I was consistently surrounded by danger or hunters,” he said.

In 2008, coworkers at his job began harassing him. Another employee stood up for him and the harassment ended. But not for long. One day a group of them surprised him in a parking lot and beat him. 

“Some had metal chains, some had sticks, one person had a wooden pole, one guy had a tire iron,” Jarred said.

Jarred tried to run to his car but was struck in the back of the legs. Once he was down, he was kicked unmercifully, he said.

“Getting hit in the back with a board and a chain really leaves a mark. I had bruised ribs… They didn’t hit me in the face, which was good, because I was able to hide the fact that I was beaten,” he said.

There were a few bystanders who heard the commotion and came to investigate. Their presence scared the attackers, creating an opening to escape.

The next day, Jarred reported the incident to HR. He was told that nothing would happen.

One of the orchestrators was part of the family that owned the company. Both Jarred and Seth call this the “good old boy” system where justice is impeded by a deep network of blood relations and friendships.

Jarred was eventually fired. He was informed that his highlighted hair and ear piercings were bad for the company’s image even though he never interacted with customers.

On occasion, Jarred sees his graduating class around Franklin County.

“They’ll see me in Walmart and they’ll recognize who I am. They’ll look away. You can see that there is guilt, but they never apologize,” he said.

A large part of Jarred’s healing has been Seth.

“Being from almost two different worlds, Seth has been able to make me more comfortable and open my eyes to how things have changed,” Jarred said.

Time has also played a factor for him.

“Over time I’ve just gotten to where I don’t care anymore. I’ve done the song and dance, I’ve been beaten. I’ve grown enough from it and seen that the world isn’t as bad as it was,” Jarred explained.  

Now, Jarred works at a grocery store where he recently found a package of pride Oreos. The dazzling foil is decorated with encouraging words like “be exactly who you are, the world needs more of that” and “there’s a place in this world for you.”

“If I had that exposure around when I was younger, I would have felt a lot more included. It really is a great thing,” Seth said.

When Seth and Jarred vacationed to Niagara Falls in June, they recalled seeing buildings lit up in rainbow colors and pride flags hanging from businesses.

“You won’t see that kind of stuff around here. Twenty years can pass and I’d never see the courthouse lit up in multiple colors,” Seth said.

Serena Vasudeva is one of nine journalism students from Middle Tennessee State University who spent two and a half weeks in Franklin County writing stories for the Herald Chronicle. More of their work can be seen at www.theroadtripclass.com.