The final post, I suppose? At least, of the summer.

I have finished the interviews. All that remains is to write the write up, pack and clean the room I've been living in the past month, and go home.
I'd like to say that I have learned a lot from this research, but honestly most of what I learned was not about the topic at hand.
The first lesson I learned was that I am uncomfortable with only revealing parts of my purposes to certain people. Just saying "I'm researching testimonies" or "I'm researching coming-out stories" when in reality I'm researching both, while not technically dishonest, made it hard for me to engage with people honestly. The fact that I was there to study people rather than be in genuine community with them was something I don't enjoy. So this will probably my last foray into ethnographic research of any sort.
The second was that it's not easy getting lots of interviews when you need people to contact you (which was how things were set up to prevent accidental outing, primarily). I didn't reach my 10-20 interviews per group goal, though I came close on the evangelical side. Part of that is I probably didn't exhaust all the possibilities when it came to contacting queer people, but the majority of it was just that I didn't really know how to go about it correctly. Perhaps if I had more time to explore the different communities in Asheville I could have found more people to interview; or perhaps if it wasn't summer (a lot of churches have much more limited programming in the summertime). It didn't help that almost all of the groups in both sets met on Sunday, so they often conflicted with each other but still left me with no good way to network for most of the week.
Another thing I learned is that I really need friends and communities. The amount that I've been in my room this summer has been unhealthy for me, and every moment spent with other people, whether interviewing or just hanging out, was worth it. The solo life of an academic in the humanities is not for me. I need daily interaction with multiple people in order to be healthy and productive.
As for the research itself, I do think that there is a lot of interesting comparisons to be made between how people talk about their stories, and there's also a lot to be said about similarities and differences of how communities are structured (there's a lot the queer movement can learn from evangelical groups when it comes to organizing to create social change). I do not think, though, that I have evidence for my original claim that the two narratives are effectively the same. Evangelical Christian testimony is based not just in personal experience but in study and theological quandry. The people who I have talked to (which I'm seeing is a very biased sample composed mostly of middle-aged men) for the most part didn't put the same emphasis on community that all of the queer people I talked to did. Conversions of faith are personal and internal, but coming out is a community process.
So, I guess that's it, then. Thank you for reading! I hope it was educational, or something.

The Home Stretch

The students at the University of North Carolina at Asheville have returned and today is their second day of classes. On one hand, this is great because it means I have an opportunity to interview a lot of highly interconnected people. On the other, this is a warning that my time here is almost up; in 11 days I'll be going home, and I've already spend my last weekend. (I'm going home for Pride this weekend, and I'm going home for good the Saturday after.)
I've finally gotten a little more variety in my interviews. I have interviewed a woman about her testimony (though one person is not enough to identify trends, and there's nothing that jumped out about her story as totally different.) I still need to find queer ladies and nonmonosexual queers if I want to make this fully LGBTQ rather than a bunch of G and one T.
I hope that UNCA students who I interview can have more variety in these areas.
On the subject of my lost data: It looks like I won't be able to recover it for less than $700 dollars (and it's probably more), and then I wouldn't be able to get it in time. I only lost three or four interviews, and I've tried to recall what I could of them.
Interestingly, it's looking like I actually would have been (almost) able to afford it; I've actually been successful at making the grant last, and will have several hundred dollars left over. In part, I think that's a symptom of my failure to get as many interviews as I wished at first, because buying another twenty people Starbucks would have made a dent, but another part of it has been my cheap eating habits. (I don't know how sustainable subsisting primarily off of pasta, rice, Parmesan cheese, and Bolthouse Farms smoothies is health-wise, but it seems to be functioning well enough now.)
I think I'm going to wait on the deep introspection stuff until the next post, though.

On inextricability and seeing Asheville with new eyes.

Interviews have continued to arrive in a trickle, though I have at this point interviewed multiple people from both groups. However, I have yet to interview a woman in either group, and I will be attempting to change that in the future.

Wesserkins is visiting me this week. I was in Charlotte over the weekend to see my parents and go to the Bon Odori Japanese festival, and he needed a ride home. When I mentioned that there was a QUILTBAG-themed open mic Sunday evening (Literature Generated By The Queers In Asheville), he seemed really interested, and so (after he got permission from his parents, obviously) he came with me back to Asheville.

It's interesting watching him react to Asheville, to things like the existence of vegan drive-thrus and the existence of a church (First Congregational United Church of Christ, which is a very liberal church that has a large number of gay members) in which he felt comfortable (despite being a gay man and an atheist). It makes me wonder if I am too cynical, or if the differences between us (age, sexual orientation, religion, home-location, and ethnicity) explain most of the difference in our reaction. Perhaps I'm just forgetting how exciting Asheville seemed when I first arrived and experienced it. It's certainly different from any other place I've been in a lot of wonderful ways.

I also talked to an associate pastor at New Life Community Church in Asheville. I'm finding it's becoming more easy to talk to people about my project honestly while leaving out the other half, and I think it's partly because both parts of the project are important to me individually as well. Hearing people's testimonies is not just about the research project but is a way for me to better understand my own faith, to address doubts and questions I have and demonstrate how other people experience God or the Holy Spirit (or however they describe it) working. And I shared that with the associate pastor, and it's completely true. He suggested a book, "I Once Was Lost: What Postmodern Skeptics Taught Us About Their Path to Jesus", which discusses evangelical Christian testimonies from a sociological rather than narrative perspective, and also a series of sermons.
I do not know if it's because of the specific communities I'm studying or a general property of human sociology, but it continues to strike me that while I'm studying communities they study me back, and move to welcome me.