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.