Long-haul trucking is part of the landscape in America. The images appears in movies, televisions, and novels mostly with a one-typed description of truckers as masculine blue-collar workers. But, with Anne Balay’s Upcoming Book Semi-Queer, a swarm of rainbow-like brushes are added into the picture.
Anne Balay is a transgender writer, professor, activist, car mechanic, and licensed commercial truck driver with a PhD from the University of Chicago. She used to teach courses about gender and sexuality at the University of Illinois and Indiana University Northwest. She’s currently a visiting Assistant Professor at Haverford College. With her interests in the blue-collar working environment, she has published Steel Closets: Voices of Gay, Lesbian, and Transgender Steelworkers (2014) and in this late September she is going to refresh our mind with Semi Queer: Inside the World of Gay, Trans, and Black Truck Drivers (2018).
Born in a blue-collar family, Balay deeply understands working-class LGBTQ people’s lives. The journey of writing working-class LGBT community started from her finding nothing about related records in the library. She was unsatisfied with the lack of the history which suggests that most of the LGBT people documented in literature are not working class. So, she writes the history and aims to turn it into an archive of blue-collar minority.
Though the industry continues to present itself as white, male and socially conservative, that’s more a nostalgic fantasy than a representation of current reality…The narratives of minority and queer truckers underscore the working-class struggle to earn a living while preserving one’s safety, dignity, and selfhood.
Twelve years ago, when I first started driving a truck, I never thought I would be able to do so as Dana…It’s a tough world we live in, but I’m tired of being afraid every day about who I really am. I don’t want to hide my true self anymore.
Now, besides her trucking career, Dana has co-founded an LGBTQ support group called Rainbow Wisdom Circle on Facebook. Her transgender life is cheerful and she’s satisfied with her finding value and purpose in driving a 53-foot rig. “Our world is changing in amazing ways, and I want to be a part of it, including my job as a truck driver,” said Dana.
I’m ready to read this amazing and insightful book! Check here for pre-order info.