The sign said, Satan is a Democrat! It sat outside a small prefabricated building off Highway 441, the main shopping strip that runs through Milledgeville, Georgia. The signs marquee lettering was only recently changed from its previous message: Democrats are the enemies of America! Another sign next to it, this one screen-printed, advertised a church called The Society for the Ten Commandments. Brett Kavanaugh was about to be confirmed onto the Supreme Court, so the sign stung a little extra. My wife, Katie, and I decided to stop and take photos in front of it to post on Instagram. It was our small way of saying fuck you right back.

This was where we lived now. And signs like this were part of the reason I decided to buy a gun.

I should mention who and what I am: a 43-year-old, transmasculine, nonbinary, gay-married, atheist Jew; the child of NYC schoolteachers and a grandchild of Holocaust survivors. I am also, yes, a hard-left Democrat. In short, I am Satan incarnate, the enemy, something many of my new neighbors wish didnt exist.

We moved here last July from Brooklyn when Katie took a tenure-track professorship at a liberal arts college in Milledgeville. The first thing I did when we got the news was to google Milledgeville + gay. Among the results was a news story from 2015 about a small church that had a roadside sign saying, Homosexuality is a death-worthy crime. (I figured out later that this was the same place on 441 that thinks Democrats are the devil.) Further down the list was an article about reality TV personality Honey Boo Boos gay uncle , whos from Milledgeville and is quoted saying, Im gay, but Im as redneck as I can get.