[Kentville, Nova Scotia, Canada] — When I first started talking to Mel about their life in rural Nova Scotia, one of the things that immediately interested me was that they had chosen to build it there. I grew up in rural Appalachia, where I absorbed the idea pretty early that being queer or trans meant I would eventually have to leave. The city was where you went to find people like you, where you could be openly queer, where the resources and community were, and where you might actually have a chance to build a life without constantly looking over your shoulder. Rural places were somewhere you came from, not somewhere you returned to on purpose.

Mel, who is nonbinary, lives with their partner in Kentville, Nova Scotia, where they own Bridge Beauty Bar, a salon that has become as much a queer community space as it is a place to get your hair done. When I asked what had made them trade city life for rural Nova Scotia, though, I learned pretty quickly that the story wasn’t nearly as intentional as I had imagined.

“I kind of have to laugh whenever anyone asks me this question,” they told me.

Mel had grown up in a rural cottage community and spent their younger years wanting exactly what I had wanted: out. They swore they would never live outside of an urban centre again, and for much of their adult life, they didn’t. Then their father died, the pandemic happened, and Mel and their partner moved back to Nova Scotia during lockdown. Eventually they outgrew their small apartment in Halifax, and as housing costs continued climbing, buying a home meant looking beyond the city. Kentville was affordable, and at the time, that was really all it needed to be. They planned to commute to Halifax for work and move back as soon as the housing crisis settled down.

“We had no intention of staying in the valley,” Mel told me. “That’s laughable now.”

There had apparently been something pulling them toward Kentville before either of them knew it. Two years before they even considered moving there, Mel and their partner spontaneously eloped at the Kentville Ravine. Still, buying a house there wasn’t supposed to be the beginning of some great love story between Mel and rural Nova Scotia. Mel told me they weren’t looking for community when they arrived and honestly didn’t intend to become particularly involved in one–they simply needed somewhere affordable to live.

If anything, one of their first experiences made them question whether they were moving somewhere they would be safe at all. Shortly after they decided on Kentville, a protest was planned against a family drag event in town, and Mel remembers immediately wondering, “Where the fuck am I moving to?” That thought was followed by questions that are painfully familiar to queer and trans people almost anywhere: Am I going to be safe here? Am I going to be a victim of a hate crime?

What happened next didn’t erase those fears, but it complicated them. The protest didn’t unfold the way Mel had feared it would, and as they settled into Kentville, the community they hadn’t gone looking for slowly started finding them anyway. They happened to know a couple who lived next door to the house they bought, who introduced them to other people in the area, and over time those connections grew. But it was really after Mel joined the Valley Pride board and opened Bridge Beauty Bar that Kentville began feeling less like the affordable place they happened to buy a house and more like somewhere they belonged.

Even then, Bridge Beauty Bar was almost built somewhere else.

When Mel first considered finding salon work in the Annapolis Valley, they started looking at what already existed and couldn’t find anywhere that felt like the kind of place they wanted to work. Salons weren’t offering gender-neutral services, staff weren’t putting pronouns in their bios, and Mel could find only one openly queer hairstylist in the area, who now, somewhat wonderfully, works alongside them at Bridge Beauty Bar. Rather than trying to force themselves into a workplace where they didn’t feel comfortable, Mel decided they would open their own salon. The problem was that they still couldn’t imagine doing it in Kentville.

“I said fuck it and decided I would open my salon in Halifax,” they told me.

They started looking at rental spaces, talking to contractors, doing market research and building an entire business plan around Halifax. Mel was prepared to commute three hours round trip every day if it meant having a place to work where they could actually be themselves. Then, in 2023, Mel and their partner went to the first Valley Pride March, and one speech completely changed their plans

Local drag performer and trans activist Queera Bang spoke before the march about something that immediately felt familiar to me when Mel retold it. Cities have an obvious pull when you’re queer or trans–there are more people like us, more established organizations and businesses, more events, and more places where we don’t have to wonder whether we’re the only person in the room like ourselves. But Queera Bang talked about why those spaces are needed in rural communities, too, particularly for LGBTQI+ young people who live there and don’t have the option to simply move somewhere larger. “I felt called out,” Mel told me. “I had never met this person in my life and they were speaking directly to me.” Mel turned to their partner and said, “I think I need to open the salon here.” The next day, they registered Bridge Beauty Inc. and started looking for spaces in Kentville.

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I keep coming back to the fact that just before that Pride march, Mel was willing to spend three hours in a car every day to reach the kind of queer-affirming workplace they couldn’t find where they lived. It would have been completely understandable if they had. Queer and trans people shouldn’t be individually responsible for fixing every place that doesn’t have what we need, and sometimes leaving really is the safest or happiest choice we can make. But Mel heard someone ask, essentially, what happens to the people who can’t leave, and their answer was to stay and build something.

That became the foundation of Bridge Beauty Bar. When Mel described what they wanted the salon to be, almost none of what they talked about had anything to do with hair. They wanted somewhere that felt like home, where people might run into friends and neighbors and where someone could stop in to talk even if they didn’t have an appointment. They wanted community groups to know there was somewhere available if they needed to meet or hold an event. More than anything, they wanted people to know before they even entered that nobody inside was going to question who they were.

And, yes, they also wanted people to stop having to drive more than an hour for their “gay little haircut.”

Only a couple of months after Bridge Beauty Bar opened, a young person and their parent walked through the door. They had already tried several barbershops in the area and had been turned away because of the child’s gender expression. The child wasn’t asking for anything extraordinary–all they wanted was the same haircut their siblings had. By the time they reached Bridge Beauty Bar, both of them were already prepared for another person to tell them no.

While Beauty Bar doesn’t normally take walk-ins, Mel made an exception. “When these two walked into the salon already prepared to be told no, we were really reminded exactly why we are here and why I built Bridge,” they told me.

That story hit me particularly hard because Mel never had an openly trans or queer adult in their own life growing up. They didn’t meet an openly trans person until university and hadn’t even heard the word “nonbinary” until their early twenties. Mel wonders now whether seeing someone like themselves living openly when they were younger might have allowed them to understand themselves earlier, or at least given them someone to talk to when they were trying to make sense of their gender. Now a queer or trans kid growing up in the Annapolis Valley can walk into Bridge Beauty Bar and see exactly that.

What I appreciate about Mel’s story, though, is that they don’t romanticize what it means to be queer in a rural community. There isn’t some hidden queer utopia tucked into the Annapolis Valley that everyone else simply failed to notice. When Pride week ends, there isn’t necessarily a permanent gathering place where everyone goes. People meet at local businesses, in parks, and in one another’s homes. They have picnics and spend time with chosen family. Mel joined the Valley Pride board because they realized that if they wanted more community where they lived, they were going to have to help build it.

When I asked what the familiar story about queer and trans people needing to leave rural places gets wrong, their answer wasn’t that leaving is unnecessary. It was that we aren’t the only ones there. “There are other queer and trans people in rural areas, there is community—but you do need to go looking for it.” Maybe that’s part of why the ordinary details of Mel’s life stayed with me just as much as everything they told me about Bridge Beauty Bar. When I asked what their life looked like outside of being a visible trans business owner, Mel started their answer with something incredibly simple: “I really do love my little life.”

Their little life includes a house and a vegetable garden they wouldn’t give up for anything, despite the fact that it has flooded multiple times. Summer means beaches, hiking trails and far too many tomatoes. Mel told me they had “cut back” this year to fourteen tomato plants across six varieties, which as an avid gardener myself, I understand how hard it is to make those delicious decisions. They share the garden with two close friends, have family harvest dinners and game nights together, and spend a weekend each fall preserving and freezing whatever they’ve managed to grow, including different kinds of salsa they’ll eat throughout the winter.

There is also a small piece of family property in the Cape Breton Highlands where Mel and their partner have been going together for twelve years. It’s where Mel fell in love with their partner, and over the years they’ve slowly worked their way through almost every hiking trail in Highlands National Park. They have six left. When they aren’t outside, there’s 90 Day Fiancé, board games and all of the other incredibly ordinary things that make up a life.

I think those were some of my favorite things Mel told me because queer and trans people are so rarely given the luxury of being ordinary in the stories told about us. We are asked to explain our identities, defend our existence, recount the worst things that have happened to us, or talk about whatever legislation is currently threatening our ability to live our lives. There is far less interest in fourteen tomato plants, making salsa with friends, slowly checking hiking trails off a list with the person you’ve loved for more than a decade, or sitting down together to watch terrible reality television.

But those things are a life, too. In fact, they’re most of it.

Before we finished our conversation, I asked Mel what they would want a trans kid growing up somewhere small in Nova Scotia to understand if that kid walked through the doors of Bridge Beauty Bar and saw them there: “I hope that they can see that they have a future,” Mel told me. “That they can live and thrive and be themselves and it’s okay.” Then they added, “I hope they know that being trans is a gift to love and hold close.”

I’ve thought about that answer a lot since I left Kentville, particularly because I grew up with such a different understanding of what being trans in a rural place meant for my future. I don’t think Mel’s story disproves the reasons so many of us leave. Sometimes leaving is necessary, and sometimes the place we came from really isn’t somewhere we can safely build the life we want. Mel still carries fears about being judged, discriminated against, or hurt, just as they did when they first learned about that protest shortly before moving to Kentville.

But their story makes room for something else. Mel moved to Kentville because they needed an affordable house and assumed they would eventually leave. Instead, they found people, joined a Pride board, opened the salon they had originally planned to build in Halifax, planted fourteen tomato plants, and created a life they now tell me they wouldn’t give up. And somewhere along the way, they became the openly trans adult they never got to see when they were young.

That might be what stayed with me most when I left the salon–not simply that Mel had built a queer space in a rural town, but that some kid who walks through those doors doesn’t have to imagine whether a future like theirs exists. They can see one.

And it’s right there in Kentville, Nova Scotia.

Stay Tuned: The next story from Conversations Across Borders, Nova Scotia, featuring Adeb Arianson, will be published September 4th

Continue the Conversation

Every story begins with a conversation.

If you’re a trans, queer, or gender-diverse person interested in sharing your story—or if you know someone who might be—I’d love to hear from you. If you’d simply like to support Conversations Across Borders or follow the journey, you’re welcome here too.

Share your story • Support the project • Follow the journey

When I arrived in Canada, I was exhausted, anxious, and quietly questioning whether this entire project was going to be a flop. What if my interviewees pulled out at the last minute? What if they didn’t like me or didn’t understand what I was trying to do? What if I had put all of this time, money, and energy into Conversations Across Borders only to realize that the project worked better in my head than it did in practice? What if Canada simply chewed me up and spit me back out?

I am so thankful to have been proven wrong.

Over the next few days, I met and interviewed six queer, trans, and gender-diverse Canadians with vastly different backgrounds and experiences, all of whose individual stories I’ll begin sharing over the coming weeks. What stayed with me most wasn’t any single identity or experience, but seeing the lives each of these people had built for themselves and being invited, even briefly, into them. Some had spent their entire lives in Nova Scotia, while others had traveled thousands of miles before finding themselves there.

One of my first interviews was with Adeb, a queer Afghan-Canadian man I met at a small coffee shop in Halifax. It was raining outside, and Vampire Weekend played softly in the background as Adeb told me about fleeing Afghanistan after the Taliban returned to power and eventually rebuilding his life in Canada. At one point in our conversation, Adeb described home as “a place in memory.” I wrote the words down, but I don’t think I understood how much they would come to define my own experience in Nova Scotia until later.

After our interview, I kept thinking about the improbability of our meeting. Out of the billions of people on this planet, somehow Adeb and I had ended up sitting across from one another in a little coffee shop in Halifax on a rainy day in August. A queer Afghan man who had been forced to flee his country and a trans Jewish man who had eventually left the mountains of West Virginia. Our circumstances and histories are vastly different, but there were parts of what Adeb said that I understood deeply—we both knew that leaving home and ceasing to love it are not the same thing.

Our conversation stayed with me as my husband and I left Halifax and began driving west through Nova Scotia. The farther we drove, the more the landscape started doing something to me. The mountains rose around the highway, fog hung between the ridges, and I felt this ache in my chest that I know all too well and for a moment, something in me forgot I wasn’t home.

I grew up in Appalachia, and I don’t think I’ll ever be able to explain what those mountains mean to me without sounding a little ridiculous. They are so deeply embedded in who I am that I don’t know how to separate myself from them, even after everything that eventually made me leave. I miss them constantly. I miss the way they surround you, the way the fog settles into them, the way you can come around a bend in the road and suddenly have nothing but mountains in front of you.

And here I was in Nova Scotia feeling that same pull, that the mountains surrounding me weren’t just reminiscent of home. They are connected to the Appalachians, pieces of an ancient mountain system broken apart and scattered across what are now different countries and continents. That same ancient geological story continues across the Atlantic through Ireland and Scotland, places where I have felt that strange familiarity before. There was something almost painful about realizing that I had spent so much of my life believing leaving West Virginia meant leaving my mountains behind, only to cross a border and find pieces of them waiting for me somewhere else.

I kept looking out the window as we drove and thinking about what Adeb had told me in that coffee shop: home is a place in memory. And maybe that is true, but sitting there surrounded by those mountains, home didn’t feel like a memory. It felt ancient, bigger than borders and the lines we’ve drawn across maps. Maybe home can be a sight, a sound, a smell, or simply the feeling of looking out a car window in a country that isn’t yours and recognizing the shape of the mountains. For the first time in a long time, I didn’t feel quite so far from mine.

That drive eventually brought me to Kentville, where I met Mel at the salon they own. Mel, who is nonbinary, moved to rural Nova Scotia with their partner after spending much of their adult lives in larger cities. What I wasn’t prepared for was how emotional I would become simply standing inside the space they had created.

The salon was colorful and bright, with LGBTQI+ resources throughout the shop and a little dog named Ellie wandering around while Mel and their colleagues worked. I found myself quietly wiping tears from my face as I watched them cut a client’s hair. There was nothing particularly dramatic happening in front of me, and I think that was exactly why it affected me so much. People were getting haircuts. They were talking. Ellie was click-clacking across the floor seeking out the next person to rub her head. It was an ordinary business in a rural Nova Scotia town, owned by a trans person who had deliberately chosen to build their life there.

As someone who also grew up trans in a rural place, I had been taught something very different. If you are queer or trans and you come from somewhere small, you leave. You go somewhere bigger. You find a city. You build a life somewhere else because the place you came from is something you survive rather than somewhere you choose.

Mel had done the opposite. They and their partner had chosen rural life, and Mel had created the kind of space where queer and trans people in their community could walk through the door and immediately know they belonged there. More importantly, young trans people could see something I rarely saw growing up: a trans adult who hadn’t needed to abandon rural life in order to thrive. I’ll share much more of Mel’s story in the coming weeks, but standing in that salon made me think about how differently two rural trans people can come to understand home, and how radically the possibilities available to us can change from one place to another.

From Kentville, we continued toward Annapolis Royal, and once again this project brought me somewhere I wasn’t expecting. I was finally going to see family.

I hadn’t seen Adele and William in more than a decade. They had never met my husband, and they hadn’t seen me since before my divorce from my first spouse or my transition. I didn’t know exactly what that reunion would feel like after so much time had passed, and in typical fashion, I had spent plenty of time overthinking it. Almost immediately, though, it felt as though very little had changed.

I was greeted with “my boy” and a hug that had been more than ten years in the waiting. We spent the next three hours sitting around a table talking. Music played softly in the background while Bill and Adele laughed and told stories, and their two cats moved between demanding head rubs from the tabletop and wandering out onto their catios to sniff the fresh air coming off the Bay of Fundy. There was no interview happening and nothing I needed to document. For once, I wasn’t thinking about what question I should ask next or what photograph I still needed to take. I was simply sitting at a table with people I loved and who loved me. That was another moment of home.

When I started Conversations Across Borders, I thought I was creating a project that would allow me to ask other queer and trans people about identity, community, belonging, and the places they call home. I didn’t expect those questions to follow me around, or for the people I met to continually force me to reconsider my own answers to them.

By the time I left Nova Scotia, I still didn’t have a clean definition of home. If anything, I understood it less than I did when I arrived. I had found it in too many places: in Adeb’s memories of a country he still loves, in the community Mel deliberately chose to build in a rural town, in mountains that looked enough like my own to make me ache for Appalachia, and around a table with family I hadn’t seen in more than a decade. Maybe that’s what I had been getting wrong. Maybe home doesn’t need to be one place, and maybe leaving one home doesn’t mean you stop carrying it with you. Sometimes it survives as memory. Sometimes you build it yourself. Sometimes you unexpectedly recognize it in a landscape thousands of miles away.

And sometimes, after more than ten years, it sounds like someone opening their arms and saying, “my boy.”

Stay Tuned: The first Nova Scotia story from Conversations Across Borders, featuring Adeb Arianson, will be published August 28th

Continue the Conversation

Every story begins with a conversation.

If you’re a trans, queer, or gender-diverse person interested in sharing your story—or if you know someone who might be—I’d love to hear from you. If you’d simply like to support Conversations Across Borders or follow the journey, you’re welcome here too.

Share your story • Support the project • Follow the journey

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