How’d We Get Here?

In many ways, that’s what this book is about. How in the hell did we get here? It should just be a travel memoir, not a eulogy. For eighteen months, my wife, toddler, and I roamed the country as my brother’s addiction morphed into a bigger and bigger beast. In this meandering travelation-turned-funeral narrative, the lives, legends, and legacies of the revolutionary holy women I paint and write about were—and continue to be—my guides. They are how I survived this, and I believe they can help you survive and thrive, too. No matter your grief or loss.

It was the myth of Lilith leaving the garden of Eden that gave me the courage to leave a job that was assaulting my soul. It was the passionate nomad Freya Stark’s sentiment that, “it’s the beckoning that counts, not the clicking latch behind you” that called me out of ordinary life to wonder and wander as a form of vocational discernment. It was Pauli Murray's intrepid resilience as she faced overt discrimination because of her race, gender, sexuality, and gender identity that buoys my work as an artist, author, and Executive Director of a fledgling non-profit that is trying to make substantive changes for marginalized women and our access to empowerment, inspiration, and beauty.

And when it comes to sharing the stories of revolutionary women from history and myth, almost all of whom have different cultural backgrounds than I do, here is where I land. The lives, legends, and legacies of these forerunners have been altogether ignored and excluded in most history books, stained glass windows, iconography, and public histories. As a queer feminist and scholar, it is my responsibility to shout their stories from the rooftops. Because their stories affect social change, evoke revolution, and embolden today’s women to keep striving and thriving. Simultaneously, I acknowledge that their stories are not my own; as a cis, white, woman, there are elements of their struggles which I can never grasp. It is my hope that glimpses into their narratives will spark you to learn more. Read their books, research their lives, follow in their footsteps. Not just mine. As a queer white feminist, I am called to shine an excavating light on the WOC who have paved the way. May my book allow this light to guide you to follow their revolutionary lead. If you do, together, we just may queer the American dream.

Advanced Praise for Queering the American Dream In Queering the American Dream,

Angela Yarber ferociously reclaims women's and nonbinary people's place in history, legend and myth. With intelligence, warmth and humor, she weaves these stories into her own narrative of leaving her ministry, selling her home, and taking to the road with her wife and toddler. Joys, challenges and grief pervade the journey. The book illuminates a lineage of non-conformists who empower us through their example. And it's a road trip through an America whose dream is ripe for queering. - Kate Evans, author of Call It Wonder and winner of the Bisexual Book Award

The “pursuit of happiness” is thwarted at every turn where racism, homo and transphobia, violence against women, and greed/poverty dynamics reign, where addictions are ignored, and the environment is ravaged. Angela Yarber’s memoir/travelogue reflects this crushing reality for which even the kindness of strangers and American can-do attitudes are no match. She turns to the arts and selected women role models for survival inspiration, some hint that in our differences are our strength.- Mary E. Hunt, Ph.D., Co-director, Women’s Alliance for Theology, Ethics and Ritual (WATER)

With moments of great beauty, wit, and grief, Yarber delivers a full-hearted affirmation of our common humanity.- Kimerer L LaMothe, PhD. Author of Why We Dance This book is a narrative toolbox for dismantling an American Dream that is nightmarish for all who exist outside the restricting dictates of the white supremicist cisheteropatriarchal status quo. Yarber's is a project of 'queering' at its best, invoking a pantheon of revolutionary women and provoking radical imagination for a more just and beautiful way of being. She helps us to summon courageous rage in the company of these subversive sister saints who have felt it before us, and, through their wisdom and her's, invites us to cultivate the precarious hope to go on in the revolution of radical imagination." - Rev. Cody J. Sanders, Ph.D., American Baptist Chaplain to Harvard University and Advisor for LGBTQ+ Affairs in the Office of Religious, Spiritual, & Ethical Life at MIT

Queering the American Dream manages to be both fun and serious, visionary and achingly down-to-earth all at the same time—one minute you’ll be contemplating deeply about ecofeminism or microagressions and the next minute you’ll be laughing about the peskiness of mosquitos. With unflinching honesty, Yarber weaves the complexity of life’s grief, injustices, and beauty into a captivating story of personal evolution that remains grounded in global revolution. Bolstered by the legacy of fierce women and goddesses from a myriad of faith traditions, Yarber’s creative courage to forge her own life inspires us all to dream, to adventure, to queer convention and explore. - Kyndall Rae Rothaus, author of Thy Queendom Come: Breaking Free from the Patriarchy to Save Your Soul

More than a memoir. More than a travelogue. More than a spiritual pilgrimage. Rev. Dr. Angela Yarber’s latest book, Queering the American Dream, is an interior adventure on an exterior territory leading to permanent, deliberately cultivated, choices meant to change herself, yes, but which also, through the generosity of her evocative prose, change us. The reclamation of her genuine vocation as a mediator for the grace of the world beams off the page with insight, wonder, and the touch of magic that all true transformation harbors. Read this book, and be forewarned—you will be changed for the better. - Rev. Dr. Susan Corso, spiritual director and novelist

Queering the American Dream is a compassionately radical book. You won't read it without a good, healing cry and a deep questioning of the status quo. Rev. Dr. Yarber has intimately shared her powerful journey of living out her own American dream, revolutionizing how we appraise those on the margins. - Trista Hendren, Creatrix of Girl God Books

An adventurer’s guide to traveling from the heart. Chock-a-block with arresting beauty and facts, Yarber’s work documents a time and place in American history from her own unique perspective. As she travels the U.S., she asks the important questions about gods, the patriarchy, and her own privilege, all against a backdrop of the feminist icons whose stories she tells, and whose images she totes along the way. - Lisa Kirchner, author of Blissful Thinking

Queering the American Dream is a deep look at how powerful the tools of myth, legend and belief are in the crafting of our cultural dreams, and how those have historically been co-opted by the patriarchy. Through one woman's journey, with her beautiful, modern American family, we understand how her story, and all of our unique stories, fit into the greater picture of our national legends and the promises of America. The reader will experience a beautiful promise of what our nation can and will be, if we are brave enough to tell all the stories. - Daniella Mestyanek Young, Author of UNCULTURED: A Memoir of Cults, War and Belonging