Wicked Little Town

John Cameron Mitchell as Hedwig singing Wicked Little Town.

A while back, my husband and I decided to watch the film “Hedwig and the Angry Inch” for about the tenth time. If you haven’t seen this film, you should. The film has to be one of the oddest things ever created. It’s about a gay German boy who marries an American GI to get out of communist East Berlin, but he has to go through a sex-change operation or else he can’t escape as the “wife” of the GI; he has to pass as a woman to be verified as the GI’s German wife, and a physical exam is required.  They move abruptly from Berlin to a dinky little town called Junction City, Kansas during the Cold War. What happens next is too strange to really describe, but suffice it to say, it is hard to be a trans person in such a small town (or anywhere for that matter) ina  society where homogeneity is the name of the game.

In the film, Hedwig becomes a singer and writes and performs a song entitled Wicked Little Town. The song is about the way Hedwig is treated in Junction City as a queer or trans person. It’s a haunting ballad that is dead-on accurate in its depiction of what life is like for a girly-boy in such a place (and elsewhere).

After watching the film that day, I sent a text to Raynard Kington, the new president of Grinnell College, and his husband, to see what they were up to and invite them over for a visit. In the text, I mentioned that I had just watched “Hedwig and the Angry Inch.” I went on to say that the song Wicked Little Town really spoke to me. As I was texting, my husband Kevin looked over my shoulder to see what I was writing. Upon seeing my reference to Wicked Little Town, he quickly pointed out that I should delete any reference to a wicked little town, as Dr. Kington and his husband might think I was referring to Grinnell. They had mentioned before they moved to Grinnell that they were concerned they wouldn’t be accepted in small town Iowa. Grinnell, which today remains progressive, had welcomed the couple as if they were long lost old friends, however. Nevertheless, they still remained a bit anxious about fitting in. I thought about Kevin’s suggestion for a moment and decided he was right, so I deleted the text.

We ran upstairs then to watch the extras on the DVD about the making of Hedwig. The extras consisted of a question-and-answer session with Stephen Trask, the lyricist and composer for the songs in the movie, and John Cameron Mitchell who played the role of Hedwig. Kevin had met Stephen Trask years previously on Fire Island and wanted to see what he and John Cameron Mitchell had to say about the making of the film. It was a fascinating story, and we were glued to the screen.

Stephen and John eventually got around to talking about the making of the song Wicked Little Town. It was noted that of all the songs in the film, Wicked Little Town was the rawest. It exposed the very soul of Hedwig. Stephen began talking about the difficulty he had in writing this song. At the time, he simply could not find the words or right tone for a song about the experience of being transgender/queer in some dinky little town someplace. He had no personal exposure to small town culture and had no starting point from which to write. He struggled and struggled and just couldn’t come up with anything.

A few weeks later Stephen and his partner, Michael Trask, were invited by some friends to visit them in a small college town in the Midwest. He thought it might be just what he needed to imagine the song he was hoping to write. As he rode from the airport into the countryside, miles and miles of farmland and open sky lay before him. He rode for an hour in open space before finally reaching the small town of his friends, Jared Gardner and Beth Hewitt. It was two days before he relaxed enough from the freneticism of his city life to begin to feel the town as it was, to explore and to imagine what it must be like to be someplace like this where everyone knew who you were and what you did every day. And then, finally, one day while sitting at a desk in his friend’s house – in Grinnell, Iowa – the words for Wicked Little Town came.

My jaw dropped. I turned to look at my husband as he turned to look at me. “Oh MY GOD!” we both yelled at once. “Grinnell IS the WICKED LITTLE TOWN!”

And then we were nearly dying with laughter at both the idea of Grinnell, of all places, as a wicked little town, and the irony of our not knowing it was the Wicked Little Town when I texted Dr. Kington.

We later regaled Dr. Kington and his husband with this funny story and assured him that even though Grinnell is technically the model for the wicked little town in Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Grinnell is definitely not Junction City, and certainly is no wicked little town! It is, instead, one of the most socially progressive places in Iowa with a long history of political and civil activism – a good place for people of all backgrounds.

So, greetings to everyone from Grinnell, Iowa, the wicked little town better known as one of the “Best Small Towns in America,” where, in truth, you could, like Hedwig, be whatever you want and hardly anyone would bat an eye, but everyone would certainly know it!