WHEN HUNTER VALE tells people about his upbringing in a deeply conservative and ultra-religious Hoosier community, people’s reactions are alarmingly similar. “Everyone says, ‘Oh, you must have so much trauma.’” But the founder of historical archive and educational tool Queer Circle City is delighted to upend those expectations—and many others, as it turns out. “I hate saying this because I feel bad in a way, but I had a great and happy childhood,” Vale says. “There are a lot of gay people with downright horrific stories about growing up in a place like Indiana. But I’m not one of them.”
In fact, the Mass Ave resident radiates joy and positivity, even in these troubling times for Hoosier residents in the LGBTQIA+ communities. “Every civil rights fight has its ebbs and flows,” Vale says. “We’re in an ebb right now, and they’re trying to erase us. But we’re not going to let them.”
Now 31, Hunter was born in Seattle, Washington, but his family moved to Anderson, Indiana, when he was very young. At the time, his minister father, Richard (who goes by Rick), was a rising star in the Church of God, which is headquartered in the city. His mother, Karen, landed a job adjacent to Rick’s ministry as the personal assistant to one of the church’s most famous members, Sandi Patty.
“Someone at the church approached my mom and said, ‘There’s this singer at the church. She’s a Christian singer and she’s looking for a personal assistant. My mom’s always been a jack-of-all-trades. She can adapt to do any kind of job, so she said, ‘Sure, introduce us,’ even though she hadn’t ever worked as a personal assistant, especially for someone famous.” Karen worked with Patty for over a decade, Vale says.
Between his dad’s job as a Church of God pastor and his mom’s work with Patty, “my childhood really was enmeshed in the church,” Vale says. “I know there’s a lot of emotion around that for many gay people who grew up in evangelical religions, but I always really had a good experience.”
This might be surprising to people who know the Church of God mainly for its emphasis on how women dress, a set of rules it’s relaxed in recent decades. But many still remember when female parishioners were discouraged from wearing pants, jewelry, or makeup; they were also told not to cut their hair or don “worldly fashions.”
That said, the church also has progressive roots in certain social areas, encouraging pacifism and discouraging church members from joining any war efforts until World War II. Similarly, church founders preached racial equity from its founding in the 1880s, arguing that true sanctification wasn’t possible without the elimination of racial prejudice.
“I really don’t have any bad memories of any of that time, especially in the evangelical kind of realm,” Vale says. “And then traveling with Sandi, you know, she’s the most awarded gospel singer of all time. And my mom was right in the center of it.”
In fact, Patty even thanked Karen in the liner notes of one of her albums, crediting her for “introducing her to per diem shoes.” In a 2003 news article in the Spartanburg Herald-Journal, Karen explained, “We get ‘per diem,’ which is money that we are given to use on the road for food. I choose to use mine for shoes. Per diem shoes must fit within the amount you are given, they are not sensible, and they just must be very fun.”
(When I showed that interview to Vale in the days following our conversation, he was floored. “This is hilarious,” he said, explaining that to this day, his mother’s email address also includes a reference to “per diem shoes.” “I just can’t believe that is in print, because that is so my mom.”)
In 2005, Rick told Karen that he was gay. “And that changed things for us in the community but not for our family. Not really.”
“It didn’t?” I ask skeptically. Like Vale, I’m from a small Indiana town that’s strongly infused with religion and wasn’t kind to folks who even seemed like they might be gay. If you’re my age (I was born in 1971), you might have memories like this, too.
But Vale was born in 1993. For context, that’s a year after RuPaul’s “Supermodel (You Better Work)” topped the U.S. charts. Now, I’m not saying that three-decade-old bop changed the face of the nation. But according to a 2020 research project by consumer goods monolith Procter & Gamble Co., non-LGBTQIA+ Americans are significantly more inclined to accept members of those communities if they see them portrayed in high-visibility outlets such as TV, music, and social media.
So unlike those of prior generations, Vale has always lived in a world with prominent drag queens; by the time he was ready for kindergarten, Ellen DeGeneres’ Ellen character, Ellen Morgan, had come out during prime time on ABC. He doesn’t mention either of those pop culture moments when we speak, but I wonder as I’m talking to him if his father would have been as free to live his truth without these visible, mainstream figures. Or if his family’s transition from the type of unit the Church of God traditionally finds acceptable to something new and more openhearted would have gone as smoothly.
“My mom’s one of eight kids, and her whole family is very accepting. So were all the close family friends around us. But in the external community it was different. He worked at Anderson University, and he was a pastor of a church, but when he came out, he was fired from all of his jobs.”
“It split the church in half. Half would talk to him, and half would never talk to him again. There are people to this day that will cross the street so they don’t have to see him. So that aspect of it was definitely hard, but my whole family was also saying, ‘Those people are not right. Those aren’t Christian values.’ Again, I know I’m a rarity, but this was actually a positive, formative time for me,” Vale says. (Rick has since returned to the ministry under another denomination and is now the pastor of Anderson’s Central Christian Church.)
“I don’t even have a recollection of our family separating, because we were still always together. That nuclear family still existed and really had no issues,” Vale says.
When Rick came out, Hunter already knew he was gay, too. “I always knew. Definitely by the time I was 2 years old. I never, ever even considered that I wasn’t.” But even so, he kept that part of himself quiet for a time.
But when he was 12, he gathered the nerve to tell his parents, “And my mother—she’s always been my best friend—said, ‘Was there anything else?’” Vale laughs at the memory. “I wasn’t offended, but it was very much, ‘Uh, yeah, we were aware of that.’”
“I’ve been fortunate to have been put into a family that didn’t really even give it a second thought,” Vale says. “I don’t take that for granted.” And, once again, it certainly helps that the tide of visibility ushered in by RuPaul and DeGeneres continued to rise, and national acceptance with it.
Vale graduated from high school in 2015, and just a few weeks later the U.S. Supreme Court issued its decision on Obergefell v. Hodges, establishing the right to marriage equality for same-sex couples. Meanwhile, Vale was working at the Noblesville location of Houlihan’s, where he was exposed to a broader swath of beliefs and politics than any time before.
“It’s Obama’s second term, marriage equality was on the table, and Eric Garner, Michael Brown, and Freddie Gray [all Black men who were killed by police officers] were in the news, gay marriage was coming, and we were at war in Afghanistan.” Then, 10 days before marriage for all became the law of the land, a reality TV star and real estate mogul named Donald Trump announced that he was running for president of the United States, descending from his tower on a golden escalator.
“When you work in a restaurant, you can have a lot of downtime where all you can do is talk. I was working with a very diverse group of people—some were liberal, some conservative, and everyone wanted to talk philosophically about the news.”
The vigorous and respectful debates he witnessed and engaged in at work ignited his interest in politics. Vale enrolled at the school then known as IUPUI, majoring in political science. While there, he got an internship with the Indiana Senate, parlayed that into a job with a lobbying firm, then joined former U.S. Senator Joe Donnelly’s final campaign as a research assistant. Donnelly, a Democrat, lost his bid for reelection in 2018 to Republican Mike Braun, who has since been elected as Indiana’s governor.
Donnelly’s loss sent Vale back to the Indiana Statehouse, where he was a legislative assistant at the House of Representatives. “I was just so interested in policy. Everybody was always talking about how the governor’s office doesn’t do this, or the statehouse doesn’t do that. I knew I needed to enter the world instead of just being mad at it from the outside.”
All the while, the political divisions between the two parties were growing at an epic rate, especially in places like Indiana. “After Trump, job prospects for a Democrat in Indiana politics got very, very low. You’re never going to work in the governor’s office because no Democrat is winning that in Indiana anytime soon. And you can’t be a lobbyist because Republicans won’t even talk to you anymore.” The exchange of ideas and healthy discussion that Vale so appreciated at Houlihan’s was nowhere to be found at 200 W. Washington St.
“I didn’t want to move to D.C. or Chicago, because this is my home. But I hit a threshold financially and professionally—and, honestly, satisfaction-wise. A friend said, ‘Well, if you want to level up, you should go back to restaurants, because the management experience you get there will transfer to any job.’ So I left politics, and I went to work for Martha Hoover.”
Hoover might be one of the Midwest’s most recognizable icons, the founder of restaurant group Won’t Stop Hospitality, which oversees Cafe Patachou and its spinoff brands; she also founded the anti-food-insecurity nonprofit The Patachou Foundation.
“Martha is extremely successful for a reason,” Vale says. “To learn under her and the leadership team she created transformed how I work with people.”
In the middle of Vale’s tenure at Patachou, the pandemic shut a lot of the operation down. “I had a lot of free time, and, like a lot of people, I was talking to my parents a lot more. My dad had remarried, and my stepdad grew up in Irvington, went to Butler, and had been out for many, many decades. They’d come down to visit, and he’d point out buildings downtown and note which were gay bars he remembered from the 1980s and ’90s. And I had all this research experience from the Donnelly campaign …”
Through his stepfather, Vale began connecting with older community members. “And then they would start giving me magazines or newspapers,” such as The Works and The New Works News, two of the earliest publications geared toward gay Indy residents. “I started collecting everything I could find, even posters, and fliers, and matchbooks, and then I’d catalog everything, taking photos and preserving them. But what’s the point of having a poster from 1972 for the Gay Liberation Front in Indianapolis—three years after Stonewall—to just have it in your closet, and not talk about it, and not share it with the general public?”
So he started the Queer Circle City Instagram account, with the idea that he’d spread this historic information in an accessible, quickly shareable way.
“Instagram was just like, everyone’s on it, everyone’s interested in it, and it’s easy,” Vale says. As the account’s following grew, more people reached out to Vale to share details and information they remember from gay Indy’s earliest days, giving him more leads to chase with his politically honed research skills.
“I’m not a historian because I’m not traditionally trained,” Vale says. “I’m really a storyteller. I’m just fascinated by people and history, and I want to make that accessible for the current generation, the next generation, even the generation before us, so they can really have that understanding of history to go forward.” That includes posts describing the glory days of downtown gay nightlife, as well as explainers on the local impact of the HIV and AIDS crisis and the disappearances linked to Herb Baumeister, now colloquially known as the Fox Hollow Farm killer.
In recent months, Vale has also brought present-day information into the mix. The tide of acceptance that started rising around the time Vale was born came crashing down toward the end of 2024, giving him a new sense of urgency. Sure, RuPaul is still working—but when he’s on a network show, he’s more frequently seen in male drag.
Influential companies like Salesforce, which pushed back against former governor Mike Pence’s proposed 2015 legislation to allow discrimination against gay people so aggressively that Apple, Yelp, NASCAR, and General Electric joined the protest, now remains silent as current governor Braun speaks out against equal rights for all. Even Indiana Democrats are attacking those communities, with Reps. Wendy Dant Chesser, Ed DeLaney, Chuck Moseley, and Tanya Pfaff and Sens. David Niezgodski, Rodney Pol, Lonnie Randolph, and Greg Taylor recently voting in favor of laws that strip trans women of rights. That about-face has prompted Vale to start “sharing as much information as I can to support this very small population [less than one percent of the worldwide population is transgender] that is under attack from all sides right now.”
“I was born into a place of queer privilege,” Vale says, sounding a great deal like a sermonizing pastor, himself. “I’m white, and I come from a very loving middle-class family. You can’t just sit on that privilege. That privilege means you have to do something when you see injustice.”
That means he’s also started leading in-person gay history discussions at places like 16th Street’s Dream Palace Books and the Carmel Clay Public Library. “Hunter’s presentations have been so special—sometimes bringing me to tears,” Dream Palace co-owner Taylor Lewandowski says. “He tries his best to save and preserve a history that is so easily erased.”
It’s that threat of erasure that seems to drive Vale the most. In a time when officials are removing mention of historically and systemically marginalized people from governmental websites and politicians are pulling curriculum that acknowledges lesbian, gay, nonbinary, and trans identity from schools, Vale says, “It isn’t just that they are trying to erase our identity. What they’re really saying is, ‘We don’t believe that you’re gay. We don’t believe you’re lesbian, transgender, bisexual, queer, asexual. We don’t believe that exists.’ They’re not trying to deny who we are—they’re truly trying to convince the world that we aren’t real.”
So by collecting and sharing ephemera from Indy’s gay past, Vale believes he just might be able to ensure its future. And if that Procter & Gamble research project is right, he could even start rebuilding some of the acceptance LGBTQIA+ communities have lost since Donald Trump began his second presidential term.
“Now more than ever, we need to get involved, and stay involved, and protect our most vulnerable,” Vale says. “There are actually more avenues than ever to do that, and one of the easiest is just to keep gay and trans people visible and in the light. Remind those people who said, ‘Hey, my cousin’s gay!’ in 2015 that they need to stand up for someone else’s cousin now. Remind everyone that we have always been here, and we’re never, ever going away.”
