Why I Keep Choosing Kentucky
I grew up in a bubble. I didn’t get out much. In high school especially, I was the kind of kid that just wanted to play Call of Duty online with my friends more than the kid who went to football games and took part in extracurricular activities. But before that, I spent my childhood in the woods. Summers were spent next to Lake Cumberland in Somerset, right on the border of Nancy, with frequent trips in the fall to Haney’s Appledale Farm and Bear Wallow Farm. I played with neighborhood friends in abandoned trailer parks with double wides toppled over hills. Froze my feet off in treestands hunting in Campbellsville with my Grandad. Sat on a dead log housing a seed tick nest while chasing squirrels. Had front yard reunions with my Mom’s mom’s side of the family in Flemingsburg, and the Daulton family Christmas in my Aunt’s garage.
When I graduated from high school in 2015, I was initially going to attend the University of Louisville to study Civil Engineering. I didn’t know much about it, but my Uncle did it and I was good at math. When I got to UofL for my orientation, I felt small in a way I never had before. I was alone. I missed home, missed my parents. I hated the sound of planes flying overhead at night. So I immediately dropped out from UofL’s enrollment and transferred to Eastern Kentucky University in Richmond to pursue a degree in English Education.
After about one year at EKU, I decided to switch majors again - this time to Broadcasting and Electronic Media with an Emphasis in Film Techniques and Technology. I’ve wanted to be a filmmaker for as long as I can remember. My high school English teacher (who I would later feature in a story for Kentucky Educational Television about paranormal happenings around Somerset) hosted a 48 hour film festival for students to enter.
Reeve (right) alongside Zachary Curry (left) at the 2025 Ohio Valley Regional Emmy Awards.
My friends and I entered the film festival during our Junior and Senior years. We made some awful movies, but it was the first time I had ever been allowed to explore the art of filmmaking. And, after some long deliberation during my college journey, I decided it was the career path I wanted to pursue. It was a difficult decision and one that my Mom couldn’t get behind. She didn’t finish college on account of raising two kids. My Dad got his GED. There is nothing wrong with that, but my parents never wanted my brother or I to struggle in the same way that they had to. I was constantly pushed to get good grades in high school and to overachieve. So going from Civil Engineering, which my family knew had a good career track, to “Broadcasting” was a hard pill to swallow. I believe the exact quote was, “What’s next? Are you going to flip burgers at McDonalds?”
To be clear, things have gone very well for me for the most part and my parents have been nothing but supportive since then. Not flipping burgers yet…but I wouldn’t be opposed to it.
After college, I worked for Kentucky Educational Television (KET) for 6 years. It was one of the best jobs I’ve ever had. Through my work there, I was able to connect with Kentucky in ways I had never truly appreciated. I produced stories on artists and authors like Wylie Caudill, Silas House, Ceirra Evans, and Belle Townsend. While all these folks were incredible at their craft, working with them helped me realize something else: there is a place for queer people in Kentucky, in spite of the stereotypes that shroud the region, and there are people whose work makes that space more open every day.
As a queer person who has lived in the “closet” so to speak for most of my life, I feel like I have always been fighting to have some kind of voice of my own. I never really figured out what that was, and I always felt like the landscape I was in was the problem. For the longest time, and even still from time to time, I thought about leaving Kentucky. When I was in high school, I was certain I would. But after 6 years exploring Kentucky for my work at KET and getting to sink into everything our home has to offer, it has become almost impossible for me to want to choose anywhere else.
Silas House said something during my interview with him that has stuck with me: “Most of us have multitudes; we’re not just one thing.” It’s a variation on the Walt Whitman line “I am large, I contain multitudes.” Silas has done so much to represent so many parts of Appalachia, and I always appreciated the way he expanded that quote to represent many people. No offense to Mr. Whitman.
Behind the scenes of an interview with Silas House for KET’s Kentucky Life.
It was the year of our Lord 2007, at a relentlessly charming octo-plex theater called Showplace Cinemas in the evidently more relenting Somerset Mall in South Central Kentucky (the still operating mall has entombed the closed cinema for 6+ years now). I was 9 going on 10, standing on chicken legs buried in mud-caked Nike Shox, in a hallway that smelled like 17 years of spilled soda and that butter-that’s-not-butter-but-who-cares.
The hallway was adorned with a mural of movie characters spread across all 8 auditorium entrances, painted by a Somerset native who 10 years later I’d know as a workplace regular. 20 years later, I would speak on a panel at a film festival in part hosted by that same painter.
Reeve speaking on a Producer's Panel at Black Mountain Film Festival in Somerset, Nov. 2025.
When I was 9, I didn’t think much of the mural outside of regularly seeing it. When I was 18 and scooping popcorn at the theater across the street from Showplace, my coworkers and I would reminisce about the mural after it had been unceremoniously painted over. At 28, sitting on a panel in a renovated theater in Somerset, I was able to reflect and give due credit to the man who had unconsciously endeared memories into my subconscious, who I sold concessions to, and who remains a champion of film in Kentucky: John Alexander.
Standing outside of auditorium doors that tripled me in size, 9-year-old me peeked through the crack between the doors at the movie on the other side: Nicolas Cage’s smash-hit take on Marvel’s Ghost Rider. I’ve liked superheroes for as long as I can remember; Spider-Man, Batman, and Ghost Rider are my favorites. Since I was 5, I’ve seen almost every superhero movie that’s come out in a theater with my Dad. Sometimes he’ll fall asleep and I’ll have to nudge him awake. Inevitably, he’ll pull the straw out of his large Diet Coke, making a loud screeching noise as the plastic of the straw runs through the lid, in the middle and often quietest part of the movie. He’ll then use the straw as a toothpick to get popcorn out of his teeth.
Cinema etiquette isn’t his strongest trait, but the times spent watching movies with my Dad are some of the best memories I have. He’s a die-hard fan of the shows and movies he watched in his youth, Lou Ferrigno and Bill Bixby’s take on The Incredible Hulk, Christopher Reeve’s Superman, and 80s horror like Halloween, Friday the 13th, and Nightmare on Elm Street. My barometer for movies being good as a kid was if my Dad could stay awake from start to finish.
He got me into comics with a stack of books he had from his childhood - Marvel’s Star Wars comics mostly, but a couple of superhero books. One of those books was Ghost Rider #81, “The End of Ghost Rider” (1983). This was the last issue in the second, and most well-known run of Ghost Rider comics, featuring Johnny Blaze as the titular Spirit of Vengeance. He told me he got them at the Shell gas station on 27 in Somerset, which has since replaced its comic shelf with kratom displays.
I could not feign interest in my Dad’s primary interest: NASCAR (this is an artform I would not appreciate until my mind had matured), but we found common ground in the nerdy stuff. He’d take me to see every superhero movie, every Star War, we rented campy horror movies from one of Somerset’s TWO Blockbusters (RIP), we watched The Walking Dead together every week, we ate it all up. My Dad introduced me to scary movies at too young an age, but 9 was not that age, and I was too young to stomach Nicolas Cage’s Ghost Rider.*
17 years later, I’d eat a home cooked breakfast in Cynthiana-born artist Colonel Tony Moore’s kitchen, while helping film a story for KET. We talked about Ghost Rider, Agent Venom, The Walking Dead, comics and characters he’d worked on and helped create. A few years before this shoot, I committed to completing the entire run of Ghost Rider comics that my Dad had given me the last issue of. Since Tony was a Ghost Rider fan as well, he had a complete collection of this run. I was a good way into completing my collection at the time, but was still missing a few key issues.**
Needless to say, I was impressed.
A still from Reeve’s Kentucky Life segment on Colonel Tony Moore.
I didn’t know any other Ghost Rider fans growing up. I hardly knew any other comic book fans besides my best friend, Mayson Rainwater. We would go to Little Monster Comics together as teenagers. Our parents would drop us off at the mall and we’d walk to the comic book store and get pizza subs at Subway. I would later go on to produce a story for KET’s Kentucky Life about one of the employees at Little Monster Comics, Jason Stephens, AKA Lemon Juice.
As a fan of The Walking Dead, and as someone who would actively buy those comics, I was geeking out with one of its creators, who was from a place in Kentucky not too dissimilar to Somerset, about a comic book character who has a flaming skull and rides around on a motorcycle. When your interests are things like film, comics, video games, etc, it can be hard to find people here that take those things seriously as “real jobs.” I keep trying to find the words to sum up what meeting Tony meant to me, but everything I type sounds corny, so I’ll just say it was really cool to see somebody from here living off the work that interests them.
Through my work at KET, I was able to share stories about people and places I grew up with. The first story I did was on the Somernites Cruise Car Show in Somerset, which my Uncle helped found and where I spent many hot summer days as a kid. I produced a story about the fall traditions I grew up on in Nancy. I interviewed some of the last living residents of Old Burnside, a town next to Somerset that was partially flooded during the creation of Lake Cumberland.
For a few years, I had the opportunity to share the things I love most about Kentucky on a TV show. That’s something I don’t take for granted.
Behind the scenes of a Kentucky Life shoot.
Behind the scenes of a Laurel Cove Session with Musical Moonshine.
The producer for the Tony Moore shoot was Zachary Curry, who was newer to KET at the time and enlisted me to help him out. Zach and I hit it off almost immediately when he started working at KET and have formed a strong working relationship in the years since.
A few months later, Zach asked me if I wanted to work with him on a video he was directing with Tony for Laid Back Country Picker (a cover of Bauhaus’ “Bela Lugosi’s Dead”). After helping with that video, I started working with Zach and Phillip Barnett under a company they founded in 2020 called Musical Moonshine.
In June 2024, I was invited by those Musical Moonshine boys to shoot live music sessions with artists at Laurel Cove Music Festival in Pineville. Going to Laurel Cove that year was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.
For 3 years now, I’ve been working with Musical Moonshine to cover the Appalachian music community. Laurel Cove Music Festival might as well be Christmas to me now. I look forward to it more than almost anything else. I have found passion, love, and understanding in the music I have found with my work here. I may not be able to relate to everything every artist sings about, but when I hear Nicholas Jamerson sing “Linda James,” I can get behind lyrics like:
“Love as much as you can
Give your gratitude at night
And be thankful for each and every day
That you get to see the sunrise
Don't take your time for granted
Don't you do nothin' in spite
Take care of the people and you won't need a steeple
To give the world your light"
Through my work with KET and Musical Moonshine, I’ve been able to discover so many musicians from this area who I love, and some that I’m happy to call friends. I’ve been able to meet musicians my classmates talked about listening to in high school. I’ve learned about traditional mountain music, the rich history in the hills of Eastern Kentucky, and the important work that has been done to preserve it.
When I interviewed Somerset-based artist Dan Dutton for my work at KET, he mentioned that he “resented the idea of having to do his work anywhere else” after people told him that he’d have to move to New York or LA to pursue art. And I think a lot of the people I’ve met feel the same way. Kentucky will have a vibrant history in music and the arts for forever - that’s something that can’t be erased - but there are artists living here today who continue to show that it is possible to live and create in this space no matter who you are. As important as preservation is, cultivation is even more so.
The word “queer” first came into my vocabulary as anything more than a word used in offense around 2019. Up until that point, I had identified as bisexual, pansexual, so on and so forth. I didn’t know what being queer meant for a long time. Then I went to a Rainbow Kitten Surprise show in Newport, KY in 2022 after the lead singer, Ela Melo, had recently come out as trans. There were other queer members in the band and I remember being entranced by how free they felt during that show, which led me to question my own feelings about who I am.
Rainbow Kitten Surprise performing in Newport, KY in 2022.
So, I decided to figure it out. I spent time in therapy. I changed my name. My birth name is Evan Daulton. I never hated that name, but it never felt right to me. So, I changed it to Reeve. More accurately, I changed it to Emoreeve (Emory-eve). I’ve always loved the name Emory and I wanted to keep the Ev from Evan as a play on Eve. All of that is a little complicated to talk about every time people ask about my name, so I just started going by Reeve. I also don’t like explaining myself. My family was confused at first and I’ve never given much reasoning behind it other than I like Christopher “Reeve”s Superman which just seemed easier. Most of them might think it’s weird, I don’t know. My Grandad didn’t care whenever I did it though. He didn’t say anything, didn’t ask me about it. It was just what it was and he was fine with that.
Queer to me means that I can be anything and love anybody. It is the closest I feel to not having to identify with anything related to a social construct. I don’t know what it is about the word “queer” that feels right to me, but it’s sort of like hearing someone call your name and knowing that it’s you. I believe we are all blank canvases at birth. We don’t start out knowing who we are or why we are, but as we grow up and learn more about ourselves, it becomes easier to know when things feel right. Things like our name, being queer, having an identity.
I have no interest in engaging in gender politics with anybody because I am baffled that anybody cares about how anybody else lives their life (as long as they aren’t harming themselves or anyone else). That’s not what this is, but if this article can reach at least one little queer kid in the 606 so that they may feel even slightly more comfortable exploring who they are, then that’s good enough for me.
Still from a home video of Reeve with his Grandad (left) and Papaw (right), July 1998.
I’ve lost my Papaw and my Grandad since I’ve been working in the Kentucky music scene. Both of them were men deeply connected to this place, my Grandad through farming and hunting, my Papaw through carpentry and the places he’d built. In that time I have become so much more deeply connected with home. When I was going through my Grandad’s closet after he passed, I found a bunch of old Dwight Yoakam and Johnny Cash cassettes, both artists that I listen to almost everyday now. My work connects me to Kentucky, and in some weird way, I still feel connected to them because of it. I keep choosing Kentucky because of that connection and connections like it.
The longer I live here, the more connected everything becomes. The more connections I find to Kentucky music from artists of today and from years long ago. I keep choosing Kentucky because of the connections I have made to people with similar lived experiences.
I keep choosing Kentucky because of the connections to people I have made like Zach, Phill, Mayson, Wylie, Cody, Elon, Tony, LB, Teresa, Chip, Casey, Silas, Ceirra, Belle, Dan, and so, so many more.
The Musical Moonshine crew at Laurel Cove Music Festival, June 2026.
I keep choosing Kentucky because every step I take, day by day, year by year, connects me more and more to all of the people I love and have ever loved.
I keep choosing Kentucky because it is home.
The opening lines of “Linda James” are:
“Linda James was a good damn woman
She gave everyone her light
She had a taste for the simple things
Knew what it took to make a good life”
I’ve been privileged to have known many “Linda James” in my life. My Mom, my Aunts, my Granny, my Nana. Kentucky women have carried me through every step of my existence and I humbly stand on their shoulders. Life is hard, and I try every day to give just a little bit more of that light. But mine pales in comparison to the women who gave me theirs.
Everything that I am has been baked in cast iron and tied together with bluegrass.
I keep choosing Kentucky because it’s all I could ever want.
*As an anxious child I bought the novelization of the movie so that I would know if there would be any scary parts, and I read the book up until a part where the film’s villain, Blackheart, kills an innocent diner waitress. The waitress made 5th grade me think of my Mom and I didn’t want to watch my Mom die, so I left during this part and some of the theater workers asked me what I was doing standing outside the doors and then asked why I got a ticket if I thought it would be scary. No other waitresses die over the course of the movie.
**I have since completed my Ghost Rider collection.
