[bold]A popular Instagram account raises funds for LGBTQ people in Appalachia. But does the money really go where it’s supposed to?[/bold]
n August 2018, the fifth annual Shaping Our Appalachian Region Summit, a social services and jobs fair, was held in Pikeville, Ky. Among the booths set up by local universities and health-care companies was a table from Queer Appalachia, a wildly popular Instagram account. Over its two-year history, Queer Appalachia had expanded beyond its original content about the lives and culture of queer people across Appalachia — playful memes about Dolly Parton and cornbread — and began collecting money from its followers to support social initiatives in the region. A small cadre of volunteers sat behind the QA table at the summit, including Mamone, the account’s founder, and a volunteer named Leo. (Mamone uses the mononymous Mamone. Leo spoke on the condition that only his first name be used.)
Leo grew up in Richmond, a town with deep ties to the coal mining industry, and felt a strong connection to Mamone’s platform. After Leo had volunteered for a few months, Mamone asked him to help expand Queer Appalachia into harm reduction work, a set of interventions designed to reduce drug overdoses and stigma associated with drug use. “I started volunteering locally, learning as much as I could about it as humanly possible, and loving every second of it,” Leo says. He trained to distribute naloxone, a drug that rapidly reverses opioid overdoses, and to teach others those skills; soon, he was spending up to 60 hours a week on QA’s harm reduction projects.
That summer, Leo, Mamone and another volunteer traveled throughout the Appalachian region, distributing harm reduction materials at zine festivals and pride celebrations. The community response was “outstanding,” Leo says. To finance their travel, Leo posted a call on Instagram asking supporters to buy QA stickers and donate to QA’s Venmo account. Leo says Mamone, who controlled the Venmo account, never told him how much money was raised in those campaigns.
In September, Mamone posted a call on Instagram asking Queer Appalachia’s followers for more donations, writing: “We’ve given out ALL of our Harm Reduction supplies & need your $upport to buy more Narcan, needles & fentanyl test strips to hand out.” It was accompanied by a picture of nearly empty cabinets.
But Leo knew this wasn’t true. Their cabinets were full of donated supplies. “I immediately sent [Mamone] a message being like: This is extremely unethical,” says Leo.
“I get the empty cupboards are not an authentic representation of where we are,” Mamone texted back. “It ain’t too far off though looking at overall budget. ... I do not have the time or ability to make custom graphics for each new post ... that’s the very nature of fundraising like this.” (When I began reporting this story in February 2019, I wrote an introductory email to Mamone with a few questions about the scope and workings of Queer Appalachia. After replying to that initial email, Mamone did not respond to multiple detailed requests for comment, made over the course of a year.)
In 2019, a Roanoke-based nonprofit called the Virginia Harm Reduction Coalition approached Queer Appalachia about partnering to apply for a grant from HepConnect, the granting arm of Gilead Sciences. The two outfits teamed up and won the grant of $300,000. Leo signed off on the application, but once the money was awarded, he quickly became frustrated with how the funds were distributed.
He decided to stop working with Queer Appalachia and scheduled a meeting with Mamone to quit in person. Mamone drove up to the meeting in a new truck, complete with “every bell and whistle,” says Leo. “There was no transparency on where the money to buy this brand-new truck came from,” he told me. “I just thought it was such a ‘f--- you’ to all of the people, the poor and working-class people who had given their money [to Queer Appalachia] without really understanding or knowing where it was going.”