Authentic
Brooke Eden, left, and her wife Hilary Hoover. Coming out as queer isn’t easy in country music, but it was worth it for Brooke Eden JENNY BLOCK | Contributing Writerjennyeblock@icloud.com When queer country music singer/songwriter Brooke Eden met her now-wife, Hilary Hoover, “It was so clear to me that she was ‘the one,’” Eden said.
So much so, she added, that Eden wanted to shout from the rooftops about her newfound love. But, she said, “I was told that I could either be in an [out] relationship with Hilary, or I could be a country singer.
But I couldn’t be both.” It was not an easy time for Eden. “I went to a Baptist school growing up, which taught me that gay people go to hell,” she recalled. “It was a lot to unlearn.” Eden, instead, had to learn to accept herself, as well as wrestle with her childhood religious trauma and pressure from the country music industry to stay in the closet, which she did for five long years.
Part of what helped her on her journey was reading Untamed by Glennon Doyle. “There was a paragraph about integrity. I realized I was living my life with no integrity, and that hit home for me,” she said.
