Fugate snuck one last item onto the agenda, just as the commission's monthly meeting was wrapping up. On March 16, 2004, Rhea County Commissioner J. "We want to get the heck out of here," Thompson says. The two have only been together for a little over a month, but they're already planning their escape. She and her girlfriend have talked about moving there. Her dream location? "Atlanta," she says, without thinking about it. She also began thinking about leaving Rhea County. While she was scrambling to find a new job, Bacon began planning the county's first ever gay pride day. "They told me I was making trouble," she explains, relating what a boss at the grocery store where she worked told her the day after she was on the evening news calling the commissioners' vote discriminatory. Bacon, as one of the area's only out gays, took a lot of heat for speaking out against the commission's vote. Bacon spends as much time as possible outside of Rhea County, whose commission made itself famous by voting to make it illegal for gays to live there.
The country road gets her to Knoxville, where she's looking for work, and the highway to Chattanooga leads to her new girlfriend, Allison Thompson. Kristie Bacon spends a lot of time on those two roads. Highway 27, the four-lane highway, is the quicker way out of town-it's a 40-minute drive south to Chattanooga, the nearest town with anything like a nightlife. Highway 30 is a two-lane country road that starts at Interstate 75-not far from Knoxville-and skips over the Tennessee River before dumping you in Dayton. There are few roads in or out of Dayton, Tennessee, the biggest town in rural Rhea County.