Country Queers Spread the Love in Rural America

A year later, with the help of a Kickstarter campaign, Garringer set out on a cross-country road trip to document and preserve the stories of rural lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, asexual and Two Spirit people across the United States.

In 30 days, Garringer covered 7,000 miles and spoke with 30 people in Mississippi, Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, Kansas and Oklahoma. These interviews would form the basis of the Country Queers multimedia oral history project, a repository of stories from the vibrant, but often overlooked, rural queer community.

In the past 11 years, Garringer has interviewed 90 people ages 18 to 81 in more than 20 states. These stories have taken a wide variety of forms, including a traveling gallery exhibit and the Country Queers podcast, which Garringer and the editorial advisory team (hermelinda cortés, Sharon P. Holland and Lewis Raven Wallace) debuted in the summer of 2020.

This October, a collection of interviews from the Country Queers oral history project and podcast will be published in a book, Country Queers: A Love Letter (Haymarket Press). Rural queer people, Garringer writes, have “always made a way out of no way. We have always found one another hiding in plain sight. We have always resisted and lovingly pushed our communities forward … we have always been here, and we always will be.”

The book arrives at a critical time. In 2022, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) reported a “record breaking” 278 bills introduced in state legislatures targeting LGBTQ+ people, with a specific focus on transgender youth. In 2023, that figure doubled to more than 510. As of this writing, 527 bills have been introduced so far this year.

Barn Raiser spoke to Garringer about how their work has evolved over time and the process of documenting the rural queer experience in all its joy, pain and variety.

Your work dismantles the idea that there’s a singular rural experience or a monolithic queer experience. How diverse is the rural queer community?

When I started in 2013, I suspected that to be true based on where I was living and grew up—southeastern West Virginia. I was curious how people’s experiences vary across geography and regional differences, as well as other layers of identity like race, class, gender and religion.

Part of what we get in national depictions of rural spaces is a monolithic reality. It’s not true for the people I’ve met and interviewed and it’s not true for the people and the communities I’ve seen growing up and living in central Appalachia.

Why is it important to engage with and preserve the lived experience of queer elders in rural communities?

I have quite a bit of personal grief about how few rural queer elders I’ve known in my life. The AIDS epidemic stole a generation of elders from all of us, regardless of where we live. Part of what this project is pushing back on is this long-standing narrative within national queer conversations that getting out of rural places is the goal. That’s been a survival strategy for many people for a long time, and it has meant that those of us growing up in rural areas have so few queer elders and so few stories of people like us.

Queerness was silenced in places like southern West Virginia. There were queer people here—I know that now—but it wasn’t talked about or acknowledged.

Hindsight is 20/20, but if I were starting the project now, I would prioritize elders.

In the beginning, I’d interview whoever found me. A lot of my connections came through social media. Less than 10 out of the 90 people I’ve interviewed have been over the age of 65, and it makes me really sad.

There are many reasons why I haven’t been able to talk to as many elders. Some elders I’ve spoken to—in their 60s, 70s and 80s—have been hesitant to speak with me. One reason is because of the word “queer” in Country Queers. The people who are most likely to be uncomfortable with the word “queer” tend to be in the 60 and older demographic because the word was used in hateful ways towards them. Another is that their survival strategy for so many years has been to fly under the radar, to not be out about their identity, to not talk about it. I can’t quite articulate how powerful it is when I get to interview elders.

That’s an invitation then? Rural queer elders who want to talk should reach out to you?

Yes. Please, please.

In the book, at every step of the way, you seem to be having a conversation with yourself and others about what this project is about, who it depicts, what it’s for and whether you’re the right person to do this work. How have these conversations helped keep the project going and how have they changed?

My training for how to do this kind of work ethically came from being part of movement spaces like the Stay Project, Highlander Center, Project South and Southerners on New Ground. That’s meant that questions of power, ethics and consent have always been front of mind, and those questions shape my approach to documentary work and storytelling. There’s also an ongoing reality of extractive and damaging reporting about Appalachia, and for better or worse, resisting that has been an underlying theme for me. 

I think one needs to be constantly interrogating their approach. I want to create a collaborative dynamic as much as possible with the people who are sharing their stories with me.  

When the project began, it was much less complicated, I just wanted to meet people. Big questions emerged as I got deeper into this work, and I want to give those questions ongoing attention. 

What stands out to you about the places you’ve seen and visited?

The first thing that comes to mind are all these beautiful, quirky, particular places spread across rural landscapes. When I was living in eastern Kentucky, a friend of mine showed a reporter from New York City around their hometown, a place called Neon that has a little more than 500 people.

The reporter found it so depressing. It’s in the coalfields and the downtown is all boarded up, but it’s such a beautiful town to me, there’s all this history in the buildings. There’s something about loving and feeling comfortable in all these rural spaces.

I think about all the old, abandoned buildings I passed in the high desert of southern Colorado. I had a wonderful stay in a small town called Peñasco, New Mexico with some people I interviewed who run a circus arts center in an old adobe theater that had all these beautiful murals outside. It’s amazing how varied the landscapes and the feel of small towns are.

I remember driving through a small town in central Texas that was thriving! It wasn’t close to the cities and it didn’t seem to have an extractive industry tied to it. It had a coffee shop, and it was full of stores for small town people. I just love driving on a two-lane highway through a small town with burned CDs, the windows down, and passing through so many different landscapes while sitting with my thoughts. It’s the characters you’ll see, the weird graffiti that some bored country kid has spray painted on the side of a road sign. And Roswell, New Mexico—what a strange place.

What brings you the most satisfaction in your work?

I love getting to meet country queers and sitting with them in the places they call home: their houses, their porches, in a café in the small town where they grew up. I don’t do a lot of interviews anymore because I’ve gotten overwhelmed with how many I already have and what to do with them. But I love getting to listen endlessly to people tell stories about their lives. You get to know people so well by spending two hours interviewing them, and then eating meals with them, meeting their pets and visiting their house.

I love hearing from country queers that the work brings meaning to them and feelings of connection. At its core, that’s the goal of this project, and it’s stayed true from the very beginning.

You’ve talked and written about how the Country Queers oral history project was born out of frustration with the lack of accessible rural queer stories and histories. Are there parts of this work that you still find frustrating or challenging?

Absolutely. Once again, we’re talking about J.D. Vance and that damn book Hillbilly Elegy. I’m still so tired from the last time we were doing this.

I’m frustrated that there are so many rural people making powerful media, beautiful writing, incredible art and doing community organizing that almost never breaks through to a national audience. It’s exhausting. I say that as someone who’s been trying to produce media about places in rural Appalachia, not just through the Country Queers podcast but with Scalawag magazine and WMMT 88.7 FM, a nonprofit community radio station in Whitesburg, Kentucky where I was the Public Affairs Director for several years.   

I know a bunch of people who have been out here doing this work for a long time and still the national narrative—especially in an election year—markets a flattened, simplistic depiction of rural spaces that erases so many of us: queer and trans people, leftists and radical organizers, Black and Brown and Indigenous people and immigrant communities.

Who would you recommend reading or listening to?

There’s a wonderful community of Appalachian writers who are connected through the Appalachian Writers Workshop. There’s Read Appalachia and a West Virginia publication I love, Black by God, the state’s only Black newspaper, which Crystal Good, the writer who founded the paper, drives around and delivers personally all across the state with her own car.

There’s the media that comes out of Appalshop, Appalachian Media Institute and WMMT, where local mountain people are producing their own shows. There’s some cool prison radio coming out of WMMT too. There’s a lot of incredible southern organizing, too much to name here, but some of my favorites are the Stay Project, which is a central Appalachian youth network and the West Virginia Black Pride Foundation.

Rural communities face a multitude of challenges: affordable housing, accessible health care, climate disasters. But in the interviews you’ve conducted, so many people describe their deep connection to place and value of self-reliance. Would you talk about that fine line between resilience and vulnerability?

So many things come to mind. I default to talking about central Appalachia, not because it’s the main focus of the book or the project, but because it’s my home and the place that I know most intimately. In many ways, I think it’s a microcosm for a lot of issues happening in a lot of different rural places.

There have been two unfathomably devastating floods—one here in West Virginia, one in Eastern Kentucky—that were absolutely the impact of climate change and other extractive economies. I can’t describe how horrific climate disasters are in rural places.

In the past couple years, I’ve seen people and organizers who’ve been dealing with climate disaster recovery get burned out. We don’t get the support, infrastructure and resources that people in more populated and wealthy places receive. There is this tension between the lack of outside support that rural areas deserve and the long practice of strength, resilience and mutual aid (although it’s not called that) baked into a lot of rural communities by necessity.

For queer and trans people in rural spaces, these ongoing legislative attacks are intense and concentrated in predominantly rural states across the South, Midwest and West. There’s literally a battle to legislate transness out of existence in a lot of our homes. I remember when there was this wave of horrible legislation for trans youth happening in Texas in 2022. All over the Internet I would see people say, “Come to Minneapolis,” “Come to New York,” “Come to Boston,” “Come to California,” “We’ll take you in and provide you with the things you need.”

Most people can’t leave for all sorts of reasons, money being a huge one. But a lot of us also don’t want to leave our homes. If anything comes through in the book or podcast, I hope it’s that a lot of rural queer people love the places they grew up in or are based. People find so much joy and connection to place. So much of my life was spent outside with animals, with the land. Place is so prevalent in rural life—it does matter to a lot of us. All these challenges we face are not enough to make us want to leave the places where we feel deep connection and belonging.

What do you hope to achieve by changing the conversation about rural queerness and shifting awareness of where the front lines in the fight for fairer world are?

I want more support for rural organizers and rural queer and trans people. I want a media that prioritizes hearing from people who live ordinary rural lives, who serve as the experts of their own communities. I dread national election cycles, and this current one is a whole nightmare already.

There’s no worse time for the national flattening of rural spaces (such my home in Appalachia), into monolithic Trump country. Previously, in between those four-year cycles, we haven’t gotten a lot of media attention about our communities. There’s such brilliant organizing and strong community and creativity. We’re doing so much with so little.

Suzanne Pharr, who wrote the foreword to the book, has been organizing for decades. In an interview we did for the National Council of Elders’ podcast, she clearly laid out the ways a lot of national leftist organizing has abandoned rural spaces, providing a real opportunity for far-right organizing to take over. I think about that, too. We’re often so outnumbered it becomes really daunting if we aren’t investing more resources into rural communities and into rural organizing. I want more support, funding and attention for rural people who are doing radical, powerful work on a dime, and I hope for more solidarity and cross-geographic support. Not paying attention to rural spaces is part of what’s gotten us into the mess that we’re in.

Rae Garringer and Out in the Open are preparing to host their second Rural LGBTQ+ Audio Retreat. Applications are open through September 23rd.

Joe Engleman

Joe Engleman is a writer and communications consultant with a graduate degree in urban planning and policy. His interests include enhancing the solidarity economy, movements for climate and food justice and community wealth building.