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COUNTRY QUEERS

A LOVE LETTER

Fans of the popular podcast of the same name will yeehaw with joy over this collection.

Hidden life stories buried in small towns across America.

Oral historian and audio producer Garringer has spent a decade collecting stories and photos of rural queer folks around America. Themself a country queer, they felt as if the rural LBGTQ+ community had very little representation in comparison to those living in big cities. On a mission to cultivate and collect interviews with country queers, Garringer has threaded every session with fondness and care so that the reader is personally affected by each of them. The interviewees, young and old, hail from Appalachia to Texas to Massachusetts, offering their neighborly wisdom. You can imagine rocking chairs, iced tea, and cicadas while Garringer records. (They do a podcast with the same title.) Questions that they frequently ask: What is the difference between a city queer and a country queer? Does a smaller queer population equal a lesser community? What is the largest issue facing country queers today? With the political climate, is it safe? Why do you think there is little to no representation of rural queer people? These are hard questions with no easy answers, but Garringer jubilantly proclaims to the world, Hey! We’re here! Always have been and always will be! The photos, taken by the author and the interviewees, give this work the feel of a homemade, handcrafted scrapbook, with images of catfish, goats, lawn mowers, ceramic cows, actual cows, and lots of beautiful scenery enlivening the pages. Near the end of most interviews, Garringer asks their subjects where they are happiest—the question behind the question being “Is there anywhere else you’d rather be?” Most people laugh and respond with some version of “I’m happiest just being right here”—readers can almost feel the room brighten with these assertions of pride and place. This is indeed the love letter of the subtitle: to the country, to queer friends and neighbors, to the small pieces of life. Slow down and flip through this uplifting, hand-threaded quilt of lives.

Fans of the popular podcast of the same name will yeehaw with joy over this collection.

Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2024

ISBN: 9798888902486

Page Count: 208

Publisher: Haymarket Books

Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024

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A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979

ISBN: 0061965588

Page Count: 772

Publisher: Harper & Row

Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979

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BEYOND THE GENDER BINARY

From the Pocket Change Collective series

A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.

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Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.

The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.

A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)

Pub Date: June 2, 2020

ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5

Page Count: 64

Publisher: Penguin Workshop

Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020

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