COUNTRY QUEERS

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.