Country Queers: A Love Letter
After years as a DIY, minimally funded, community-based oral history project, the work now takes a new form in Country Queers: A Love Letter-a book of full-color photos and interviews with rural folks from Mississippi to New Mexico and beyond, with Garringer's account as traveler and interviewer woven through the pages. In these intimate conversations, we see how queerness--shaped, as all things are, by race, class, gender, and more--moves in rural and small-town spaces, spotlighting how country queers make sense of their lives through reflections on land, home, community, and belonging. While media-driven myths suggest that big cities are the only places queer folks can find love and community, Country Queers resists that trope by centering rural queer and trans stories of the joys, challenges, monotony, and nuances of their lives, in their own words.
Earn by promoting books
Earn money by sharing your favorite books through our Affiliate program.
Become an affiliate
"'We are everywhere.' You've heard it said, and with Country Queers Rae Garringer makes it plain. This book is such a gift to rural queer folks. It renders us visible. Renders our past and present experiences, questions, and struggles to navigate complicated feelings about people and place visible. More broadly, Country Queers reminds us all that even in the smallest places, in the 'reddest' states, there have always been queer people fighting for our collective liberation. They demand our solidarity. They, and this book, demand our close attention because they have so much to teach us."
--Neema Avashia, author of Another Appalachia: Coming Up Queer and Indian in a Mountain Place "With the art of a storyteller Rae Garringer expands our understanding of queer lives and shows that our home places are everywhere we want them to be."
--Barbara Smith, author of The Truth That Never Hurts: Writings on Race, Gender, and Freedom "Rae Garringer's work speaks directly to the all-too-common experience of loving a place that doesn't always love you back. Country Queers is a map of queer resilience and placemaking. It serves as an artifact for the next generations of queer misfits making sense of the complex spaces we call home."
--Ashby Combahee, cofounder of Georgia Dusk: a southern liberation oral history project, and librarian and archivist at Highlander Research and Education Center "For over eleven years, writer and oral historian Rae Garringer has been thoughtfully listening to and documenting the experiences of queer people living in rural America, and now they have gathered these remarkable stories to share with readers. What a gift! Country Queers is a tender, fierce, and inspiring love letter to a population that is too often made invisible. Garringer serves as a generous and attentive guide, shining a light on stories of queer joy, courage, and fierce resistance. An important and necessary book, and a beautiful triumph."
--Carter Sickels, author of The Prettiest Star
--hermelinda cortés, executive director of ReFrame "On page after page, readers meet charismatic country queers whose words are joined with Garringer's travelogue--a road trip story propelled by gnawing queer love for country and a wish to (peripatetically) 'return home.' This is queer history at its best, making a play on oral history's superpower to complicate a narrative that has long gone undiscerned, undetected, and oversimplified. Garringer reminds us that country queers 'have always made a way out of no way' and tells us how."
--Suzanne Snider, founder/director of Oral History Summer School "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."
--Kirkus Reviews
