Published in: May-June 2010 issue.
Out in the Country: Youth, Media, and Queer Visibility in Rural America
by Mary L. Gray
NYU Press. 279 pages, $22.
QUEER FOLKS have long migrated to cities. Paris, London, and Berlin had notorious agglomerations of “sodomites”—documented by police records since the 18th century. In America today, lesbians and gays constitute twelve to fifteen percent of the population in cities like Minneapolis, Atlanta, and San Francisco, and almost six percent of even the megalopolises of Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York. We try to escape closed-minded, homophobic, parochial people, but also gravitate to the artistic, cultural, and educational resources of cities.