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.
Historical and sociological work on GLBT people has also focused on cities, not just because of the demographic concentration but also because queer scholars prefer to live in urban centers with their intellectual, political, and archival wealth. Even anthropologist Mary Gray chose to live in Louisville, Kentucky, while doing research for Out in the Country and to have an academic home in the Women’s Studies Department.
While we have wonderfully rich histories of gay life in New York City, San Francisco, Chicago, and Los Angeles, there are few studies of rural areas and less densely populated states. These have not been completely untouched by researchers: there are excellent studies of GLBT people and politics in Oregon, the South, and the rural Midwest. However, Gray’s work, particularly with its focus on queer youth, is a welcome addition to this scholarship, and with good reason it was awarded the 2009 Ruth Benedict Prize by the American Anthropological Association for outstanding monograph.
Gray opens by criticizing the “metronormativity” of GLBT scholarship. She rightly points out that gay people, even scholars, tend to look down on rural people, including the gay ones, assuming they are too hopelessly closeted or timid to escape the countryside. It is also easy to assume that economic factors alone limit their ability to escape to the utopian freedom of the city. Migrating to the city, therefore, is too easily mapped onto a developmental and political narrative of self-enlightenment, political liberation, and sexual freedom. Gray challenges queer urban chauvinism in a number of ways.
Gray closely analyzes a handful of individuals, gay groups, and political flashpoints, rather than amalgamating sociological data points. This makes for a host of gripping narratives. We meet a sixty-year-old mother who, inspired by her lesbian daughter, struggles to promote tolerance of LGB people in her rural town. There are queer, punk, and transgender youths interfacing on the Internet, performing at concerts, and camping it up at Wal-Mart. We meet queer youths and their adult mentors trying to lobby a Kentucky state representative to support gay and transgender rights.
Unfortunately, most of these stories end on a sour note of disappointment, rejection, or homophobic aggression. This only makes these individuals’ efforts more heroic. Despite the constraints, these people can have a genuine affection for their families, their community, and their rural homeland. Connecting with gay peers—whether on the Net or in impromptu, transient gay hot spots—is a joy for them and a pleasure to witness. Most of them do not have the economic means to escape to the city, and some may not want to. But they are marvelously resilient and adaptable to the racial, religious, and class constraints of their families and towns. Some of the adolescents are in glass closets—politely maintaining the open secret of their sexuality in towns where everyone knows everyone else’s business. Discretion may be demanded by the family and community, but these kids find interstices where they can be fabulous. Of course, there must be some, perhaps many, young people who never dare expose themselves at all, and Gray cannot access them. Nor does she explore the long-term toll of identity self-policing for the discreetly out. But then, even gay ghetto denizens have to be watchful.
The Internet is critical for Gray’s young informants—as it is for almost all youth in America. Internet coming-out stories and chat sites provide more diversity and realness, allowing youths to shape their sexual and gender identity, find community, hook up, and feel connected to GLBT people in a neighboring town or around the globe.
Out in the Country is a reworked dissertation, so it tends to get bogged down in academic jargon and sometimes gratuitous displays of erudition. The narrative about the Wal-Mart drag outings, for example, is condensed into a couple of paragraphs sandwiched between pages of theorizing from Jürgen Habermas and about “boundary publics.” It is as if Gray did not trust her informants to adequately explain their activities for the urban scholar.
Her conclusion is a rallying, progressive call for more support for rural queer youths. This does not mean imposing an urban model of gay identity and individual rights, but legitimizing rural youths’ values of family and community. The struggle for gay rights, Gray argues, must also envision a broader agenda of gender, class, and racial rights. Despite her supportive and optimistic approach to informants, Gray’s epilogue provides a sobering reminder of their challenges. It seems that most of her informants, a few years later, have become alienated from the gay groups that they had founded and are discouraged about gay organizing and lobbying. Interpersonal drama and activist burnout can be toxic even to an urban queer organization, but they can be particularly devastating when there is barely the critical mass to maintain one group in town. But if my experience with campus gay groups is a guide, new queer energy, creativity, and zeal always rise up from youths emboldened to manifest their identity and claim their rights, defiantly and joyfully.
Vernon Rosario is a child and adolescent psychiatrist in Los Angeles, and the author of Homosexuality and Science: A Guide to the Debates.
