Out in the Country

Youth, Media, and Queer Visibility in Rural America

Mary L. Gray

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780814732205
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: LGBT Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Winner of the 2009 Ruth Benedict Prize for Outstanding Monograph from the Society of Lesbian and Gay Anthropologists

Winner of the 2010 Distinguished Book Award from the American Sociological Association, Sociology of Sexualities Section

Winner of the 2010 Congress Inaugural Qualitative Inquiry Book Award Honorable Mention

From Wal-Mart drag parties to renegade Homemaker's Clubs, Out in the Country offers an unprecedented contemporary account of the lives of today's rural queer youth. Mary L. Gray maps out the experiences of young people living in small towns across rural Kentucky and along its desolate Appalachian borders, providing a fascinating and often surprising look at the contours of gay life beyond the big city. Gray illustrates that, against a backdrop of an increasingly impoverished and privatized rural America, LGBT youth and their allies visibly—and often vibrantly—work the boundaries of the public spaces available to them, whether in their high schools, public libraries, town hall meetings, churches, or through websites. This important book shows that, in addition to the spaces of Main Street, rural LGBT youth explore and carve out online spaces to fashion their emerging queer identities. Their triumphs and travails defy clear distinctions often drawn between online and offline experiences of identity, fundamentally redefining our understanding of the term 'queer visibility' and its political stakes. Gray combines ethnographic insight with incisive cultural critique, engaging with some of the biggest issues facing both queer studies and media scholarship. Out in the Country is a timely and groundbreaking study of sexuality and gender, new media, youth culture, and the meaning of identity and social movements in a digital age.

1

Introduction

There Are No Queers Here

I snaked my way through I-64 traffic, past two car wrecks and several police speed traps to reach Frankfort, Kentucky, by 8:20 that icy February morning in 2002. A regional field organizer from the Kentucky Fairness Alliance (KFA), a statewide lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) advocacy organization, had arranged for me to lobby with a dozen young people and four adults from Berea, a Central Kentucky town of 9,800 people, and I was running almost a half-hour late. I quickly found my fellow advocates crowded around a table in the Kentucky State Capitol’s smoky basement cafeteria. They stood out among the gray-haired white men in dark-blue suits who filled the low-ceilinged, fluorescent-lit room silently chain-smoking as they read their morning papers.

The all-white group from Berea sat tightly packed together with their backpacks and winter coats piled on the floor around their feet. An even mixture of young men and women wore Berea College or Berea High sweatshirts. The four adult allies affiliated with the Berea chapter of Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG) had the tired-but-supportive faces of elders trying to keep up with their younger counterparts’ exuberance. As I walked toward them, a tall man in his early fifties with a neatly trimmed salt-and-pepper beard stood up, smiled, and said in a resonating baritone, “You must be Mary.” He held out both his hands to shake mine as the youth seated around him also smiled, waved up at me from their seats, and made room for me to squeeze in among them. The excited pitch of the discussion about lobbying strategy and talking points suggested that they were well into a second round of coffee.

After apologizing for being late, I introduced myself, sat down, and asked them if this was the first time they had lobbied together. Two of the younger members of the group smiled widely and said “no,” then launched into the following story. The year before, in 2001, a small group of the same young people from Berea College, a private Christian school, met with their state house representative, Lonnie Napier, during Religious Leaders Lobby Day. The KFA and progressive clergy involved in KFA’s Religious Organizing Project co-sponsored the event to educate lawmakers about LGBT issues in the state. “None of us had ever met a government representative before,” said Jeremy, a Berea College senior. “I know Napier’s family owns a lot of property around town, but I’d never met him in person.” The Berea students certainly did not expect their meeting with a local government representative to become a media spectacle.

Jeremy and his friend Seth broke out in laughter as they recounted their barbed exchanges with Representative Napier. “He let me and a couple other guys into his office and then started throwing Bible quotes at us, saying we’d been badly influenced by TV and the Internet. It was weird. He just went off. Then, he tells us he doesn’t have to be educated about LGBT issues because there aren’t any gays living in Berea!” Napier’s claim—professed to two of his gay-identifying constituents—floored Jeremy and Seth. More than 15 people regularly attended the Berea LGBT student group’s monthly meetings and many more belonged to its online discussion list. “Berea’s got to be the gayest place in Kentucky, outside of Louisville and Lexington!” Seth asserted before returning to the topic of last year’s lobbying efforts. Apparently Napier carried the conversation with the Berea students out onto the State Capitol building’s steps in range of a local camera crew and reporter covering the 2001 Lobby Day event. The students said that the next day’s evening news featured images of Napier shaking his finger in the face of a white young man clutching his backpack straps and looking bewildered as Napier unleashed his fire-and-brimstone condemnations of the gay lifestyle.

LGBT Lobby Day events are quintessential examples of how a politics of visibility can work as a political force in public life. Private citizens coalesce as a community of LGBT people at these events to demonstrate their strength in numbers. Together, they seek to effect change through a public call for social recognition and equal representation. I was intimately familiar with the Berea students’ strategies because I was once a queer-youth activist. I moved to San Francisco after college and joined a cadre of dynamic youth leaders, all in our late teens and early twenties, drawn as much to the city’s politics as its social scene in the mid-1990s. A range of not-for-profit youth advocacy organizations, like San Francisco’s Stop AIDS Project and the Lavender Youth Recreation and Information Center, provided meeting space and other raw materials for our organizing, but a tight circle of queer-youth activists led the effort to craft and run rallies like California’s first LGBT Youth Lobby Day, held January 3, 1996, on Sacramento’s State Capitol building steps and in its rotunda.

Hundreds of youth activists from around California bused in or drove to the Capitol for that first Lobby Day to advocate for the passage of what would become, four years later, Assembly Bill 537, a law to protect K-12 students from harassment based on sexual orientation and gender identity.¹ A few of the event’s organizers, myself included, hailed from small towns, transplants from California’s mountain ranges and farming communities. Others grew up in the rural corners of Midwestern and Southern “flyover” states that many city dwellers cannot find on a map. The expectations of conformity and the lack of civic engagement (unless one counts church picnics) that we associated with our upbringings made the idea of publicly reveling in a queer sense of difference (“Let your freak flag fly!”) almost unimaginable. Caught up in the excitement of that first Youth Lobby Day, and as only young activists can sometimes believe, we felt we could accomplish anything through these public demonstrations of defiant visibility and collective action.

But the Berea students’ Lobby Day experience, which I will return to in the next chapter, demonstrates the dilemmas rural young people face when they rely on similar strategies of visibility and assertions of difference deployed by their urban peers. Unlike urban gay and lesbian communities able to mobilize significant numbers of people and dollars to generate visibility, rural youth and their allies live and work in communities and legislative districts that prioritize solidarity, rely on familiarity, and lack the public or private resources to underwrite sustained, visible dissent to assert queer difference. These are also places where media representations of LGBT people outpace the tangible presence of locally organized constituencies able to or invested in prioritizing queer recognition.

This book addresses how young people in the rural United States who lay claim to LGBT identities confront the politics of gay visibility, expectations, and constraints that define and shape the recognition of LGBT-identifying people in popular culture and public life. I take an interdisciplinary approach to examine how rural queer and LGBT-identifying youth, contrary to popular narratives of escape to urban oases, stand their ground to name their desires and flesh out their local meaning. I take stock of the strategies they use to create belonging and visibility in communities where they are not only a distinct minority but also popularly represented as out of place. To do so, they must lean on the structures of rural life, particularly the dynamics of class, gender, race, and location. In equal measure, they also use mainstream and new media representations to piece together what counts as an “authentic” LGBT identity and integrate these depictions of “realness” into rural settings. I argue that LGBT-identifying youth and their allies use their status as “familiar locals” as well as tenuous access to each other, public spaces, and media-circulated representations of LGBT identities to rework the boundaries of public recognition and local belonging. They rally these resources not to combat isolation from their senses of self, but to weather the demands a politics of gay visibility poses outside of cities. Along the way, their experiences attenuate claims that political strategies of gay visibility and recognition have brought us universally to the brink of a “post-gay” moment.

I push against assuming that a politics of visibility can lead to what sociologist Steven Seidman characterizes as life “beyond the closet” because, as scholar Eve Sedgwick among others notes, visibility operates as a binary: in order for someone to be visible, to “come out,” there must always be a closet someplace where others clamor or struggle to get out.² The rural United States, as I will argue below, operates as America’s perennial, tacitly taken-for-granted closet. Examining the assumptions that tether LGBT identities to cities and closets to rural communities opens the door to critique the privileging of some queer identities over others that the politics of gay visibility can produce.

I bring together gay and lesbian studies of community and identity, social theories of public spaces, and studies of media reception, particularly the role of new media in everyday life, to frame how sociality, location, and media shape the visibility of LGBT-identifying young people living in rural areas of Kentucky and along its borders. With the help of these academic conversations, refracted through the lens of ethnography—the qualitative study of research participants’ interactions and perspectives—I set the stage for readers to consider how strategies of visibility that currently drive mainstream gay and lesbian social movements in the United States work out in the country. More broadly, I lay the groundwork to make the case that this ethnographic study of rural LGBT-identifying and questioning youth contributes to larger debates regarding young people’s contemporary experiences of sexual and gender identity and the mediation of public engagement in a digital era.

Never Met a Stranger

Small-town life, so the story goes, engenders a kind of “never met a stranger” friendliness—a popular Southern euphemism I heard often during my time out in the country. It is a pervasive ethos, what cultural theorist Raymond Williams might have called a “structure of feeling,” that makes it easy to presume you have known the person ahead of you in the grocery store checkout lane all your life.³ This imagined, affable familiarity animates both the repulsion and fascination many urbanites—particularly queer-identifying ones—feel toward the rural. They might ask, why would any self-respecting lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender person forego the expansive safe havens of urban enclaves like the Castro in San Francisco, Boystown in Chicago, the Village in Manhattan, Brooklyn’s Park Slope, Florida’s Key West and Miami, and West Hollywood in Los Angeles for the suffocating myopia of the sticks?

At the heart of the antipathy between familiarity and queerness is the belief that discovering a sense of one’s queer self requires three things: the privacy to explore one’s queer differences beyond the watchful eyes of those who presume to know everything about one; a visible community able to recognize and return one’s queer gaze; and the safe space to express queer difference without fear of retribution. These conditions considered pivotal to reaching that last stage of identity development called “coming out” are presumed to be part of a city’s fabric (even if, at times, threadbare) while veritably absent out in the country. Even if one questions the availability or existence of these conditions to most urban dwellers, without question rural youth negotiate queer desires and embodiments under different logistical realities.

Unlike their urban and suburban peers, young people living between the metropoles of San Francisco, Chicago, and Manhattan face vastly different access to agencies serving lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender-identifying youth. Many also live beyond the reach of publicly funded LGBT health programs, community-based support agencies, and visible constituencies able to finance, nurture, and augment such services.⁴ The dearth of capital and community-based resources also means that gatekeepers, like Berea’s Representative Lonnie Napier, can make all the difference. Powerful individuals wield a disproportionate amount of power in setting local agendas and therefore the conditions for LGBT visibility. This leaves little recourse or incentive to risk one’s local acceptance by registering dissent. Age, obligations to family, and limited economic opportunities left the rural youth I met with little choice in the matter but to stay put and make do.

But the ubiquitous presumption that only urban centers can properly foster the kinds of visibility considered essential to LGBT identities and community organizing drove me to ask: What are the queer sexual and gender possibilities in places where the operative assumption is that one has never met a stranger? If access to a visible community of sexual and gender difference is central to the story of urban queer cultural formation, how do the expectations and experiences of prosaic familiarity, central to the organization of rural communities, produce and articulate queerness differently? Where, when, and how do rural youth who seek support for their sense of gender or sexual difference acquire a vocabulary for specifically LGBT identities? And, with the rapid but unequal incorporation of new information technologies into the lives of rural youth and their support agencies, what difference does the Internet’s increasing presence—and presumed ubiquity—make to youth negotiating the politics of LGBT visibility in small towns across Kentucky and its rural Appalachian borders?

Epistemologies of LGBT Visibility: Gay and Lesbian Studies of Community and Identity

The contemporary story of gay identity formation in the United States is that it started in (and could not have happened without) a city. Historian John D’Emilio’s now classic argument posited that capitalism’s mobilizing forces reorganized same-sex desire into a visible and viable social identity. Masses of young, single individuals discovered new erotic as well as economic opportunities as they migrated from farms to cities at the turn of the 19th century, crescendoing in the post–World War II era.⁵ D’Emilio argued that the anonymity of U.S. cities provided same-sex desiring people with networks of connection. These new “homophile movements,” as they were called, defied medical discourses that defined same-sex desires as an individual pathological defect and transformed homosexuality into a collective identity.⁶ Historians like George Chauncey in his book Gay New York, for example, added greater nuance to this argument, noting that the racially and class-stratified sexual circuits of gay life in New York City organized more through habits or patterns of congregation than through anonymity.⁷ Nonetheless, the cityscape took center stage as the key site for the rise of gay and lesbian identity and community formation.

Out of this amassing of desire came a visible political movement inspired by the strategies of the new social movements for civil and women’s rights that took root in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s.⁸ Through a range of political and social strategies, not the least of which was savvy use of mainstream and alternative media, gay- and lesbian-identifying activists of this era demanded legitimacy.⁹ Urban chapters of activist organizations like the Gay Liberation Front and later the Gay Activists Alliance fought nationally on projects ranging from the repeal of sodomy laws that entrapped anyone seen to traffic in the “perversion” of “unnatural” sexual acts to reforms of the American Psychiatric Association’s classification of homosexuality as a mental illness. While some activists, certainly radical lesbian feminists, sought broader social revolution through liberation from the confines of heterosexuality, others fought for recognition and validation of gay and lesbian people to live and love just like everyone else.¹⁰ These “wars of position” would later be characterized as a struggle between liberationist and assimilationist politics.¹¹ Both positions, however, work from an assumption that visibility and political dissent operate the same way across space and time and are readily available and universally valued no matter where one might live. Cities are imagined to draw out and bind together the nameless throngs of same-sex desiring and gender-variant people to build visibility and political power. This particular history of gay and lesbian visibility positions the city’s capacities to make space for queer difference and consolidate capital as necessary precursors to modern lesbian and gay identity formation.

D’Emilio and other social constructivist scholars, building on earlier feminist critiques, meant to challenge biological assumptions about sexuality and gender roles, and open them to cultural inquiry.¹² But as sociologist Steven Seidman observed, “As much as these [social construction studies of gay and lesbian community formation] challenged essentialist or universalistic understandings of homosexuality, they contributed to a politics of the making of the homosexual minority” (Seidman 1996, 9). The political gains of gay and lesbian organizing made in the 1970s and 1980s buoyed U.S. scholars, particularly gay- and lesbian-identifying ones, to legitimate homosexuality as an object of historical and cross-cultural social formation rather than an individual pathological defect.

Community studies expanded cultural and historical understandings of gay and lesbian urban enclaves and established gay and lesbian studies as legitimate fields of study in the social sciences and the humanities.¹³ Kath Weston, in her exhaustive 1993 review of the anthropological literature resulting from th...