
The Country Queers podcast features oral history interviews with rural and small-town LGBTQIA+ folks in the U.S. Season One uplifts often unheard stories of rural queer experiences across intersecting layers of identity including race, class, gender identity, age, religion, and occupation. This podcast aims to complicate our collective ideas about rural spaces and queer communities. Subscribe now to get weekly episodes in your feed starting June 30, 2020!

Meet The Editorial Dream Team! – Country Queers
This episode features audio from a webinar hosted by the Women's and Gender-Non-Conforming Center at Berea College in October 2020 as a part of their virtual pride series. In it, Rae Garringer is joined by the Editorial Dream Team: Sharon P. Holland, Hermelinda Cortés, and Lewis Raven Wallace. We talk about how we came into story-telling and narrative-shifting work, who we are accountable to in this work, and how we think about and engage with the power dynamics at play in this work. Season 2 will be dropping later in 2021, so in the meantime we'll be bringing you some bonus episodes throughout the winter and into the spring. If this episode is too in the weeds for you, about behind-the-scenes details of how our team thinks about this work, rest assured: more rural queer and trans stories are coming your way soon, including an episode about queer and trans SHEPHERDS!!! Stay warm and queer out there friends! P.S. Learn more about this project at http://www.countryqueers.com. And, become a sustaining supporter of Country Queers on Patreon to help us pay more folks for the production of our 2nd Season!
Support BIPOC queer & trans led land & wellness projects:
(List updated weekly)
- Maroon Grove Freedom Farm is located in so called Waverly, VA / Nottoway territory, on Black liberated land that was bought with reparations. The farm will provide plant medicine and food as medicine to queer and trans BIPOC communities. The farm is collecting ongoing reparations and donations to make repairs and updates to create a thriving community for QTBIPOC:
Venmo: @jas-battle
CashApp: $jasbattle
PayPal: paypal.me/jasbattle
- Support Jennie & Delaney’s goal for stable housing in rural Tennessee! Jennie is a Black, vegan, agender Aries mom of a 2-and-a-half year old agender Scorpio child. In Jennie’s words: “I’d like to build us a tiny home so that we’ll have stability, can move when we need to travel, eat, sleep & wash comfortably, and be active and present in community.”
- Black Soil: Our Better Nature works to reconnect Black Kentuckians to their heritage and legacy in agriculture. They represent over 60 Kentucky based Black farmers, culinary artists, value added product makers, artists/makers & are raising funds to match a foundation’s donation.
- FrontLine Farming is a Denver, CO based Womxn & POC-led grassroots nonprofit that focuses on building food sovereignty & farmer liberation. FLF works from an asset-based perspective to “feed our communities with healthy, affordable produce grown from our 5 acres of land, educate our constituents, create equitable policies, and honor the land and our ancestors.” In response to COVID-19, FLF started an initiative called Project Protect Food Systems that seeks to support immigrant food workers across the nation by raising funds to provide PPE, proposing and advocating for equitable policy action, raising awareness of Food Worker strengths and plights, and illuminating Food Workers contributions to our society.
- Black Appalachian Young & Rising – is a Black-led program of the STAY Project. STAY (which stands for Stay Together Appalachian Youth) is a central Appalachian regional network of youth 14-30 working to create sustainable, equitable communities where young folks can and want to stay!
- Disability Justice Work at the People’s Hub – a nonprofit that offers live, interactive trainings and workshops to build community power and support grassroots work.
- Healing & Housing for Black Womxn after Bail – the RESIST Campaign is a vision led by formerly incarcerated Black womxn. Their goal is to ethically find and steward Indigenous land, to build a green, sustainable nest – ultimately creating a space for formerly incarcerated Black womxn – who include caregivers, sex workers, and mothers – to hold, nurture, and heal themselves and their sisters in experience & struggle
- Support Miguel Mendías in reclaiming his family’s 4th generation Mexican-American adobe home in the high desert of Marfa, TX (unceded Jumano-Apache territory). Miguel is a queer, trans, artist and activist of Czech, Basque, and Raramúri Tarahumara (indigenous Mexican) descent. The house, which belonged to his great-grandmother, was threatened with public auction by the county and is in a remote part of Texas that has experienced rapid gentrification.
- Reunion: Family & Black Land Stewardship Melisse Watson is a Black indigenous queer non binary artist from Tkaronto, Dish with One Spoon wampum territory. They are raising money to buy land in Georgia where their birth father’s family has lived for generations – for the purposes of land regeneration, building community with Black and Indigenous farmers and earth workers, working towards land sovereignty, and protecting and restoring the land, reclaiming it from the state. If you’d like to support by offering building materials or support, equipment and more email melissewatson@gmail.com
- My Sistahs House is a grassroots, direct services and advocacy organization that was founded in 2016 by two trans women of color who sought to bridge a gap in services for trans and queer people of color in Memphis, TN. They currently have a 6 bedroom house that serves as emergency housing for TGNC people of color, and they are fundraising to build 20 tiny homes for trans women – expanding on their housing security work!
- Navajo Nation Covid-19 Relief Fund
- White Mountain Apache Tribe’s Covid-19 Relief Fund
- Where Freedom Grows support Carlin Rushing – a Black queer southern organizer – in buying back a house her family lost to white banks nearly 50 years ago, that sits on land her family has stewarded for generations in the Piedmont of North Carolina.
- Build a Black led regenerative Farm Kiley is a Black queer woman who is fundraising to start a farm on the west coast “where Queer folx can get their hands in the dirt, where our communities can thrive, laugh, and be fed.”
Help sustain this rural-queer-led central-Appalachian-based project on Patreon!
Production Team


Editorial Advisory Dream Team



Music
Our theme song was written & performed on banjo by the sweetest singing country queer Sam Gleaves – who was one of the first people to share his story with this project in 2013! Pedal steel versions of the song were performed by Rebecca Branson Jones. Additional music on acoustic and electric guitar was written and performed by Tommie Anderson.
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