Extended Postscript

I’ve long been a fan of hermelinda cortés’s sharp analysis and dedication to rural people, since I first met her in the summer of 2013 at a Southerners On New Ground (SONG) gathering in east Tennessee. hermelinda was SONG’s communication director at the time, and since 2020 she has been a member of the Country Queers advisory team. In fall 2023, the two of us had a conversation reflecting on the project, its work in the world, and its future. This is an extended version of the postscript in the book.

hermelinda 

Part of what so many of us face is isolation and the SONG antidote to isolation has always been desire. Our desire is actually the reason, as queer folks, that we are kept from each other, and why we face violence. So I want to hear from you: what role did desire play in the beginning of the project? And then I want to know how it kind of evolved. Not just the arc of the frustrations, but the arc of the desire as well. 

Rae 

Well, one thing I'll just say up front is that thinking about the strategic stuff, or the zoomed-out-arc stuff, is really not my strength. It's not what my brain does. How I write is how I think is how I walk in the woods. I stop and pick up a lot of details along the way.

hermelinda

But to me that is the arc, it's not necessarily linear, right? Because desire can be wandering. And my orientation to the question of desire is really the embodiment of feeling in relationship to the emotionality of moving through the project.

Rae

Well, I can definitely talk about emotions. Part of why it’s hard for me to answer questions about my vision in the beginning is because I was like, This is an idea. I wonder if it’ll work. I wasn’t imagining what it would become, or where it would go. But the initial desire was to connect with other rural queer people and to learn from them. It was born out of that isolation.  

Moving home was the best choice I ever made in many ways, but I also quickly realized it wasn’t gonna work for all my queer friends to be in New York or Austin. So, I really wanted to know how other people were making it work. And then my Gemini side was also like, Well, what's it like in your place? And what's it like in your place? And what's it like inside different experiences? But at the beginning, I really just wanted to meet people, and listen, and learn.

hermelinda 

So, around the time you were embarking on that first interview collection trip (2014) was when we were doing this small town summit at SONG, and the “Small Town Cross Roads” report came out of that. And the precursor to that report and that summit had been four or five state listening tours to figure out what SONG’s campaign focus was going to be next. Four of us were brought on to do listening tours across Alabama, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Virginia. I interviewed five hundred people in Virginia. And other people interviewed people in those other states. And in a very similar way to your process, we cast the net wide for whoever would talk to us. I got in a car with no money and drove around for a very concentrated period of time talking to strangers.

People were telling me all kinds of things that I felt like I didn't deserve to know. And I was a baby, a fucking baby, in my early twenties. I had these elders talking to me about really horrific things, young people talking to me about really horrific things, and I went through this secondary trauma process of what do I do with all of this? But one of the themes that emerged was that the small town and country people we talked to in all these places had more in common with each other across states than they did with people in urban places in their own states.

One thing that was different is because of who SONG is, we were connected to a wider demographic of folks. But, we faced a similar gap in reaching men of color. When we went into the assessment phase, I started pulling out insights like, these elders are not here because of the AIDS crisis. And you could start to see some of the profound structural gaps, where some of it has to do with whatever relationships existed, but some of it is about that macro political social structure. We’ve talked about how that has shown up within the collection of interviews you’ve gathered for Country Queers too.

And you can see as the project goes on, there's this weight, this pressure, that emerges, even if it's not explicit. Because other people start to project their desires and needs onto it. There is an inherent tension there between other people’s desires and what they want out of the project, and the meandering that you are holding around how you make it work. You know what I mean?

Rae 

I do. 

hermelinda 

Well, tell me how you've held that, because I think that's one of the things that happens to people who found projects. And as someone who is in leadership, even if that's not a word that you identify with, there is a responsibility in figuring out how to take the resources that you have—including what's in your mind, your brain, your skills—and steward the requests that are coming your way. So I want to hear a little bit more about how that has evolved, more about the influences and values that got you to pause and shift direction at various points. How much of that was internal versus pressure from the community that formed around the podcast?

Rae

Well, that 2014 road trip was a turning point, because I spent a month in my car with a flip phone and a paper map, staying with complete strangers in parts of the country where I barely knew anyone. Then I came back with thirty interviews and was like, Whoa. I have no idea what to do with all this. People told me a lot. And I very quickly realized there's a huge responsibility in this work. People had trusted me with stories that were really vulnerable, really personal, and very… sacred, and I—

hermelinda

Did you expect that?

Rae

No. No. I still do interviews and think why are people trusting me with this? And some of that is because I don't have a lot of trust in the media broadly, so I almost feel protective of people when they trust me. But no, I was not expecting the depth of vulnerability, or for people who I’d just met that day to open up to me in that way. And also people's enthusiasm about the project surprised me. I was like, This is a little idea, we’ll see if it works. And people were like, Yes! Please come to Texas! You know?

And then, coming home, and going back to work in public schools where I couldn't be out at work, and commuting three hours a day while also trying to build this project that was about us finding and seeing each other. I was like, This isn't working. I really need support. I need to learn from people who know how to do this work. I have no idea what to do with all of these stories. It's gonna take me 700 hours to transcribe them. I don’t know how to build a website. 

So that led me to grad school where I thought I would get this mentorship and training in how to do this work, and instead I found it really, really, really frustrating. Having been a part of The STAY Project for many years, and having been through a BAM [Building A Movement] Institute facilitated by Steph G. [Guilloud] and Project South, and having been to a couple SONG gatherings, and also having spent years working with youth in crisis in an advocacy and support role where a big part of my job was developing trust and a safe place for young people to just talk about what was happening in their lives—I showed up at grad school and we were doing power dynamics 101, and I was like, Wait, this is where we start in grad school? Are you fucking kidding me? You know what I mean? 

We spent the first whole year critiquing the history of folklore in the US for almost exclusively being made up of white academics from the Northeast who studied southern Black communities, Indigenous communities, and poor white mountain people in Appalachia. We critique this for a year, but then many of the people I met in the field of Folklore seemed to be replicating that pattern of studying a community they have no personal connection to. So, I was quickly like, I'm not convinced academia has this figured out, at all. A lot of it felt very weird and extractive to me, and this distance between the researcher and “the subject” is not what I wanted to replicate. But the two best parts of grad school were taking a hands-on audio editing class, which gave me some tangible skills, and getting to work with Sharon Patricia Holland. I was like, theory is not my thing, but you are someone that I want to learn from, and I want to think with. And she really took me in, in all sorts of ways. Literally into her home, into her life, into her family. And so of course, having my most important mentor in grad school be a critical race theorist, a queer theorist, a feminist theorist, that absolutely was a turning point for me in this work. 

It’s not that I wasn’t thinking about race and intersectionality at the beginning of the project. But I don't think I knew how—this is kind of a ridiculous statement—-I didn’t know how to do it. You know what I mean? I didn't have the connections. I didn't even know what questions I needed to be asking. I hadn’t done enough study. 

Before grad school, I actually remember being at a SONG gathering at the Penn Center in South Carolina, probably in late 2014 or early 2015. And I had a really brief conversation with Suzanne Pharr that she probably doesn't remember, but I remember vividly. She asked me: Who are you accountable to? And how are you accountable to people of color? And I was like, cool, got it, noted, right? Like it's still burnt into my head almost ten years later. 

So, I think there was definitely an internal shift after the first two years, when I realized, Oh, the people who are gonna self-select for this project are gonna be white people. So if I don't want that to be the whole collection, I need to make some explicit asks, I need to build some different relationships, and be very intentional.

I think the podcast, and the external pressures it brought from other people’s desires, is a whole other chapter.

hermelinda

But there was a turning point. And it was really interesting to watch as the popularity grew. You could see the growth of this scrappy DIY project that was a person's idea as it caught fire. And this is what happens with the best ideas—they suddenly become not just your own. They're everybody's. You start to feel that responsibility, not just to your desire, but also to a kind of imagined community of humans, right? This is one of the things that the internet does… So Suzanne's question becomes really relevant. And I think you're articulating that, and feeling that, and then making these choices. 

Consent was a theme that I saw you grappling with in more complex ways as the project went on, and I don't think that consent is a core value in academia historically. Whereas in organizing, in movement building, and in culture building, it is a core value. That people with lived experiences are those best positioned to build power, intervene in power, and to tell their own stories. And people doing organizing have always included oral traditions, of some variety, in their work. Particularly in the US South, and in a lot of communities of color in many places, it is just baked into the culture. So if a community is enlisted in the work of power building or power intervention, there is inherently cultural work happening.

That's the thing that these graduate programs actually should be doing. Like they can't just be coming in and saying, We know that the history of this field is messed up, and then not actually train people how to do it differently. And I do think that you got that training, by proxy, by being in relationship to SONG, to Project South, to STAY, to Highlander. And I think that you have also become a purveyor of those methods to another generation of people. 

Rae

Definitely. I also think that I started with a pretty strong set of values around consent. It wasn’t necessarily a conscious strategic decision, but there were just some gut feelings and an intuitive approach to knowing consent was important. Which came from being part of the early crew at STAY, and because Appalshop was one of the parent organizations of STAY, and because STAY gatherings and meetings had been held at Highlander. Even though most of the conversations I was a part of in those spaces weren’t about media or storytelling, at all. But those ethics, and those values, and those commitments to consent and to people having control over their own stories. There was a kind of training that’s not technically about oral history or documentary work but is about power and agency that I had absorbed through being in central Appalachian and Southern movement spaces.

Growing up in Appalachia, it’s hard not to pick up on an understanding that media can be harmful. So I do think that consent was something that I took very seriously from the beginning. 

But the podcast was a really particular turning point for me, and for us as a new podcast team, around having to formalize some practices around consent. The consent forms always said we're not going to share these without your approval. But that became much more robust as the podcast rolled out. 

This is part of the conflict I had recently with a photojournalist I worked with. It's not just that you sign the consent form and then I check in once with your full transcript to get consent to do whatever I want with it, for the rest of time. We want people to have consent, not only over what parts of their interview go in, but also around how the host narration is summarizing any part of their story, and how we’re situating their story in a national political moment and historical context, including what photos we use. It’s ongoing, multiple steps of rolling consent.

hermelinda

Right. And values have to be practiced, right? Like you get good at it by doing 10,000 reps. That is not actually the experience that most people have in multimedia production, whether it's the mainstream media or independent, and that is part of what has been refreshing to people about Country Queers. I hear you on one of the struggles being not knowing why you made certain choices or feeling like it wasn't a strategy. But strategy is not always logical or linear. And often the best strategy is emergent, based on intuition, rooted in experience. And you saying, I'm not a strategist. I'm like, Actually you are. Not in a “step one through five” type of way. But what you are describing is the practice of emergent strategy, and making decisions and choices as you're going without necessarily knowing what the endpoint is going to be.

I think it’s important that people can see the path of choices that you were making. You come to a crossroads of some variety and there's three roads you can go down. I do this all the time where I live, and I cannot do this in cities. If I get to the intersection of a street, I'm like, I have no idea where the fuck to go and I'm flustered. On country roads, I can be like, if I go right, it's eventually gonna take me back over here, and this road connects over here.

Rae

Right, or like, I know this creek flows into that creek that flows into…

hermelinda

And I'll figure out how to get back home and it's all gonna be fine. That's how the strategy was for this project and that's okay. It's why so much of the answer to what's next for Country Queers isn’t here's the next five things. The question should be: what are the crossroads that are before us? So, feeling your way through it, that's valid.

I'm interested in hearing how it feels to think of yourself as a pin between generations of LGBTQ people who happen to reside in rural and country spaces. Our generation, we are bridges between the Suzanne [Pharr]s and the Dorothy [Allison]s of the world and the young people in county high schools who are hosting walkouts in defense of LGBTQ people and against the horrible policies that are rolling out at school boards all across the country right now. 

In the second season of the podcast, we wanted to bring in this other set of humans who were stewarding stories, and you were teaching people how to do it, right? That experiment was as much about who was there as it was about how to write a script. How do you plan a production process? What are the implications of the editing decisions that you have to make? And I could also see these community participants, their evolutions in learning how to also gain skills and make these ethical choices. That also becomes the place where values are represented. So I want to hear a little bit more about bridging to the future, and what you see your role is at this point in the history of the project.

Rae

Well that shift, what we did with community participants in Season 2, was also part of my job at WMMT 88.7 in eastern Kentucky. I learned to bust out radio stories really quickly there because it was a 24-hour radio station with only three full-time staff, and the signal was always going out, and the tower was way up on top of the mountain, and the engineer had to take a 4-wheeler to get to it. Part of my job was supporting community producers who already had a show or helping train people who wanted to start a show. So I supported people in starting oral history projects, or learning audio recording and editing. And that was my favorite part of that job. It wasn't busting out radio stories. It was seeing other people get really excited about oral history or about using an audio recorder and listening through headphones for the first time.

Also, I did not want to leave West Virginia for grad school. I did not wanna go to North Carolina. But I could not figure out how to get the support I needed for this project without leaving the state. Again. After having been gone for years, and then moving home, and starting this project out of the feeling of Thank God I'm home. In order to be able to gain skills to continue this work, I had to leave, again.

So, at this point, there are a lot of questions about what’s next for the project. But for me and my role, I’ve been able to lean into some of this media production training and I love it. And I want rural people to have the technical skills needed to make media about our own communities. This extraction of rural stories that are never made for us became another piece of the project for me, even though it wasn’t originally. We need rural people to have the skills to produce media about and for our people. So the only option isn’t you have to leave the state to gain those skills or to get a job at the one NPR station in the state. I’ll be on these national media-maker calls sometimes, and someone in California will ask me, have you heard of Appalshop? I'm like, Yes. I have. And also, good lord, can we have more than one rural arts and media center in the country?

In terms of how does it feel to be a bridge between generations and to be in the lineage Dorothy Allison? God, I don’t know. Those are two of my heroes.

hermelinda

I’m not asking you to cast yourself as a future hero. And you don't have to acknowledge it, but who we are in the world and the work that we do in the world is a critical bridge of time, a critical bridge of relationships. 

People I know, where I live, may or may not stumble across Country Queers, and they may or may not listen to an interview with Dorothy Allison. Or they will have no idea who she is. There are people who will read this book who have no idea who Suzanne Pharr is, right? There are people who will read this book who will have no idea about any of the organizations that are named here.

And in that way, the Rae’s and hermelinda’s of the world become critical knowledge keepers if nothing else through this work. And if we think of this work in that way, there is a lineage that we will leave behind.

I think there's a part of you that knows…

Rae

I mean, this is the most uncomfortable part of the project for me. The hardest part has been having to become, in some way, at any scale, a slightly public figure. It stresses me out. It is not comfortable for me. What I needed in 2013 was to meet other rural queer people, and hear their stories on their porches, and share a meal together. 

It is really uncomfortable for me… to be the host, to be interviewed, to have to be outside my little tin can of a trailer on this mountainside with animals all around. I'm deeply uncomfortable with the attention. And it does feel like a lot of pressure to me—to need to be able to think and articulate complex things, quickly, in a way that just isn't my pace of being. 

But, I do know that the project has done something. I don't think I always know exactly what it’s done, in all the ways, because it’s hard for me to get enough distance from it to see that. But, when the project started, you could not find rural queer stories online. And there’s so much more visibility of our experiences now, which is great! I don’t think Country Queers changed that in and of itself, but I do think it helped.

But there’s a new frustration I have, where it almost feels like this new visibility is somehow still missing the point. People know that there are country queers now. Great, cool, finally, thanks. We've accomplished that, at least, right? But, is that all we get? And I don't know if it's the Orville Peck phenomenon or what, but this summer all the queers on the internet have their cowboy outfits—like what the fuck just happened? You know what I mean? It feels like in the past couple years everybody's got a western shirt. Everybody's got cowboy boots. In LA, in New York, in the Bay. Everybody's got a cowboy outfit. Which is cool! I'm into cowboys! I love the aesthetic, but that's not the end goal.

hermelinda

It’s this commodification of the identity.

Rae

Totally.

So there’s much more visibility, but is there actually any more interest from folks in cities around listening to our stories, around respecting our experiences and expertise, and building solidarity with us? I’m not sure there is.

And also—in the midst of rising political and physical attacks—just in this past year—there have been attacks at bars, that substation shooting in North Carolina [2022], the [December 2022 Club Q] shooting in Colorado Springs, Proud Boys showing up to queer events and rural and small town areas are in a really different place in terms of the intensity and escalation of violence than we were when this project started. I really worry about the rural queer and trans folks in places like Utah, or parts of rural West Virginia, where they're completely outnumbered by Proud Boys and militias.

hermelinda

And in a lot of our counties, that's just how it is, right? That is part of what the project—and not just this project—is going to have to navigate. Because if we are living in places where right-wing militias have always been, that is a real concern for many of us. It was most poignant to me in the interview with the old dykes out with their guns. In reading that I was like, Oh, we're ramping back up to that moment. That's part of the reason I point to—not just me and you—but humans who sit in particular seats, with particular skills, in a particular moment of time, that to me is part of the question of the future of Country Queers. It’s not just for the project. It is a question for us as individuals and for the larger moment beyond us. And it’s why some of the future of Country Queers is not in our control. It will evolve into what the conditions both allow for and require of it.

This is one of your strengths—to allow that to unfold. I see you as a doula of the project. And what it means to be a doula is different from what it means to be the person who is giving birth, and is different from what it means to be the primary caregiver after the birth happens. That’s what I mean by asking about the future of the project.

Rae

When I think about all the details behind the scenes of the project, and trying to figure out how it will work, and how to fund it, I get totally overwhelmed. But I don’t think the work of Country Queers is over. 

The work of continuing to document our histories still feels important to me, because they already have been so thoroughly erased. And this rising wave of legislation and violence is partly aimed at doing, right? It’s erasing our ability to know that we have always been here. And that we are still here. 

hermelinda

And all each of us can do is to play our role in keeping our stories and our lives from getting erased, and in communicating that there is a wholeness to our lives. That is one of the things that the project has done beautifully, and will continue to do. That feels important, and I hope that you are able to see that and hold that in whatever comes next for you and for it. 

Rae

Thank you. What else do you think the project has done?

hermelinda

It’s given people a vehicle to see at least a part of their own experience reflected, and that is what the best storytelling does. It doesn't mirror our exact experience back to us, but it allows us to see a part of ourselves. That to me is the most powerful narrative change work. And I think it’s why you're so uncomfortable being compared to the Dorothy Allisons of the world. Dorothy's work allows people to see a sliver of their story in hers, and that is actually what breaks isolation. 

There's a very particular thing that oral stories do for a community, too. I was at SONG Gaycation with a bunch of Southern gays the summer that Pulse happened. It was the last morning and everybody was about to leave. We were in a place that did not have good cell phone service, and I woke up and I got a news alert about the shooting. I was up early with the sun while the rest of the gays were asleep in the tent, cause we’d had a late night. And I started writing a press release on my phone, with no service, because I was the communications director, and I knew that we were about to be in an onslaught. And I had to figure out how to also write an internal statement to our base.

The night before, I’d interviewed a bunch of the SONG elders and cofounders around the fire about their experiences in the eighties and the nineties. And at least two of them talked about times when gay bars that they were at had gotten bombed. The next morning was a really profound moment for me. The people who happened to be at Gaycation, who had heard those stories the night before…hearing what had happened at Pulse, it was easier for them to survive the moment, because they had this other set of stories to hold onto, to know that other people had survived too. 

That's what this project has done. It's the hardest thing to touch. It's the hardest thing to see. Some people will tell us, but a lot of people will never tell us. And I think that balm is the thing that you also have to hold on to through all the questions around what comes next.