Country Queers: A Love Letter
October 8, 2024
Part photo book, part memoir, part oral history project, this volume paints a vivid portrait of queer and trans experiences in rural areas and small towns across the US.
In 2013, Rae Garringer embarked on the Country Queers oral history project with a borrowed audio recorder, a flip phone, and a paper atlas in a Subaru Forester with over 160,000 miles on it. Raised on a sheep farm in southeastern West Virginia, they were motivated by an intense frustration with the lack of rural queer stories and the isolation that comes with that absence. “Queers, in all our forms, have always existed,” Garringer writes, “all across this continent since before it was colonized.”
After years as a DIY, minimally funded, community-based oral history project, the work now takes a new form in Country Queers: A Love Letter—a book of full-color photos and interviews with rural folks from Mississippi to New Mexico and beyond, with Garringer’s account as traveler and interviewer woven through the pages.
“Country Queers reminds us all that even in the smallest places, in the ‘reddest’ states, there have always been queer people fighting for our collective liberation. They demand our solidarity. They, and this book, demand our close attention because they have so much to teach us.”
“What a gift! Country Queers is a tender, fierce, and inspiring love letter to a population that is too often made invisible. An important and necessary book, and a beautiful triumph.”
Crisosto Apache, at home in Denver, CO, July 2014.
Interior book design by Eric Kerl.
Kasha Snyder-McDonald in front of WV Black Pride Foundation. August 2023.
“This is queer history at its best, making a play on oral history’s superpower to complicate a narrative that has long gone undiscerned, undetected, and oversimplified. Garringer reminds us that country queers ‘have always made a way out of no way’ and tells us how.”
Cameron McCoy, Jon Peck, and the horses, at home in Avondale, CO, June 2014.
“With the art of a storyteller Rae Garringer expands our understanding of queer lives and shows that our home places are everywhere we want them to be.”
“Speaks directly to the all-too-common experience of loving a place that doesn’t always love you back. Country Queers is a map of queer resilience and placemaking.”
Kijana West at home in Cumberland, MD, June 2022.
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