“I love hearing from country queers that the work brings meaning to them and feelings of connection. At its core, that’s the goal of this project, and it’s stayed true from the very beginning.”
—Joe Engleman, “Country Queers Spread the Love in Rural America” Barn Raiser, September 2024.
“Every time I do an interview, I’m so overwhelmed with gratitude for how trusting people are, how generous and vulnerable people are in these oral histories.”
—Mason Adams, “Rae Garringer Marks 10 years of Country Queers.” Inside Appalachia, October 2023.
“My hope for media representations of rural places is that our places are allowed as much nuance and contradiction and complexity as any collection of stories about New York or the Bay is.”
—Annalee Newitz, “The ‘Country Queers’ Who Don’t Want to Flee Rural America.” On the Media, June 2022.
“The perception of queerness as an urban phenomenon was then inadvertently reinforced by the early pioneers of LGBT studies, many of whom had moved from small towns and rural places in order to be a part of the urban-based Gay Liberation movements of the 1960s, 70s, and 80s.”
-Anya Slepyan, “Rural Queer History: Hidden In Plain Sight”. The Daily Yonder, April 2021.
“This is oral history, distilled to its essence: One person shares, one listens and records, and the past becomes a living thing to learn from.”
— Nicole Blackwood. “We are everywhere’: How rural queer communities connect through storytelling.” National Geographic, September 2020.
“This collection—depicting people’s animals, landscapes, and memories—displays the breadth of what it means to be a “country queer,” and how expansive these experiences can be.”
— Yvonne S. Marquez, “The ‘Country Queers’ Podcast Challenges Preconceptions About Rural Areas.” Texas Monthly, August 2020.
“Early on in the project, it was clear to Garringer that rural queer experiences are not monolithic, which is why Country Queers — first as an oral history project and now as a podcast — aims to document rural, queer people of different races, ages, religions, socioeconomic backgrounds and occupations.”
— Gabriela Martinez. “‘Country Queers' shares the 'joy' and 'pain' of rural LGBTQ life.” NBC News, June 2020.