Country Queers: Rae Garringer’s Love Letter to Rural LGBTQ+ Folks
As part of our “Love Louder” initiative, Neema Avashia interviews Rae Garringer about their groundbreaking oral history project celebrating LGBTQ+ lives in rural Appalachia.
Whenever I talk to Rae Garringer, I wish we’d known one another growing up. That somehow, two queer kids growing up mere hours from one another in the hills of West Virginia had found one another. I believe we could have made sense of our identities far earlier.
That opportunity didn’t exist for Rae and me. We didn’t meet until 2017 at the Appalachian Writers Workshop in Hindman, Kentucky. At the time, Rae was the public affairs director at WMMT, Appalashop’s 24-hour radio station that broadcasts out of Whitesburg, Kentucky. But the work Rae has done for the last decade, collecting oral histories of queer folks living in small places, and featuring them on their podcast, Country Queers, feels to me like the audio equivalent for rural queer folks. Even if you don’t have a queer friend or neighbor or family member to serve as a mirror or sounding board, all you have to do is pull up Country Queers to be offered that mirror, that sounding board. I can’t overstate the importance of this. Whenever I talk with queer folks in Appalachia about my book, Another Appalachia: Growing Up Queer and Indian in a Mountain Place, they tell me it helped them feel less alone. They saw their own questions and struggles reflected in my own, and they say seeing their struggle made visible was a source of profound comfort.
With Country Queers, Rae creates that comfort for folks again and again.
Rae’s spent the last few years pulling together a kind of “best of” Country Queers for Haymarket Books—a combination of photographs and interviews, woven in with Rae’s own story, that I can’t stop thinking about. I talk about loving louder, but with this book, Rae is doing it. Taking that love for queer people, and for Rae's rural home, and lifting them up for all the world to see.
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Country Queers: A Love Letter, the book, appeared in bookstores around the nation earlier this week.
Neema Avashia: What are the origins of Country Queers? How did you come to the project? And then also, how did the project evolve into the book?
Rae Garringer: I think the project really bloomed out of a frustration that I didn’t know I had for a long time. I grew up in Pocahontas County, West Virginia. Didn’t know any out queer people, and didn’t really meet any queer people my age until I left for college in western Massachusetts [at Hampshire College in Northampton]. I quickly figured out I was queer there, but the only peers I had who were queer were either from New York, Massachusetts, Chicago, California or that’s the place they moved after college. I sort of picked up on this idea that was the only option, you know, and that it would be insane to go home now that I was out, now that I knew it.
I spent almost a decade away from home, always achingly homesick, just no matter where I lived, constantly comparing everywhere to West Virginia in the most obnoxious way. And everywhere else is always lacking by comparison, in my opinion.
I ended up moving home. And it just felt so good to be home. A decade after moving away, queer people were a bit more visible. I was more aware of queerness. I started to see people and then started to get really frustrated that clearly, there have always, always been queer people here, and nobody ever talked about it. My entire growing up, nobody, not even the queer people who I now know I knew, talked about it.
The other piece was that everywhere else I lived, from western Massachusetts to Austin, Texas, the only queer stories at that time, in 2013, that you could find were of violence and death. It was Matthew Shepard. It was Brandon Teena. Oh, and Brokeback Mountain, where again somebody gets killed in the end. Why are there no stories except for these three accounts?
“After being home for a couple of years, I started to be like, ‘Wait a minute. This is the happiest I’ve been in a long time being home. And there are queer people. But then, also, there are real challenges to this...’”
I also think, after being home for a couple of years, I started to be like, “Wait a minute. This is the happiest I’ve been in a long time being home. And there are queer people. But then, also, there are real challenges to this, and I need to learn from other people who’ve been doing it about how you do this.”
I didn’t have training in oral history, or interviewing, or media, or anything. I just really needed to meet people. I think the journey to the book has been just like a wandering adventure of trying new things and seeing what worked.
At some point a gallery in Athens, Ohio asked if I had ever thought of a gallery exhibit, and I was like, “Nope.” And so I wrote a grant proposal and got a grant to bring together a little gallery exhibit. I only did a few shows because of the pandemic. Then the podcast emerged out of a stretch of time where I gave up on the dream of a book, because it just felt impossible to write a book while having a full-time job. After spending all that time at WMMT cranking out radio, I just knew I could do it more quickly than a book.
And then the book dream came true because I have this incredible editor who I call the fairy godmother of the project. Dao Tran at Haymarket reached out to me because she was on a selection committee for a fellowship I didn’t get, and was in love with the project, and asked if I wanted to talk, and then has been with me literally every step of the way. She’s incredible.
I’m very aware that I got a very incredibly rare gift in Dao. Without her, I wouldn’t have done it. Dao got every step of the way on the proposal, on a work plan—edits and drafts until the last design round that we just finished. So I feel like she co-wrote the book, but she made me edit down her acknowledgment section from ’graphs to one or two sentences.
NA: I think that is such a powerful commitment, right? It actually speaks to the role that independent presses play in elevating stories. That’s a real choice by Dao and Haymarket. It’s a choice to publish this book. It’s a choice to amplify queer, rural voices. It’s a choice that mainstream publishing doesn’t make. Ever. I think about other stories of rural queerness, and I can’t think of hardly any that are out from the Big Four presses [Penguin Random House, Hachette Livre, Harper Collins, and Macmillan Publishers].
I think both of us have this shared experience of growing up in a West Virginia where there was just such profound silence about queerness. Right? One of my elementary school teachers was queer. I know now that she had a partner. They lived in my neighborhood. They went for walks every evening, and yet nobody said nothing.
And when there was conversation about queerness, it was just in a derogatory, theoretical way. It wasn’t like, “Oh, there are actually queer people in our community.” That wasn’t a thing, and so I think lots of queer people kind of grow up with this feeling of like we have to choose. We either choose our sense of belonging in a place, or we choose our queerness, but we can’t have both.
One thing that’s so powerful about your project is it shows all these people who are rejecting that binary. How do you think they were able to do that? Because it feels to me like that it’s not easy to do when the dominant message is that you can’t.
RG: It’s so hard for me to think of the people I’ve interviewed as a group partially, because it’s been over ninety at this point. There are twenty-two excerpts in the book. Everybody’s just got such particular stories and personalities and homes and pets and spaces. Even if I think about it more broadly, as like a group of people who’ve all been able to do that, there is variation even within that.
“Marriage equality passed like a couple of years into this project. It felt like we were on this sort of path where people felt like things were kind of getting better. I think now we’re in such a time of such intense attack.”
I actually wonder sometimes, what if I’d never left for college? What would my journey toward understanding my queerness have been? What if I’d gone to WVU? What if I’d stayed home? You know what I mean? What if I’d gone to Concord [University], where my dad went back to school? I don’t think it’s that I wouldn’t have found my queerness, but I think it would have taken me longer than it did by showing up at Hampshire College and being like, “Oh. Everyone here is queer. What’s happening?” A bunch of the queer kids I met at college knew about Northampton and moved there on purpose.
I think there’s some of that where people are just like, “This is just home, and it’s always been home, and I’ve never wanted to leave.” But I also think the reality is a lot of people can’t leave. There’s not that option, there’s not that access or privilege to be able to. And so I love it when I interview people who are just like, “It’s just fine. This is just home. This is just where I’ve always been. It’s not a big deal.” You know what I mean? Because I think that totally upturns even my own Can I do this? angst. But then I also think that there are people who’ve intentionally made a choice: I want to choose home over access to queer community.
I don’t think everybody’s the same in the collection, but I do think some people also do that through living somewhere that’s really like home, but not exactly where they grew up. For example, it’s really different to live in the other end of the state where you grew up, or a bordering Appalachian state versus your home community, where your principal from elementary school might be your boss when you’re substitute teaching.
But I do think it’s also interesting to have been working on this book during 2023, with this rabid rise of anti-queer and -trans bills. That wasn’t happening in 2013. Marriage equality passed like a couple of years into this project. It felt like we were on this sort of path where people felt like things were kind of getting better. I think now we’re in such a time of such intense attack. I’m actually hearing more young trans people I know here saying, “I don’t know if I can stay,” in a way that’s pretty different from how a lot of people were feeling in 2013, 2014, 2015.
NA: I think that the volume is so much louder now. And really, since 2016, it has been. It’s so different from the silence. The other piece that’s different is that young people have access to mirrors much earlier than you or I did.
RG: Yes, because of media, and because of the Internet.
NA: That’s right. So young people know who they are earlier than you or I did. Which means that there’s this loud volume, and it’s landing on them.
RG: As a twelve-year-old.
NA: And to me, part of what I feel like is the gift of your book, is that it feels like it is created for queer youth. Young people need to believe that you’ll find a soft place to land. You need to see that, yes, hard shit is gonna happen. And also that there’s joy in this. And there’s love in this. And we find home. And we find community. And you need elders. We didn’t have them, right? You’ve created this body of work that is full of so many elders saying, “Look, there’s not one path here; there are infinite paths.” But if you can see these different paths, maybe it helps you see your own path. Do you feel like you had young people in mind when you started this? Has that been in the front of your brain as a target audience for this work?
RG: I got a little emotional there. I do think there’s something about the oral history tradition that still feels so intense to me because of the cross-generational element. Specifically, because, when you or I were growing up here, we had no access to queer elders. I’m thinking about this young trans person in the county that I live in, who is really hungry for resources, wants to talk to people who’ve had access to hormones, had access to gender affirming care, thinking that there could be some through-line there feels powerful to me.
People ask me, “What was your vision? What was your plan?” Sometimes I feel like this project was selfish, that its origins are just that I literally needed to know how to survive. I was trying to figure out how to survive, how to do this, how to be here in West Virginia, because I just keep trying to leave and being miserable everywhere else, and I don’t want to leave. But also it’s really hard.
I didn’t have young people in mind necessarily as the audience. But it’s interesting to hear you say that it feels like it’s this collection of elders, because I have all this sadness about not interviewing enough elders, but it’s true that many of the people in this book count as queer elders.
“I was working for a dropout prevention organization and I couldn’t be out at work. But a lot of the students I had were queer and came out to me because they could tell [I was]. So that’s interesting.”
NA: And especially relative to a young person now. I’m an elder to them. I hate to break it to you: you’re also an elder.
RG: I know. I don’t feel like it. But should we have everything figured out, or something?
NA: Absolutely not. It just means we’re old. It doesn’t mean we know anything.
RG: I was working in rural schools when I started the project. I was teaching GED classes to people, both adults who were coming back and to teenagers who dropped out. And then I was working for a dropout prevention organization and I couldn’t be out at work. But a lot of the students I had were queer and came out to me because they could tell [I was]. So that’s interesting.
I don’t even totally know why I chose oral history, but it just sort of grabbed me, and it became this obsession. It just felt intensely important to keep documenting. So I guess I had some sense that, hopefully, future generations will have this resource.
NA: I feel the same way about Another Appalachia. I wasn’t thinking about any other reader besides myself. When I was writing, I just felt that there’s nowhere else in the world where I exist outside of me. There’s nothing that reflects me. And so I’m gonna write me into the world, right? It sounds like that’s what you were doing. There aren’t mirrors that are very visible to me. So I’m gonna figure out how I make mirrors or how I’m gonna kind of create this, this Hall of Mirrors, where I can see myself in all these different ways. And then the secondary gift is that actually, when you do that for yourself, you also are doing it for other people.
You touched on this a little, but I’m curious. In your conversations with queer folks in West Virginia, and in rural spaces generally, do you feel like there’s been a significant shift in the way people are talking about their ability to stay, especially with a West Virginia legislature that basically spends every session finding different ways to cause harm to queer and trans youth?
RG: I feel like queer time moves really fast: 2013 was such a different time for the conversation, but it did feel very much like a lot of those young people were making this choice to stay because of a commitment to place and wanting to build visibility for other younger, queer people. But now I have many close friends, and other trans and gender-nonconforming people in West Virginia and beyond, who are saying, “I don’t know if I can do it. I don’t know if I can stay.” In 2014, that wasn’t something people were saying.
It’s not that there wasn’t stuff going on in the eleven years of the project. The Pulse [nightclub] shooting happened, all of Donald Trump’s presidency happened. But these past two or three years, with this national coordinated push of anti-trans legislation, is really intense, and not something I’ve seen in my lifetime at this level. I’m having conversations about it with people locally. But I’ve also had conversations with people very broadly spread out, who are all saying this moment is different.
I’ve started to see online right where people are like to come to Massachusetts, come to Minneapolis, come to these sanctuary cities, and it actually ticks me off. Because that’s not the goal.
NA: You should be safe anywhere, right? The goal should be that.
RG: We need support from places that do have more funding and resources in making that possible. Not this return to this myth that you’ve got to leave to be okay. It makes me furious.
NA: It’s also not true. That’s an illusion, right? I think that kind of definition of safety is fake.
RG: This idea that rural spaces are unsafe for queer folks and cities are safe falls apart when we look at statistics on the murder of Black trans women, and the majority of those are happening in cities. I just feel like that whole narrative is so wrong.
NA: There’s just no nuance in it. And it’s not rooted in reality. I think it also allows places like Massachusetts to be like, “Well, we’ve handled our stuff so we don’t have any problems.” It’s the same thing around race in Massachusetts. People say we don’t have any problems with racism. Meanwhile, the median net worth for a Black family is $8 in Boston, and it’s $247,500 for a white family [according to a 2015 report from the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston].
“Now, I get invited to rural Pride celebrations all the time. They weren’t happening very much in the beginning of this project. ... It used to be that if you wanted to go to Pride, you had to go to the city in your state. Or sometimes in another state.”
I keep thinking about this statistic that I read, which is that West Virginia has the highest number of trans youth per capita in the country, which feels really deep to think about in the context of this volume: because it seems to me like the people propagating this legislation think that they can scare people back into closets.
They can’t enforce 98 percent of what they’re passing. It’s largely unenforceable, but I think their goal is just fear. They’re gonna scare people into self-censoring. They’re gonna scare people into making themselves small. They’re gonna scare queer people into leaving.
Meanwhile, it’s not like fewer and fewer kids are coming out as trans. Actually, more and more are.
RG: At the same time there’s more visibility in media and social media, there’s all this legislation. Also, young people here today have access to representation multiplied so much from what even existed a decade ago when I started this project.
NA: When you and I were growing up, because people felt like that push to go, there wasn’t the same relationship dynamic. Often, relationships were severed. Or people hid themselves.
RG: If we left, we figured, we don’t have to deal with it that much, because I only come home once a year.
NA: Exactly. I just will be in the closet when I’m home. People didn’t have to actually fight for the person in their family who was queer. And they didn’t, by and large. Now I feel that, with young people finding who they are so much earlier, I feel like parents are in a different position. You want to protect your child. They’re your child. It’s harder to write them off. Still happens, but it isn’t as easy. It has been really powerful to watch a kind of culture shift that has happened because of that.
RG: Now, I get invited to rural Pride celebrations all the time. They weren’t happening very much in the beginning of this project. And that has shifted in this eleven-year window. I mean, there’s not a Pride celebration yet in the county seat where I live. But there’s a drag show that’s happened three years in a row, and this was the fourth year of pride in one of the counties I grew up in. I did a story about this community of drag performers in western Maryland, and they were on their fifth year of Pride.
It used to be that if you wanted to go to Pride, you had to go to the city in your state. Or sometimes in another state. But now there’s a Pride celebration every weekend, and I can’t get to them all in West Virginia. I think things have shifted not just for the young people who are queer, but also in terms of the visibility beyond.
I never was a big Pride person before, because I’d only been to city Pride, which is cool, but it’s overwhelming. But these small town Prides are incredible. So powerful. I cry every time. There’s all these baby queers there, often with their parents. There are very young drag performers who are saying, “I grew up here.” I never thought this would be possible. It’s incredible.
NA: And often being pulled off by small groups of people. Huntington Pride, Ashland Pride. These are beautiful organizations, run by people who are so committed to being visible. It’s like there’s this tandem gift and curse. The visibility is beautiful, but it’s hard not to think that the visibility and the vitriol are connected.
RG: They totally are. I talked to trans friends who’ve been out since the early 2000s who are like, “We didn’t used to have this much to attend.” I miss those days where we were just under the radar in a different way, whereas compared to the hypervisibility that people are experiencing now. There’s a connection between the visibility and the pushback that’s horrifying and really scary and pretty daunting.
NA: I was home in April, and all the ads for the governor’s race were about trans youth. This is the thing you’re campaigning on—not the broken foster-care system, not the fact that people don’t have clean drinking water, not the substance-use disorder crisis, or climate change, not even the potholes on I-64. How has this become the bludgeon in West Virginia? We have a legislature that has not been able to do jack shit for multiple sessions because all they’re doing is thinking about what other type of hell they can exact on trans young people.
RG: It’s not an accident that states between the coasts are all pushing through the same legislation. There’s clearly such coordination at play. That’s the part I get really daunted by. It’s just West Virginia, but the Tennessee, Kentucky, Georgia, Florida, the Carolinas…
NA: Alabama, Louisiana. Keep going!
RG: Idaho, Wyoming, Utah, Texas. Maybe I’m just used to West Virginia politics being kind of a mess. But when I think about the national coordination of the attack, and it being very targeted on trans youth, that’s the part that overwhelms me.
NA: Given that national context, what do you want people who read Country Queers to walk away with?
RG: I think about a couple of audiences. I want country queers to feel really comforted and really connected to other rural queer people, especially because of this legislation, and because of these times. When I get overwhelmed by the project I have to remember that it is the goal for me and has been from early on. I want other rural, queer people who need it to have access to these stories. I don’t think stories of really complicated nuanced, rural, queer experiences are making it super far out. I really do hope it feels like a gift, like comforting and like companionship.
And then I want everybody else, whether that’s straight people in rural places. or whether that’s queers in cities who also have total misconceptions about rural spaces if they’re not from them, or just people broadly to put a little effort into having a different understanding of rural spaces than what we’re getting given over and over again in the JD Vance narrative, in Trump country.
I hope this book adds some complexity to some conversations about real spaces. Your book has done so much for the region in so many ways, and I’m so glad you wrote it.
NA: But we need so many, right?
RG: We need so many. Yeah, we need so many.
NA: The only way you knock Hillbilly Elegy off the shelf is by writing so many books that there's no room for Vance to dominate anymore. His doesn’t stand, because it can’t stand up to those other narratives. This is where Country Queers is so important. It’s a community he doesn’t want to talk about. He doesn’t want to acknowledge that there are queer people in Jackson, Kentucky, just like there are queer people in every fucking county. Town. Holler. Name it. There are queer people everywhere. Because if we knew that, and we really knew it, those folks would deserve our solidarity everywhere. Whether you’re a queer person or a straight person living outside of a rural space, if you actually have to contend with the fact that there are queer people everywhere, then your ass needs to be putting itself on the line for people everywhere.
Rural America is a very, very queer place, and that just is all erased in the dominant narrative right now. But your book does a lot to push back against that.
RG: I do hope to feel a little more solidarity from city queers. In my life of hopping between worlds and traveling, I’ve met a lot of city-based queers who say really horrible shit about rural spaces, or who tell these stories about how they didn’t feel safe, how they survived traveling through rural America, that make me really angry because I’m like, this is a bunch of queer and trans people’s homes. And for them, it’s not passing through. It’s an everyday thing. This repeated idea of your unsafety in this place erases all the people for whom, this is just where we live.
And queer life, it looks different here. How we organize, how we survive, how we do and don’t show our queerness in public. But that doesn’t mean it’s lesser. And it doesn’t mean it’s not everywhere.
NA: I think it also allows for a kind of electoral politics that completely ignores rural America.
RG: National election cycles are my least favorite time. It’s the worst time for narratives about real people. I just want to lay down and sleep when I think about it, it makes me so tired. It’s such horrible rhetoric from everybody outside of rural spaces. Just this condescension, this flattening. Rural spaces only get to be this “thing,” since Trump. We only get to be Trump country, all of us, not just queer and trans people. It erases people of color. It erases radical organizing. It erases everything that’s not that.
About the author
Neema Avashia is the daughter of Indian immigrants and was born and raised in southern West Virginia. She has been an educator and activist in the Boston Public Schools since 2003, and was named a City of Boston Educator of the Year in 2013. Her first book, Another Appalachia: Coming Up Queer and Indian in a Mountain Place, was published by West Virginia University Press in March 2022. It has been called “a timely collection that begins to fill the gap in literature focused mainly on the white male experience” by Ms. Magazine, and “a graceful exploration of identity, community, and contradictions,” by Scalawag. The book was named Best LGBTQ Memoir of 2022 by BookRiot, was one of the New York Public Library’s Best Books of 2022, and was a finalist for the New England Book Award, the Weatherford Award, and a Lambda Literary Award. She lives in Boston with her partner, Laura, and her daughter, Kahani.
- Neema Avashiahttps://www.salvationsouth.com/author/neema-avashia/
- Neema Avashiahttps://www.salvationsouth.com/author/neema-avashia/
- Neema Avashiahttps://www.salvationsouth.com/author/neema-avashia/
