Join us in welcoming Rae Garringer and special guest Sam Green for a presentation and book signing. Rae’s book, Country Queers, was published by Haymarket Books this fall. 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. In these intimate conversations, we see how queerness—shaped, as all things are, by race, class, gender, and more—moves in rural and small-town spaces, spotlighting how country queers make sense of their lives through reflections on land, home, community, and belonging. While media-driven myths suggest that big cities are the only places queer folks can find love and community, Country Queers resists that trope by centering rural queer and trans stories of the joys, challenges, monotony, and nuances of their lives, in their own words.
“‘We are everywhere.’ You’ve heard it said, and with Country Queers Rae Garringer makes it plain. This book is such a gift to rural queer folks. It renders us visible. Renders our past and present experiences, questions, and struggles to navigate complicated feelings about people and place visible. More broadly, 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.”
—Neema Avashia, author of Another Appalachia: Coming Up Queer and Indian in a Mountain Place
Rae Garringer (they/them) is a writer, oral historian, and audio producer who grew up on a sheep farm in southeastern West Virginia, and now lives a few counties away on S’atsoyaha (Yuchi) and Šaawanwaki (Shawnee) lands. They are the founder of Country Queers, a multimedia oral history project documenting rural and small town LGBTQIA2S+ experiences since 2013. When not working with stories, Rae spends a lot of time failing at keeping goats in fences, swimming in the river, and two-stepping around their trailer.
Sam Green (they/he) is the Trans Justice Organizer for the ACLU of West Virginia. They have been an advocate for the LGBTQ+ community in West Virginia since 2018; leading mutual aid efforts, creating events to provide safe spaces for queer West Virginians, advocating for better policies at the Capital, organizing protests, and more. Before he stepped into his role with the ACLU, Sam served as the vice-president of Huntington Pride, Assistant Coordinator for Marshall University’s suicide prevention organization, and as president of the Appalachian Liberation Collective. Sam also co-founded and continues to organize the West Virginia Trans Coalition, a network for trans people in the state to support each other and work together on issues important to the community.