Moonshine and Rainbows: Queer, Young and Rural
By Mandy Van Deven, September 2, 2009
http://www.wiretapmag.org/stories/44464Interview: Author Mary Gray's new book shows that not all young queers are leaving small towns for big cities.
Living in cities like New York and San Francisco has become a modern-day marker of queer authenticity, and media representations like "Queer as Folk", The Advocate, and PlanetOut do little to disabuse us of the notion that small town America is inherently hostile to queer communities. But those of us who have lived queerly in both rural and urban places know this ubiquitous portrayal only shows part of the picture.
A queer-identified woman from a small town in California, Mary Gray's experience lobbying for harassment protection for queer youth in the California public schools prompted her groundbreaking research on what life is like for the young and queer in rural America. The resulting book, Out in the Country: Youth, Media and Queer Visibility in Rural America, discusses the myriad ways the national gay rights movement fails to be fully inclusive of its bucolic brethren, and provides strategies for including the complex needs of rural LGBTQ youth in the national queer agenda.
