Country Queers

“‘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

“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.”
—Barbara Smith, author of The Truth That Never Hurts: Writings on Race, Gender, and Freedom

“Rae Garringer’s work 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. It serves as an artifact for the next generations of queer misfits making sense of the complex spaces we call home.”
—Ashby Combahee, cofounder of Georgia Dusk: a southern liberation oral history project, and librarian and archivist at Highlander Research and Education Center

“For over eleven years, writer and oral historian Rae Garringer has been thoughtfully listening to and documenting the experiences of queer people living in rural America, and now they have gathered these remarkable stories to share with readers. What a gift! Country Queers is a tender, fierce, and inspiring love letter to a population that is too often made invisible. Garringer serves as a generous and attentive guide, shining a light on stories of queer joy, courage, and fierce resistance. An important and necessary book, and a beautiful triumph.” 
—Carter Sickels, author of The Prettiest Star

“Rae Garringer and their interview companions pay homage to the back roads, hollers, hills, hell-raising, heartbreak, love affairs, and joys of small town and country queer life. Across geography, generations, and gender, Country Queers gives voice to a lineage of queer and trans people claiming our seat at the table.” 
—hermelinda cortés, executive director of ReFrame

“On page after page, readers meet charismatic country queers whose words are joined with Garringer’s travelogue—a road trip story propelled by gnawing queer love for country and a wish to (peripatetically) ‘return home.’ 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.”
—Suzanne Snider, founder/director of Oral History Summer School

“This is indeed the love letter of the subtitle: to the country, to queer friends and neighbors, to the small pieces of life. Slow down and flip through this uplifting, hand-threaded quilt of lives.”
—Kirkus Reviews