Country Queers: Support the Book Tour

Help us bring the stories of rural and small town queers where they're needed most: rural areas and small towns!

Country Queers is a multimedia oral history project documenting rural and small town LGBTQIA2S+ experiences, since 2013. After 11 years of trucking away at the project, the original dream of a book is here!

Country Queers: A Love Letter comes out October 8, 2024 from Haymarket Books. Pre-order it here!

Now it's time for a different kind of journey. Help us do a book tour!

About the Tour:

Funds will support Rae as they travel on a multi-leg journey to bring the book – and the amazing stories it holds – to rural spaces, small towns (and a couple cities), engaging in conversation with organizers, artists, and storytellers along the way.

Let’s get this book to the people and places it was made for!

About the Book:

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.