Juniper Moon Folk Arts: Crafters, Activists, and the Glories of Gas Station Food
Juniper Moon Folk Arts, based out of Kentucky, is an etsy shop created by rural lesbians Raina Rue and Vann Gibson — Rue is the artist and Gibson is the shop manager. The shop is representative of “things that I like and things I wanted to see,” says Rue, whose work is largely shrinky dinks of cartoons and illustrations that are made into earrings, pins, and bolo ties. “It’s a very simple style because a simple style translates better to shrinky dinks; if you put a bunch of detail in your work, they just disappear.”
Lots of Rue’s inspiration for Juniper Moon Folk Arts are country markers — soup beans, morels, and possums — combined with Pride pins and sex toys. Possums have become a flag for rural queers, “It feels both very gradual and very sudden. I think it started in weird leftist Facebook meme groups, kind of, and somehow we all had love for this weird, little, scrappy critter, and it just blew up from there. I don’t know where it originated exactly, but it’s probably within six degrees of someone I know [laughs.]” You heard it here, folks, possums are gay.
Rue was “super artsy” growing up, but didn’t have a specific area of focus, “I fiddled around with a lot of different things. And I never thought I was gonna have anything with art that I could make a kind-of living from.”
The etsy shop started under a different name selling needle felted items, but the shrinky dinks caught on because of famed drag queen Sasha Velour. Rue made some fan art pins for Velour in 2016, who loved them. “When Sasha Velour gagged and died for the shrinky dink pins, I decided to put my name on a pin because my name is weird and I could never buy anything with my name on it.” For the unfamiliar, a huge part of gas station and museum merchandise is stuff with your name on it, from magnets to necklaces to miniature statues of liberty — I own like 40. “I knew it would be a big deal right away,” Gibson says. “And it’s a big thing now that we’re able to highlight other Appalachian artists and raise funds for organizations like Holler Health Justice and Kentucky Health Justice Network.”
Gibson and Rue have collaborated with Sexy Sex Ed, Chris DeMaria, Travelin’ Appalachian Review, and now Louisville Community Bail Fund. During Pride month, Juniper Moon Folk Art is doing weekly giveaways to raise funds for black-led organizations and bail funds working in antiracism and prison abolition. “I think it’s really baked into our identity now, and we reflect the queer community the way we’d like to see it represented but we want to bring into the fold other perspectives, identities, and voices, and be a hub as much as we can.”
Rue grew up in a small rural town, didn’t know she was gay when she was young, and came from a religious background. “In the religious family I grew up in, [being gay] wasn’t even an option, so my brain never consciously wandered that way. Now I look back and I’m like ‘that thing I did was gay.’” As someone who wrote a girl a love poem every day of her sophomore year of highschool, and then didn’t get I was queer until 23, I understand this particular experience. ”I didn’t grow up with a lot of queer representation, there were a couple dykes on the outskirts of town, but they got called names and weren’t really accepted. Since I came out, and over the past ten years, I realized there is so little popular representation of people who grew up in Appalachia or the south who are also totally gay and fabulous. Or even gay and not fabulous.” Digging out of your culture can be really complicated when you’re queer, “I can remember thinking or saying hurtful things about queer people when I was younger because of how I’d been taught, and now I want to rail against that with every bone in my body.”
Gibson grew up in Dayton, Ohio, and moved to Kentucky at age 19 to be with Rue. Like a lot of lesbians, their relationship started as a really intense friendship and they’ve been together 8 years, enduring a lot of poverty and homelessness in that time. “For me, living rural and being queer has been how we met some of our best friends,” Gibson says. Their queer community provided them housing when they needed it, transportation, and “we’re probably all going to end up all on a plot of land together feeding each other oatmeal when we don’t have teeth. They’re who watch drag race with, take trips to Louisville with, and plant soup beans and make cornbread with” Rue says.
Community helped Gibson feel connected to the area and connected to the land, whereas Rue has always wanted to be a mountain witch. “Our favorite thing about living rural is pissing outside, and fashion shows in the woods, it’s a great point of liberation for me, being outside and feeling my oats out in the woods.” Gibson says don’t discount the gas station food, “There’s something about the deep fried mac and cheese bites, deep fried cauliflower, and coleslaw. I’ve had some of the best chicken strips ever there.” Rue clarifies, “we lived on gas station food for a while when we didn’t have a car.”
Chosen family is a major thing for Rue and Gibson who like their privacy and have a community that’s very spread out. “Our community in my hometown was very much not there. We had two friends in town, and I went to high school there, but a lot of people I knew had kids, I found out I was gay, and I broke apart from people that I had grown up with. Then Vann and I went through terrible bouts of depression and we were broke as hell and super isolated.” Since then, they’ve moved to another rural community where they’re still physically isolated, but their community has gone virtual, “Community over the past few years has been online. We’ve made friends with queer artists and activists and they’ve all been supportive of what I do and I try to be supportive of what they do. Even though were aren’t from the same holler, we’re going to do what we can to support each other.”
“I didn’t think that was something that could be sustainable, and we have events where we see each other every year and then a bunch of online, and it’s enough. It’s more than I thought it would be, and we’ll all just pass around the same 20 dollars until we die,” laughs Gibson.
Both Gibson and Rue like rural living, and love the family they’ve chosen. “I need to walk out onto my porch and not hear anything but a rooster,” Rue says, “I’m a hermit. And being gay shouldn’t change that.”
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Country Queers Documents the Myriad Experiences of Rural LGBTQIA Americans
All photos provided by the Country Queers Project
Country Queers, a multimedia oral history project documenting the diverse experience of small town and rural LGBTQIA people, was started in 2013 and “born out of a pretty intense personal need to find and connect with other rural and small town queerfolks,” says creator, R. Garringer. A native of southeastern West Virginia from a farming community “waaaaay out in the country, an hour outside a town of 3000 people,” Garringer remembers growing up in the ’80s, ’90s, and ’00s and not knowing any out queer people. And when they went away to college were surrounded by people who had “bought into this idea that I couldn’t move home. That there was no way to have West Virginia and my queerness and be safe and be happy.”
After spending ten years away from their hometown, Garringer moved back in 2011 and “of course started to see queers in the way I hadn’t when I was a teen. I grew up without TV, we got the internet by the time I was in high school. I don’t feel that old, but I’ll be 35 this year and it really was like a different planet when it came to queer visibility and queer politics.” Garringer didn’t meet queers their own age until college, and so the rumored queer people in their hometown weren’t peers when they were growing up.
Since the project’s inception, Garringer has interviewed 65 queers in 15 states, focusing primarily on the rural and small town American South, Midwest, and Southwest. “I felt really frustrated that it was so hard to find local stories that we had been there, that is was so hard to find any stories in national queer media about rural queerness, so I bought a recorder and started talking to friends of mine through the STAY Project.” The STAY Project is a central Appalachian youth network that focuses on youth outreach in Appalachian communities that are seeing a mass exodus of young people due to economic and educational opportunities drying up.
“The majority of the project has been crowdfunded and that just blows me away,” says Garringer who successfully Kickstarted a month-long road trip in 2014 to visit and interview rural queers in Mississippi, Texas, Colorado, Kansas, and Oklahoma, and just wrapped a fundraiser to take some time to create a podcast of their recordings.
“A lot of the first stories I gathered were with young people under the age of 30 living in central Appalachia. It was us trying to piece together as young people like did we know of any queer history in places we’d grown up in West Virginia or southwest Virginia or east Tennessee or eastern Kentucky. How were people seeing queerness in the places we love and also have complicated relationships with,” Garringer told me.
Garringer’s project shows just the scope of ground to cover when it comes to oral histories. Often the American south or Appalachia are treated like one solid experience, and a very narrow one, when discussed by people outside of those regions. But there’s more to unpack in the diversity of narratives and experiences, and it’s easy to forget just how big of an area we’re talking about.
“Growing up in very rural West Virginia, county to county things can be really different, it’s not even state to state, or one side of the state to the other side. Counties have very different economic realities, sometimes racial demographics, so I think the south and the rural south and rural places in general get talked about this very flattened and oversimplified way. Where in reality it can be a completely different world to go from one county that has more money to the one next door that doesn’t, and the tensions between those places. I grew up in a county that’s 98% white or more, and a lot of the traveling I did took me through towns that were predominantly black, or had huge immigrant communities. The rural south is a lot more varied in terms of who exists than we often think.”
“Country” and “queer” — like “southern” or “Appalachian” — are huge, vague identities; really more umbrella concepts that are often tossed around like they are niche. When I asked Garringer what this process has taught them about queer community, they said, “The question I always ask people is ‘Who is your community?’ Because I think we always talk about ‘the queer community’ in this very vague and amorphous way. Community is a very complicated and roomy word. Rural queer people also have other layers of identity that inform their realities.”
Community works differently if you’re living in the same place your whole life, and in lower populations, the demographics collide more intensely. “In cities and even big towns that are very queer there is the option to mostly interact with other queer people. You can only hang out with queer people if you want, or support queer business, and that generally isn’t possible in a lot of rural places. Rural people often tell me their communities aren’t just queer. It’s other farmers or other musicians, and they are in community with people who don’t necessarily share political beliefs or lived experiences with gender or sexuality.”
For many rural queers, community is who’s around, and Garringer says that a lot of her interviewees liked building and being members of community where their connection point wasn’t necessarily queerness. Turns out, queers contain multitudes.
Since that first road trip, Garringer has transcribed all of the interviews (with the help of volunteer transcriptionists throughout the US), curated some of the histories for an immersive, grant-funded, gallery exhibit with photos and listening stations. Garringer has led workshops and oral history trainings with rural queer groups or people in rural places. The visibility of rural queers has changed profoundly in seven years, and Garringer is excited to keep contributing to it.
The Country Queers Podcast is projected to release in early summer 2020. To learn more about the project, and donate, visit their website. If you’re interested in submitting your own oral history, email the project directly at country.queers.thrive@gmail.com.
This Queer Ink Maker Is Using Alchemy to Turn Pain and Chaos Into Art
All photos by Thomas Little
“I became really intrigued in the history of [ink making]. As a medium to record history, ink itself wasn’t actually recorded — the process of making ink wasn’t super well known. I started thinking about it as this interesting kind of magic,” Thomas Little, an illustrator, ink maker, and citizen alchemist from rural North Carolina told me. He has been making ink for the last six years but his first attempt started much earlier.
“The first time I made ink I was actually in the fifth grade when I was doing a project on Houdini. It was a magic trick that involved a water to wine sort of chemical reaction. At that time I didn’t know but I was essentially doing the ink process — the actual chemical reaction. That didn’t go over very well.” Little grew up in religious and rural North Carolina and water to wine is just close enough to mocking Jesus: “That wasn’t real popular.”
Little has been running his A Rural Pen Instagram account since 2017 and uses it to discuss ink history and sell his illustrations and ink directly to interested customers and promote his workshops. Little’s dedication to crafting is a continuation of cultural devotion to crafting and making. Practices that grew of necessity — woodworking, homesteading, weaving — morph into expression, art, and utility. What you have must come from somewhere, and rural queer makers and crafters have their hands in the dirt of creation, sharing their cultural history and story.
Crafting is also tied to sharing specifically queer history. The NAMES Project AIDS memorial quilt began in 1985 and remains the largest community folk project in the world. Queer Threads: Crafting Identity and Community, an art exhibition from 2014, showcased felt paintings, yarn drawings, quilted tapestries, and crocheted sculptures from queer artists around the world was ground breaking in the city centers, and coverage by media sources focused on the connection between folk art and queer life as “unexpected”. But for rural queers, the separation between folk art identity and queer identity doesn’t exist. Artists like Libby Paloma, Amelia Christensen, Steph Littlebird Fogel, and Janie Stamm not only operate as queer makers, but explore queer experience through embroidery, woodworking, painting, and beading.
Little’s passion for ink is as poetic as it is practical, considering its existence and history with the pointed analysis of a scientist and the empathic creativity of an artist. “Ink’s powerful in that it is ubiquitous and prosaic but also carries all of our meaning around. It revolutionized our way of speaking, the ideas of the dead are recorded in ink, the dead speak through ink, it just had this really mystical element to it.” During Little’s research into the ingredients in ink — sumac, yarrow, red ochre — he found a certain alchemy involved in the ink making process. “Ink is one of the more important things to come out of the alchemical process.”
Little has also lived in rural queer communes in Tennessee and found that he loves living in rural spaces, but like anywhere there’s a cost. Little felt unsafe working as a waiter in North Carolina, and needed to find a way to take himself out of “the harmful spaces of everyday life.” So Little became an illustrator. “It’s lonely and sad in the woods, it can be. But it’s also a good place to breathe and think about what it means to be human in this world.”
Little goes on to say that while he’s a queer creator, “I don’t have the energy to maintain visibility or the need to explain my queerness to people” while also creating. “I’m also a private person, and I don’t have to explain myself in the woods.”
Little’s point is one I hadn’t considered as a queer writer. Being queer is not just a pillar of my identity, but being visibly a queer artist is important to me and my (vomits in mouth) brand. Little is not closeted, but his desire to not have to explain himself everywhere he goes is understandable. We don’t owe every straight person a coming out moment, it’s a lot of energy and intimacy to trade in, and some of us just want to make our art. As for living in the city, Little isn’t really a fan. “I can be more me in the woods than I can in the city, it seems. I feel more alone in the city and I don’t even have the solitude [laughs].”
Little discovered he could create ink out of almost anything. “The ink I enjoy [making] the most is my black ink which is an iron gall ink variant. It uses iron sulfate, which you can make by dissolving just about anything in iron with sulphuric acid. So that got me thinking that ink is this sort of magical substance and what you can transmute into it. I’ve had some friends lost to gun violence, and I thought what better way to use a gun than change it to ink?” Most recently Little has turned a Smith and Wesson into his black ink. “Granted ink isn’t exactly innocent itself, but it’s more in the theatre of the mind than in the world as a violent thing.”
The process of melting a gun in sulphuric acid is captivating for Little. For the Smith and Wesson, “it formed these really beautiful blue/green crystals, and then that is scraped off and dried, and then added to a solution of sumac abstract or some kind of plant matter with high tannic content. It does this beautiful reaction on paper and it’s somewhere between a dye and a paint and it chemically bonds on the paper and it kind of breathes with oxygen. Ink is a momentary organism, it breathes once and dies on the paper.”
Little also teaches workshops in pigment making. “There’s a lot of esoteric history around certain colors. The first cave paintings were with Red Iron Oxide, it’s over 40000 years old. Following that thread and its use throughout the world — every continent has used it. It’s a very cosmopolitan color. Understanding all the mysticism and beauty in the mundane. We take color for granted so much in this world. I like to know where it came from and its roots.”
To support Little’s work, pledge his Patreon, and to purchase ink or his illustrations, follow him on Instagram.
Raechel Anne Jolie on Class, Gender and Being a Rust Belt Femme
Feature image via Raechel’s Instagram
Raechel Anne Jolie grew up in a rural working-class community in Northeast Ohio at “the very beginning of country Ohio, ten minutes and I was in a suburb, ten more minutes and I was in Cleveland so I was at the very edge of rural Ohio. My earliest memories of life are dirt roads, creeks, yards that went on forever, and the woods.” Jolie’s memoir, Rust Belt Femme, is an exploration of her rural foundation combined with alternative ’90s punk culture shaped her as she is today — “a queer femme with PTSD and a deep love of the Midwest.”
Jolie’s father was a race car driver and was hit by a drunk driver when she was four. That was the catalyst for Jolie’s exposure to queerness — one of the guys on the race car crew moved in with Jolie’s mother. Chris was gay and deeply closeted, but Jolie’s mother knew, and Jolie found out herself around age 12. “I had this clear idea of someone who I was very close to, who I loved, who helped take care of me, who my mom loved and had no judgement about, but it was the ’90s. And he was very afraid of what the people he worked with would think. I had this very early understanding that queer people exist in these communities and that people are going to respond to it differently the way they would in any other community.”
Jolie’s queerness is heavily shaped by the rural culture she grew up in — specifically in her gender identity. “I grew up in what would be considered, and I’ve lovingly reclaimed, a ‘white trash’ neighborhood that had all the markers of ‘white trash living.’ My dad was a race car driver, men without shirts on, drinking beer, covered in car grease, women in short shorts, everyone smoking and swearing.” As Jolie has aged, she’s developed a fondness for the culture she grew up in, especially as she relocated to multiple urban areas for higher education. “I’ve come to embrace that ‘lack of decorum’ that I grew up in.” Her embracing of the “white trash” aesthetic “already feels very queer because it’s so non-normative. “It’s already not fitting inside the boxes of what’s ‘appropriate.’ Which is what queers have been doing forever.”
With the publication of JD Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy in 2016, and the election of Donald Trump, major coastal metro media started becoming more interested in what was happening outside of their horizon line. The downside is we’ll have to sit through a movie of Hillbilly Elegy, but the positive is the attention being paid to the great work coming out of the “flyover country.” Memoirs like Jolie’s exploring what it means to be working class and how that creates and facilitates a queer identity, and collections of queer stories like Samantha Allen’s Real Queer America: LGBT Stories from Red States, and Rachel Garringer’s Country Queers project catalog queer history in areas outside of New York and San Francisco. The art and queer history that has always been present is being unearthed on the national stage.
“By late high school I started meeting queer people my age, but the year that I graduated, 2003, no one in the history of my high school had ever been out.” The process of securing femininity was an arduous one. “It wasn’t awful because I didn’t want [femininity], it was awful because I couldn’t find the right kind. And when I found femme, and not every femme has a feminine gender performance, obviously, but for me, femininity is deeply connected to class. And my working class town was deeply shaped by being a rural working class town. Working class aesthetic looks different in rural areas than urban areas. When you’re poor, it can show up differently. Femme relates to the women I grew up with, my femme ancestors, and my longing to express femininity and perform femininity.”
She left for Chicago for her undergraduate “with lots of debt trailing behind me” and came out about her bisexuality in college. “I grew up around these strong, complex women, who wore short shorts, lots of makeup, and had tattoos, and that stereotype was real, and that was certainly what I was being shaped by. When I heard the word femme and met my first butch and everything clicked into place. Thankfully, I learned the history of femme and butch working class culture, which dates back to the working class gay bars in the ’40s and ’50s, full of queer working class women. So I learned the working class roots of gay bars, and trashy bar culture was something I grew up with. Those things clicked in place for me so quickly and were so affirming.”
Jolie went on to get a PhD in Communication Studies with a minor in Gender and Sexuality. “I went on to be an academic, and it’s been interesting to be in different cities.” Jolie got her undergraduate degree in Chicago, PhD in Minneapolis, and then worked for a college in Boston for five years. “Queerness,” she says, “is a bit sexy in academia. But my partner is trans and uses he/him pronouns and passes and there’s never not the mental gymnastics that every queer person does, even in the ‘liberal university’ that right wing people think exist, it’s still so much mental energy to figure out how to talk about my partner with particular people.”
Being queer is a lot of work wherever you live, and while there is a clear coming out narrative, there isn’t a good “living out” narrative. There’s often a lot of well-meaning bigotry and invasive questions lobbed at queers, especially anyone deviating from expected gender performance.
“I think about the code-switching that has to happen, and it’s less about coming back to my hometown and thinking about it, I have to code-switch no matter where I am.”
The working class escape narrative mirrors the metronormative queer one. The aspiration is to get into college and live in a city, but that can alienate you from your roots, and create a bit of an identity crisis. “For a while I was writing things for academic journals that very few people in my family could understand. Now, with this book coming out, I’m doing more popular writing and that’s much more accessible. I’ve done so much writing that is analyzing my community from home, and I don’t ever want to feel like that gross anthropologist that only studies my past through an academic lens. I don’t want to exotify or exploit the community I came from.”
Jolie has been careful to be honest in her book and loves being able to share her love of the Midwest. “I’m just so excited to think that more stories like this will be available in the world.”
Rust Belt Femme is available from BELT Press where books are sold on March 10th. Preorder it here.
The tarot zine The Prison Arcana, written by c.l. Young, an incarcerated gay black man in Kentucky, edited by Jolie, and illustrated by Jamie Diaz is available here and all proceeds go to the author and illustrator. To participate in the Black & Pink penpal program, click here. Follow Raechel on Instagram and Twitter for upcoming book tour dates and more.
TruckSlutsMag Is Making Trucks Gay and Reclaiming Rural Queer Culture
TruckSlutsMag, like all good things, was a bit of an accident. It started off as an Instagram account called CoolTruckZone where Tiffany Saint-Bunny, TruckSluts’ creator, would post photos of trucks she liked. The idea evolved from there and in 2016, TruckSlutsMag started on Instagram as a pinup platform for rural and redneck queers.
In the three years TruckSlutsMag has been in operation, it has amassed over 32,000 followers, the team has expanded, and a print magazine will hit stands in 2020. When asked where the passion project came from, Bunny says, “I wanted to see it.”
All photos by Tiffany Saint-Bunny.
Bunny is originally from Oklahoma and didn’t live in a real city until 2015, when she was in her early 30s. “Hunting and fishing and driving trucks and drinking beer and swimming in lakes and having guns – it’s just how I grew up,” she told me. “That’s all the shit I’m really into.” TruckSluts is completely a reflection of everything Bunny holds dear. It gives homage to rural iconography of the American West, Plains, and South tied in with the brash and bawdy grit of pinup art. It’s art that wrenches culture from the hands of people gatekeeping against queers. “I’m also a trans woman and gay,” Bunny said, “and it felt bad to always feel like you had to choose one or the other, like you could be into all this shit [trucks, beer, guns] or be queer, but not both, you know, and it felt wrong to me. Like I knew that wasn’t true. But at the time TruckSluts came out, there wasn’t a lot of representation of rural queerness yet.”
Bunny relocated to the Bay Area from rural Tennessee and has mixed feelings about living in a city, but remarks on the stresses of being a remote queer: “It got really exhausting to see if someone would ever hire a trans woman in rural Tennessee and the answer to that was ‘no.’ Am I gonna be able to go to a bar without getting fucked with, the answer was ‘sometimes.’ Am I gonna be able to drive on the highway without drunk high school kids whipping around to harass me? You’re always worried about it. You stick out a lot more. More noticeable.”
Since moving to the Bay Area, the part where she had to worry all the time disappeared and she didn’t realize how much of her energy it was taking up. “But there’s a trade off — now I live in the city and it’s loud as shit. It takes forever to get anywhere and it’s expensive as hell and I hate it and I love it.” But it wasn’t something she really elected to do. “It’s a survival thing for a lot of queers. Like we don’t want to leave the country. But in order for me to have a quality of life that I want, I needed to get where my existence isn’t such a fucking threat to people.”
Queers have always existed, including in rural communities, and with the internet have become more organized and visible. “[Queer community] exists. It’s just rinky dink and small a lot of the time, sadly. Queers in rural areas have to spend half their energy dealing with threats to their survival, there’s not a lot left over.” Threats like low employment to no healthcare to outright persecution — queers have to battle through every other kind of oppression and then still have the energy to become activists.
TruckSluts isn’t intended to make rural queerness palatable to city dwellers, but to show rad queers and cool trucks, and the community has led it by sending in submissions. Bunny started to get photos from people all over the country. “It helps people see that there are other people doing the same shit. It’s good to see other gay rednecks. What I hear a lot is [something along the lines of], ‘We’re the only ones out here and it’s great to see babes homesteading, or gay queers and rednecks working seasonal jobs, working beet harvest, or people living in their trucks.’ People are excited to see it. If you go to truck Instagram, which is totally a thing, it’s so white supremacist, and heterosupremecist, heterofocused, and it’s fucking gross. It’s all Punisher skulls and thin blue lines, super gross sovereign citizen garbage, and I hate it. They shouldn’t have it or get to own it.”
Bunny created the hashtag #makingtrucksgay as a response to how much of gun and redneck culture is dominated by white hetero cis supremacy. “I remember growing up that people would be like, ‘You can’t have a truck, trucks are for men.’ And if you didn’t have a truck they’d yell, ‘Nice car, f—-t.’ But if you did have a truck they’d try to like take that from you. ‘If you’re queer you can’t fish, or if you’re queer you can’t go mudding’ or like have a gun and shoot it. All of that is supposed to be for men, specifically white men.”
The struggle to own your culture and have it hate you is a constant balancing act of identity, and art like TruckSluts is important for facilitating visibility, but also community. Bunny sells bumper stickers that say things like “Gone Fistin’” and “If you’re gonna ride my ass, at least gimme a reach around!” as ways for queers to commander truck culture from white supremacy.
Threats aside, Bunny misses the country. Saying of the city she lives in, “It’s removed a lot of stress from my life but added a lot of others. It’s just not home, it’s loud, it’s bright. I like quiet, I like the solitude, I like being able to go outside and not see anyone else.”
It’s really complicated for rural queers to find space to survive with the collision of oppression that is poverty, racism, and homophobia and transphobia. Physical safety is always a concern, but employment and access to financial security is a huge problem. “Any time an area becomes moderately progressive, all these real estate developers swoop in and before you know it, it’s Nevada City and you can never afford to live there no more. I don’t want to live somewhere where I’m never going to go on a date again, where I’m local color. If I have a choice I want to move somewhere where there’s a large queer community. Even if I have to build it myself. And I’ve lived in intentional communities before, and I know they aren’t the be-all end-all that people all think they’ll be, but I’m still drawn to it.”
The future of TruckSluts is probably a place other than Instagram, thanks to the Orwellian policies of Fosta-Sesta. Social media platforms, in arbitrary attempts to stop sex trafficking, have been cracking down on queer and sex worker content, removing posts, banning accounts, and pushing queer culture and expression, once again, underground (I beg you to call your senators). Laws and policing like this not only extinguish our art, but remove a lot of our access to community, especially in places where people are a long way out. TruckSluts is often in peril of being shut down or banned, hence the added push to make TruckSluts a tangible print publication.
“There are gay rednecks, there have always been gay rednecks, and there always will be too.”
Wmn Zine: What It Means To Be A “Rural Lesbian”
Wmn Zine, the love letter to lesbians created by Jeanette Spicer, Florencia Alvarado, and Sarah Duell , is the exploring the radical nature of the term “lesbian.” With the current chiseling away of gender detritus, “lesbian” has been in a strange space. Clung to by trans-exclusionists (aka bigots), lesbian is in constant peril of being absorbed into history as “old fashioned.” But Wmn Zine’s team seeks to explore its possible ability to be adapted and repossessed. Gender might be a spectrum, but it can also be a word cloud. “When thinking of our own identifications, we realized that the term lesbian was in ways a signifier of the past, and could even be considered radical.”
Wmn Zine’s first issue, Season of the Dyke , explores the collision of lesbian with rural landscape, and that’s very personal for the editorial team. “I don’t see myself as a city person forever,” laughs Spicer over the phone. Along with the rest of the editorial staff of Wmn Zine, she’s living in Brooklyn, but as a formal rural lesbian (formerly rural, the lesbian paperwork is still up to date), she hasn’t forgotten her roots. “We wanted to put together a project where artists could share insight for their environment and their location, and how their lesbian experience informs that.”
https://www.instagram.com/p/B3nGxkkBscV/
Spicer is from rural Maryland, and wanted to create a focus around rural lesbianism with a particular interest in older lesbians, “I think elder reverence is really missing in America, and I wish we had more of a community in New York City of older lesbians. It’s such a youth culture.”
“The lesbian community is one that encapsulates so many beautiful women and non-binary people with a long history in art, literature, and life,” says contributor Gabrielle Grace Hogan, a poet who grew up in Missouri without a queer scene she could easily recognize. “Gay women sometimes don’t find themselves comfortable with the word lesbian, for multiple reasons, and I think a lot of it has to do with this stigma against women whose lives have nothing to do with men in any capacity.” Iowa Poetry Prize winning poet Alicia Mountain agrees with Hogan that the avoidance or apprehension of the term “lesbian” can be an intersection of homophobia and misogyny. “Lesbian still kind of weirds people out. I think ‘lesbian’ makes more folks in mainstream culture feel uncomfortable. It’s a bit of an awkward word, it doesn’t roll off the tongue, sounds a little bit clinical. And I kind of love that it’s not normative.”
The fraught relationship people feel around “lesbian” also extends to “rural,” a term with clear definition but smudged meaning. So much coverage of queer in rural spaces are about the whole, so to drill down to specifically rural lesbians is remarkable. To quote Elizabeth Catte, author of What You’re Getting Wrong About Appalachia, “Rural spaces are often thought of as places absent of things, from amenities to people of color to radical politics” and much of the queer experience is wrapped up in a hero’s journey of escape. Hugh Ryan’s essay in Left Elsewhere: Finding the Future in Radical Rural America discusses the narrative of It Gets Better, the project developed by Dan Savage that encourages queer people to grow up, leave their hometowns, and seek respite in the relative safety of major metropolitan areas.
As a former rural queer who has “fled” to “safety,” this writer knows that most safety is an illusion. While people don’t follow me home calling me a “dyke” quite as often as they used to, men still interrupt with a date in a bar to tell us how beautiful we look together. While there are often more concentrated numbers of queer people in cities, rural America is not absent of queers. In 2014 the National Center for Lesbian Rights developed the first #RuralPride that has grown into events across the country. A 2017 study indicated that West Virginia had the highest density of transgender people in the nation . The queers have remained, and they’re organized and know how to change your oil.
Contributor Libby Paloma, a Chicanx interdispinary artist featured in Seasons of the Dyke, spent three years in upstate New York says while she also identifies with the term “queer,” she feels more of an emotional connection to lesbian, especially as a femme. “I find comfort in the word ‘lesbian’ because as a high femme person, I have to out myself all the time.” While living in rural upstate New York, Paloma’s environment ignored her queerness and racial identity, defaulting to a heteropatriarchal lens that forced her to self-disclose her queerness and her race. “Just not being taken seriously [in my gender and sexuality] most places I go, there is this ‘take me, take my culture, take my personhood, and my sexuality serious.’”
Wmn Zine’s team gives the space and landscape for lesbians to speak for themselves. Seasons of the Dyke features incredible breadth of artwork, from photography to sketches to poetry to stencil work, women and non-binary creators like Stephanie Littlebird Fogel, Erina Colombo, and Jess Fry. Spicer says, “I connected so much with how these individuals were so earnest and all the submissions were so personal and intimate.” It took two months from the open call to get Seasons of the Dyke into production, and Wmn Zine hopes to have three issues a year. “This work could have been made anywhere, but I kind of like that. It makes everything come together, and not to be cheesy, but we all are one.”
Spicer always had an affinity for Appalachia, and when discourse surrounds rural space, the social mind defaults to Appalachia or other southern rural people, but Seasons of the Dyke takes work from rural spaces all over the nation, from the mountains of Colorado to the trailer parks of California to upstate New York. One of the artists recently moved to a more rural space when they made their piece, and it was more plain and not as colorful as their usual work.
When asked what surprised her most about country queer culture, Spicer said, “the subtlety of rural queer identity.” Queer community is not something exclusive to metro spaces, but it’s important to expose the non-universal journey of queer people. We stand out from the herd, but also each other.
Preorder WMN zine’s Season of the Dyke (Jan 2020) on wmnzine.com.
The Communist Pleasure Activism That’s Helping Erase Medical Debt in Appalachia
Editor’s Note (September 2020): When we published this article on November 9, 2019 we believed Mutual Aid Lube when they described both their collective organization structure and what they were doing with the funds they raised. On August 3, 2020 Emma Copley Eisenberg wrote an investigative piece in The Washington Post Magazine titled “The Tale of Queer Appalachia,” bringing into question how the organization is run and where the money they have raised over the years really goes. We are leaving this article up, but urge readers to check out Eisenberg’s piece and to stop giving money to Mutual Aid Lubeuntil they provide clarity and confirmation about where the funds are going and who they are really supporting.
Dispatches from the Country Culture War is a monthly column that explores queer country music and art, and examines how it informs broader community opinions about rural queers.
Mutual Aid Lube, a “vegan plant-based lube made by queers for queers,” started off as “a crazy idea I had alone on a mountaintop daydreaming,” according to the organization’s founder, Chelsea. A queer resident of the mountains of West Virginia, Chelsea’s project — tagline: “a fistin’ lube for lovers and others” — partners with RIP Medical Debt, an organization committed to buying up and forgiving medical debt all across the country. RIP Medical Debt has a specific project for Appalachia because the need is so great. With healthcare being a major issue in the nation at the moment, and discussions of the opioid crisis and student loan debt dominating major political debates, Chelsea wanted to create something that dealt directly with medical debt in a funny and queer way.
The results of the 2016 election have put more attention on rural America as a means to better understand the perceived group of people who put Donald Trump in office — working class white people living in remote and small town communities. This political narrative has been proven false, but in anticipation of the 2020 election there’s continued observation of the large portions of the country considered “rural.” I asked Chelsea what they considered the difference between “rural” and “country,” considering the terms are used fairly interchangeably and provoke very specific images for different people.
“I use rural for a more clinical context,” they told me.” When I describe institutional systems and trends I use the term ‘rural.’ I’m more likely to use the term rural if I’m talking to folks in an urban area. Country has more romance, I use it when describing cultural setting, landscapes, and feelings.”
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Chelsea’s is an unusual story in that they moved from a metropolitan area to the Mountains. Most narratives on rural queer life revolve around small towns and small minds forcing their queer citizens to flee to the bastions of major cities, specifically coastal ones like New York, San Francisco, or Los Angeles. But Chelsea moved from the Washington DC area to several parts of Appalachia before settling in West Virginia. An interdisciplinary artist specializing in multimedia work, including textiles and sculpture and furniture design, Chelsea experienced their own medical debt specter after going to the hospital for a concussion and ending up with a multi thousand dollar bill.
“A couple thousand dollars to someone who lives on less than, like, ten thousand a year can be pretty intense so I have a lot of compassion for people who experience those problems.”
They couldn’t pay it, and the experience affected their credit and relationships in their personal life. “I have a special soft spot for medical debt,” they told me,
The name of the lube, for those who didn’t have communist pamphlets under their bed as a teen, comes from the concept of Mutual Aid — a voluntary exchange of resources for mutual benefit designed to not operate as charity, but as greater community building. Chelsea rented an allergy and pet-free kitchen, and is learning as they go. “I want to be as considerate as possible in how I go about doing this.”
The idea of Mutual Aid Lube might have begun as a dream on a mountaintop, but it’s certainly popular now that it’s in the world. Inspired by adrienne maree brown’s book, Pleasure Activism, Chelsea began making lube solutions because store bought products didn’t work for them, and decided to put some humor into the work. Since promoting on Instagram, preorders are open, previous orders have shipped out, and customers have the option to purchase additional medical debt as part of their order. So far, Chelsea’s been able to help forgive $55,000 of medical debt in Appalachia.
Chelsea’s doing most of the work themselves, from promotion to manufacturing to design, and was surprised and excited at how interested people were in the product. “I did a lot of research first, and it’s been a slow and steady march to getting the ingredients together to testing things to talking to sexual educators about what concerns I would need to look out for.” Chelsea is also excited about getting attention from harm reduction groups and sexual advocacy “rooted in a field of other activists who are working on important projects who are in the same family of helping people helping each other… Coming from an arts background, people get really competitive with each other and it can be exhausting. A byproduct of capitalism is this idea that we’re all competing with each other which is obviously so unnecessary. It’s been truly wonderful to see the support from people who just want to put in an order for lube and be part of a DIY project that popped up on the internet a few weeks ago.”
Chelsea was living in the Mountains during the 2016 election, and got to watch first hand how the political climate as shaped the area: “Lives were changed as far as health, Medicaid, and benefits slowly being taken away from folks. I want to say it’s been like a slow crushing of people’s livelihood.”
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It’s easy to dismiss Southern Appalachia and West Virginia as being backward or being more bigoted that urban epicenters, but Chelsea says that kind of thinking, “erases all the groups that are here and doing exciting things [for their communities].”
However, being a rural queer is not without very specific challenges. According to the Where We Call Home: LGBT in Rural America, a report by MAP, the largest struggles for rural queers are their visibility, fewer resources, and the ripple effects of rejection. With resources diminishing overall in rural areas, the reduction of access is even greater for the upwards of three million rural queers where healthcare can be religiously motivated, and communities are more likely to take advantage of the lack of state and federal protections for queer people.
“It’s a different existence. There are certain shirts I don’t wear out of the house. When I’m in more rural areas I have to think about safety a lot more, and sometimes that looks like being really specific about what bathrooms you stop at on long drives. Sometimes it’s remembering which waitresses or what gas stations don’t want to serve you at, and avoiding those.”
Yet, Chelsea feels just as exhausted wading through the microaggressions of urbanites when they find out they live in West Virginia. Not all rural communities are created equal, “I try to be careful to not speak for someone who was raised here or grew up here, because I understand that’s a completely different experience.” Chelsea has also lived in rural upstate New York (the part with confederate flags) and notes that not all rural experiences are the same. Appalachia is more of a healthcare desert, Chelsea says, “Sometimes It feels very jobless here”
In the wake of the discussions about debt, there’s a lot of conversation about education, but medical debt affects 25% of Americans, and more than half of medical debt carriers have no other forms of debt. It can prevent access to housing, lead to bankruptcy, and facilitate generational and systemic poverty. And then there’s the opioid epidemic. Pharmaceutical companies targeted West Virginia with painkillers, specifically coal country, and created a deadly plague that’s resulted in thousands of deaths.
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“There’s no time for you to take off and recover from your injuries, especially as people get older. You gotta sorta suck it up and take your pills so you can go to work and bring home some money.” Chelsea sees a direct connection of the trap of medical debt and the resource extraction that’s been a long problem in West Virginia. Where the state is valuable for its timber, coal, and natural gas, the money from those industries has never really matriculated into the local economies and results in very hard lives for residents. “What I’m trying to do is approach the problem from the level of praxis and reach people where they’re at.”
Chelsea’s queer sexuality has always been present in their work, and while attending graduate school, they managed the student run gallery and curated a collection called Queering the Mountains. With this project, Chelsea’s main goal isn’t to make money — “this would be a terrible business model” — but to cover expenses and get people to talk about medical debt and demonstrate that “you can mix your praxis and the way you find your light.”
A Lesbian Etiquette Guide to Stealing Rural Farms
It’s been an exciting couple of weeks for Autostraddle, and not just because we’ve gotten to continue our celebration of the Bisexual Takeover of 2016. The anticipation of which pop star is coming out next has been reason enough to get us out of bed in the morning, but we’ve also been blessed by Obama’s vetting of the Lesbian Takeover of America’s Rural Southern Farms (Article Nine, Section Two of The Gay Agenda).
And it’s not just us who can’t get enough of this news! The mainstream media has gotten a hold of it and some people are so excited that they’re literally screaming about it on the radio! Have you ever cared about anything so much that you’ve screamed into a microphone about it, every syllable being amplified, no – empowered? I want you to really think about that.
Truthfully, though, this is not what I saw being chosen for The Gay Agenda’s next phase of implementation. I was hoping if anything was going to be vetted by POTUS it was going to be the Lesbian Takeover of America’s Got Talent (Article Twelve, Section One of The Gay Agenda) because I think it’s fair to estimate three billion people watch it and quite frankly I’d love to be a judge, but it’s important to remember that rural farms are the heart of America and therefore their destruction is the most strategic, if boring, choice.
So, what does this mean for us? Now that everything’s been made public, the roll out on this is going to be quick. Things are going to get complicated and you’re going to have questions! What rural town from which you’ll steal land is best for you? Should you diversify and steal from multiple areas? Should you stake claim on your new land by driving a dildo into the ground?
Then there’s the culture difference. Not to mention the circumstances surrounding your acquaintance! There’s a lot to consider here and you’re probably thinking there’s just no way there’s precedence for something like this. And guess what? You’re wrong. I’ve been stealing rural southern farms as a lesbian for years. Here’s everything I’ve learned about the etiquette of it.
Write Them A ‘Thank You’ Note
If you remember nothing else today remember this: the thank you note in a rural southern setting is as imperative as central AC. It’s also your most invaluable power move.
Now technically because you’ve stolen this farm it’s not something your neighbors have necessarily given you, but still, aren’t you grateful to have it? There’s no way this can come off as pouring salt in the wounds, so get elaborate with it! “Hey y’all, thank you sooooooooooooooooooo much for this wonderful gift! We can’t wait to see where this ‘grows” with you!’ and then maybe a bunch of cry-laughing emojis.
Give Them A Copy of You’ve Got Mail
In this scenario we’re essentially the Fox Books to their Shop Around the Corner. This will be a playful suggestion of where things can progress from a state of tension if you just give it time and communicate via calculated omissions about your true self and intentions. Maybe like in the movie you’ll even get to a point where you share a dog together, as is custom in your culture.
Bring Them A Baked Good, You Asshole!
Bringing a baked good to a new neighbor is usually the responsibility of the established residents, but in this case you sort of owe them for forcibly removing their old neighbors. Bake your pie, tart or turnover with ingredients from your newly stolen farm!
Never Talk Money
Specifically, how much you’re going to make from your newly stolen farm.
Throw Your All White Party Between Easter and Labor Day
As is custom in lesbian tradition, we honor those people who have gone before us. To Dinah Shore’s All White Party. Still, that’s no reason to be untimely (read: tacky) about it.
Walk Curbside of the Women You’re Recruiting
There was a time when lesbians could take straight women on recruitment walks without the inconveniences or dangers of road traffic. Just free floating down a path together as plans for the recruitment cookout were set in place. Now it’s custom that when we take these walks with potential draftees we remain curbside to protect their vulnerable state.
Talk in Euphemisms
Around company it’s best to talk about harsh or private realities by cushioning them with softened language. After all, disassociating has been a part of southern rural life since the War of Northern Aggression! Sometimes something as simple as a woman being pregnant is too rooted in realism and she instead becomes a woman that is “expecting.” So: when referencing your lesbian bed death, explain that your lesbian bed has “passed” rather than “died.”
Draw Your Blinds When Brushing Your Gal Pal’s Hair
Brushing our lesbian partner’s hair as a means of intimacy is a thing we all do at night. Except now you’ll have to do it with your blinds drawn, because in the rural south it’s considered uncouth for a lady to be seen grooming in public. Herself or others! This one’s a bit old school, but so are you now.
“AWOL” Tackles Rural Poverty in a Brillant Lesbian Love Story
“I wanted to run away from who we had been seen to be, who we had been. That desire is one I have seen in other members of my family. It is the first thing I think of when trouble comes — the geographic solution. Change your name, leave town, disappear, make yourself over,” Dorothy Allison writes in her seminal essay “A Question of Class.” While watching Deb Shoval’s first feature film AWOL, it’s all too easy to imagine these escapist ideations racing through the two main characters’ minds.
In the drama, shiny new high school graduate Joey (Lola Kirke) is nudged by her overworked grandmother to make something of herself. An Army recruiter promises the teen that she’ll get to see the world if she signs on the dotted line. All Joey really wants to do is be elsewhere, not necessarily Afghanistan. Like so many young rural Pennsylvanians before her, it’s the promise of a reliable paycheck that nudges Joey in the Army’s direction. Around that same time, she encounters 27 year-old Rayna (Breeda Wool), an immaculate piece of trailer trash who doesn’t miss a beat. It’s not until Joey has seduced and been seduced that, in the haze of a hungover morning, she’s forced to acknowledge that Rayna has children and an unhappy, distant marriage of convenience with a trucker; neither of these things deter her. Joey, however, is deterred from her military commitment. Together, the two women drum up a plan — one that, given their stagnant reality, always feels a tad more fantastical than real — to flee their pocket of Appalachia for Canada.
Breeda Wool in AWOL
AWOL — which has been honored by the Kansas City LGBT Film Festival, qFLIX Philadelphia, and the North Carolina Gay & Lesbian Film Festival — got its start as a short film at Sundance in 2011. At a Q&A after the feature-length film’s world premiere at the Tribeca this spring, Deb Shoval noted that AWOL, which is an indulgent yet brief 80 minutes, took an arduous four years to make.
Of course filmmakers experience a sense of time uniquely theirs; it is impacted by money (crowdsourcing was integral to AWOL’s completion), bodies (Kirke was temporarily unavailable while filming Noah Baumbach’s Mistress America), and the right words (the gifted Karolina Waclawiak co-wrote the final script). However, this made me pause to consider Jack Halberstam’s notion of queer time, the one that Lila cited in a beautiful essay a month before AWOL’s premiere: Queer time for me is the dark nightclub, the perverse turn away from the narrative coherence of adolescence–early adulthood–marriage–reproduction–child rearing–retirement–death. In scenes where Joey and Rayna are sneaking away on a camping trip like they’re in the throes of a youth they both missed out on, or are coiled around one another in a room opposite Rayna’s slumbering children, Shoval’s flick certainly fits Halberstam’s definition.
Yet it feels important to consider one more construct: Rural time. The six years of silence before the cicadas return. How a 15-minute drive through a sparse town often feels like it’s peeling years away from your life. The way having nothing to do means that there’s nowhere to be. Rural time seems to be AWOL’s blessing and curse: the movie, which was shot in Shoval’s bucolic hometown of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania — is so committed to the speed of the beautiful place where it’s set that it’s initially slow-going. If one’s not patient with it, she might make the fatal error of mistaking it for one of Wolfe Video’s saccharine direct-to-DVD releases. It’s okay if you can’t figure out if you’re watching a Great American Love Story or yet another Tale of Tormented Lesbian Love within the first 30 minutes (full disclosure: AWOL is neither).
AWOL approaches its characters with the same delicate dignity that it approaches place. Lola Kirke has a great reputation for portraying alluring, drawling hick tomboys (look no further than her scene-stealing bit part in Gone Girl where she effortlessly hustles a Yankee), but this role feels special because her character, who is of a rarely depicted archetype, is both prominent and well-written. In that previously mentioned essay on class, Allison also writes, “The choice becomes Steven Spielberg movies or Erskine Caldwell novels, the one valorizing and the other caricaturing, or the patriarchy as villain, trivializing the choices the men and women of my family have made. I have had to fight broad generalizations from every theoretical viewpoint.” Joey resists being both a poster girl for both hillbilly kitsch and tragic poverty porn. This is because, before anything else, AWOL is a movie about class: every single move made, be it across the Canadian border or setting foot into a pawn shop, has an impact on Joey and Rayna’s wallets and the contents of their families’ bellies.
“Initially, some people were seeing earlier cuts of the film and really wanting to talk about gay marriage or Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and some topics that maybe are not the pressing thing right now,” Shoval mentioned in an interview at Columbia University earlier this year. “And for me, this film, in the largest sense, is about class and disparity of wealth.”
The actors understand this, too. “If anything, I love my daughter,” Dale Soules, who plays Joey’s mother, said at the premiere, speaking as her character. “That’s the main thing and though there are these sexuality questions, the economic questions are more pressing…I’m a single mother with three jobs. I don’t know how to economically help her right now, although I don’t want her to get stuck in rural Pennsylvania.” It’s too easy to note that small places are slow at addressing issues of gender and sexuality while not exploring why. This is the answer to the why (and it’s one that AWOL addresses exceptionally well): Because there are far bigger fish to fry, including rural poverty, social class stratification, and racism. It’s easy to avert one’s eyes from the mildly troubling act of homosexuality when your birthright has already picked bigger battles for you.
Lola Kirke in AWOL
Not unlike moments in Sunshine Cleaning when one sister hands another a few bucks to make it through the week or when Michelle Williams’ character anxiously scribbles down her dwindling budget in Wendy and Lucy, poverty’s tension is exhaustingly palpable throughout AWOL. The viewer wonders when Rayna’s husband is going to kick her out, or when Joey’s final military stipend will run dry — What will happen to them as a duo then? It’s not regional intolerance that strains them; it’s the limitations of their own bank accounts.
Talking about class can be ugly. Yet as AWOL asserts, when you dare to comment, sometimes it frees up room for beauty to unfurl.
In a particularly magical sequence, Joey, whose relationship with Rayna is on the rocks, is working as an Army recruiter in a shopping mall. Tanned and muscled up from basic training, she’s immediately cruised by Haley (played by Britne Oldford, who some may remember from the American reboot of Skins) and invited to her party. The attraction is mutual; Joey, looking for an escape between escapes, accepts.
When the night arrives, we find Joey around a dinner table table with her ultimate adversaries: Youthful, Seven Sisters-educated practitioners of queer theory. The kids inaccessibly wax intellectual over their own identities, the horrors of capitalism (to which they’re the least susceptible), and Joey’s military affiliation. This moment can easily be paralleled with Max nee Moira’s infamous lobster dinner moment on The L Word. Here we have yet another class interloper in dungarees and button-up flannel who is overwhelmed by the upper echelon’s sophistication. But unlike Moira, Joey isn’t painfully eviscerated for the sake of socioeconomically comfortable viewers. She doesn’t nervously fiddle around with her sparse salad and attempt to fit in by telling a tone-deaf story about crustaceans. Joey, incredibly self-aware, sees through all of the pretense and puts up with none of it. After all, she’s only there to get laid. When Joey ambles up to leave, she’s stopped by Haley. That night, the girl shoves a pair of military grade combat boots into Joey’s chest, who immediately indulges Haley’s secret military fetish; Woke Black Girl and White Trash having their escapist needs met, at the same time, by one another.
AWOL is quietly meandering around the country and is certainly worth following. The film was shown at the Reel Creative Cinema Fest in Miami in early August and will screen at the Bradbury Sullivan Center in Bradbury, Pennsylvania on September 8th. To stay abreast of AWOL’s screenings and release, follow the film’s Facebook Page.