Just Queer Folks: Gender and Sexuality in Rural America by Colin R. Johnson (review)

Historians of American sexual practices have tended toward a seductive geography of desire: metropolitan bubbles of nonnormative sexual possibility floating in a vast and undifferentiated ocean of heteronormativity. This academic conventional wisdom coincides with two popular cultural scripts that are actually different sides of the same coin. In one, a (usually white male) gay youth flees the violent homophobia of small-town life to find liberation, acceptance, romance, and fabulous sex in the throbbing metropolis. In the other, nonmetropolitan spaces are the holdfasts of decaying “traditional” gendered and sexual order—the way families, sex, and pleasure “used to be.” Colin R. Johnson’s excellent book, Just Queer Folks: Gender and Sexuality in Rural America, is a crucial corrective to this cartography of desire precisely because it upends many of the commonsense assumptions both historians and the public make about how space and sexuality have been historically entwined.

Johnson argues that “heterosexuality had to be constructed in nonmetropolitan America in much the same way that it had to be constructed everyplace else” (18). Early twentieth-century nonmetropolitan spaces rippled with ribald, heterogeneous, and famously perverse sexual arrangements, and rural reform projects consequently prioritized the moral reform of notoriously perverse country folk. Heteronormalization was neither located nor contested exclusively—or even primarily—in the metropolis; rather, much of twentieth-century national sexual culture emerged from the language, logic, and conflicts circumscribing sexuality in the countryside. Just Queer Folks embeds these processes of heteronormalization within the context of the developing political economy of nonmetropolitan spaces dominated by industrial agriculture and resource extraction. In this, Johnson connects the fluid norms around gender and sexuality to transitioning landscapes, labor regimes, land tenure, technical modes of production, and governing institutions.

Johnson focuses on the nonmetropolitan DNA of national heteronormalization in the book’s first section, whose two chapters explore the agrarian roots of the human eugenics movement and the sexual emphasis of rural reform and modernization movements, respectively. The book’s second section excavates the chaotic and fluid arrangements that rural reformers sought—and consistently failed—to correct. In these four chapters, Johnson describes acts, relationships, persons, and performances that we might now code as queer but that were entirely commonplace in early twentieth-century nonmetropolitan spaces. Johnson renders in entertaining detail the erotic homosocial worlds built by itinerant laborers on farms and in mines; the modes of inclusion of gender and sexually nonnormative individuals in nonmetropolitan communities; the homoerotics and sexual politics of the New Deal–era Civilian Conservation Corps; and cultural celebrations of the hardened masculinity of farmwomen.

Undergirding this history is an incisive commentary on the spatial categories that stabilize many social histories of sexuality in the United States. Johnson notes that while historians write with great confidence about the sexual histories of specific urban communities, rural desire is inevitably mapped on a procrustean bed: specific rural communities are too small to be representative, but the “rural” is too large a category “to sustain … generalizable claims on the strength of numerous examples” (12). The result is that while historians of urban sexuality enjoy access to the recognizable tools of “disciplinary social history,” huge swaths of America’s sexual history remain obscure and disconnected from the primarily urban story of heteronormalization. Johnson deploys instead a “queer historicism” that blends creative and incisive cultural analysis with more conventional archival social and political history (17). Just Queer Folks provides a vivid picture of the sexual and gendered diversity of prewar nonmetropolitan spaces undergoing tumultuous social, political, economic, and environmental transformation. Johnson’s countryside is far from archaic or preindustrial; quite to the contrary, Johnson depicts both the erotic and social structures of the hinterlands as every bit as rich, complex, and modern as those found in the city—that is, still shaped fundamentally by the same forces of industrial capitalism and statist rationalization that sustained urbanization.

Just Queer Folks is particularly compelling...