159 David Allan Coe was a top-selling singer and songwriter in his 1970s prime, but his antibourgeois and antihomophobic 1978 underground album track “Fuck Aneta Briant” stands apart, in its ribaldry and blatant obscenity, from mainstream country music. By 1992, Garth Brooks had sounded a more earnest , even churchy, antihomophobic note with “We Shall Be Free.” More recent antihomophobic and queer-friendly country releases include Toby Keith’s “I Love This Bar” (#1 2004, #26 Pop), whose video features a comically sympathetic transwoman in its colorful cast of characters, and Willie Nelson’s contribution to the Brokeback Mountain sound track, “Cowboys Are Frequently Secretly Fond of Each Other” (2006). Phil Vassar’s “Bobbi with an I” (#46 2010) is a gently humorous ode to a regular Joe, one-of-theguys transvestite that urges, “live and let live.” Rascal Flatts’ title line in “Love Who You Love” (2009) signified to many listeners in much the same way as Brooks’s “free to love anyone we choose” had done years earlier. In “All Kinds of Kinds” (2011) Miranda Lambert presents a set of vignettes on fringy and eccentric characters, including a cross-dressing congressman, that unfolds over a compelling and equally eccentric two-against-three polyrhythmic groove. The refrain, “Ever since the beginning, to keep the world spinning / It takes all kinds of kinds,” is extended in the coda to call out those who “point a finger,” making the song’s ultimate message one of hillbilly humanism.1 Her fellow Texan singer-songwriter Kacey Musgraves’s #1 country album, Same Trailer, Different Park (2013), elicited comparisons to Lambert and includes a track, “Follow Your Arrow,” exhorting listeners to “Love who you love” (echoing Rascal Flatts) and to pursue their own paths “When the straight and narrow / Gets a little too straight.” A salient theme in these queer-affirmative country songs is LGBTQ characters ’ belonging within an everyday, regular-folk social world. The realm of Outro 160 / Outro regular folk may be marked as socioeconomically low (e.g., “Fuck Aneta Briant”), as small-town or rural (e.g., “Cowboys Are Frequently Secretly Fond of Each Other”), or as both (e.g.,“Bobbi with an I”).This book’s discussion of country music and the queer has focused primarily on the social and political workings of socioeconomic class—whose high/low opposition is often represented symbolically in urban/rustic oppositions. But the rustic and provincial meanings associated with country music also link to another analytic perspective on the queer, one that asks how queerness operates in actual social spaces structured, not by urban anonymity, but by small-town familiarity.These are spaces in which everybody knows everybody’s business via networks of relationship and exchange tracing an individual’s history back across years, often from birth. Rural and small-town sites have long been imagined as antithetical to LGBTQ life, the very places one must escape in order to realize queer desires. But current research on LGBTQ life in rural America complicates and questions prevailing assumptions. Recent studies of rural LGBTQ people by the sociologist Emily Kazyak and the anthropologist Mary Gray, among others, suggest that established presence in the community and adherence to moral values like loyalty, honor, and personal sincerity come before all else—including sexual identity —in rural social life. The rural cultural logic of social coexistence and interaction involves being known and trusted, accepted in the community as “a good person.”2 Then, according to some queer locals, you can be whatever you want to be. In the words of one rural gay man,“Most people really don’t give a damn.”3 We need more research to know the extent to which such findings on rural social life might jibe with class-based traits in social life. I would note, however, that Lamont has flagged the same qualities identified here with the rural—of loyalty, honor, and personal sincerity—as paramount values in the American working class.4 Pursuing these resonances between rural and working-class repertoires, we might observe that another way of viewing the rural social ethos described here—in which being a “good person” takes priority over identity labeling—is as a species of walk-the-walk values , in which actions speak louder than words and substance trumps surface . In this connection we might recall Ollivier’s study identifying greater working-class respect for “useful” occupations than for others designated prestigious, Walker’s research finding walk-the-walk values in workingclass friendship, Ehrenreich and Valentine...