From Websites to Wal-Mart: Youth, Identity Work, and the Queering of Boundary Publics in Small Town, USA

Don was the first of his friends from the Highland Pride Alliance (HPA) to arrive at the donut shop attached to the Gas-n'-Go.¹ It was the only coffee place open after 6:00 p.m. in their small town of 3,000. Their usual group meeting space—the basement of the local public county library—was already booked with another community group.

HPA was slowly reviving as a community-wide social support group for local lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender (LGBT) people and their straight allies after languishing in the drama of its cofounders' breakup. More than thirty people now participated in larger, monthly HPA community fundraisers and picnics but fewer than ten regularly attended its organizational meetings. HPA's most active members were white, gay-identifying men between 17 and 22, although there were a few members in their late fifties and mid-sixties and participants as young as fourteen. The majority did not have steady incomes or concrete plans (not to mention local options) for schooling beyond high school. Several HPA participants had attended one or two semesters of community college in larger towns before running out of money and moving back to home. The group was not an official private not-for-profit 501(c)3 but they did their best to operate like the all-volunteer community-based organizations found in larger cities in their state.

When I began attending HPA meetings and events and getting to know its members and their social networks, the group had only recently reinstated biweekly meetings and still didn't have a "routine of gathering" according to Don, HPA's president. At this particular meeting, talk of HPA's upcoming Halloween fundraiser seamlessly turned to casual gossip and chatter regarding this evening's after-meeting plans. Possibilities were bandied about and then dismissed as "too boring" or "too far away." Jay tossed out the idea of heading over to neighboring Springhaven, Kentucky—forty minutes due south—to do some drag at the Wal-Mart. The group's collective roar of affirming whoops and laughter drew the eyes of two bleach-blonde-haired women in their mid-twenties listlessly tending to the donut display case and coffee hot plates. Don met their tentative smiles with a large grin and a small princess-atop-a-float hand wave. Turning back to the group, he giggled, then purred softly, "Now, settle it down, y'all."

That boisterous LGBT-identifying young people scattered throughout rural Kentucky and its borders move between public libraries, Christian bookstores, gas stations, house parties, websites, and Wal-Mart may seem unexpected at first glance. Why the surprise? Well, it is true that we know very little about rural youth negotiating LGBT or questioning identities. Most literature frames queer youth sexualities and genders as an individual mental health issue (or crisis) rather than as vibrant, collectively negotiated identities.² Perhaps the overriding reason for our surprise at the sheer publicness and brash visibility of LGBT youth in Christian bookstores and Wal-Marts is that rural environments are presumed to be (more) hostile to queer desires and genders and, therefore rural LGBTQ-identifying youth (at least the self-respecting ones?) must have already left their small towns for the big city.³ The imagining of rural spaces as inhospitable to difference is commonplace. Perhaps, as Donna Smith suggests, "myths [about Northerners and Southerners] function . . . as ideological constructs set within binary oppositions."⁴ That is, urban sophistication, with its tolerance, even celebration, of its queer eyes needs an abject, rural red state Other to both confirm the liberalness of the city and signal the backwardness of the country.

To date, most historical and political renderings of queer life focus on the possibilities afforded by the public and private spaces of urban centers.⁵ Even within queer narratives of the recent rural past, private house parties serve as the central location of queer possibility and gathering—if any gathering is imagined possible at all.⁶ But, as Smith suggests, "[p]rojects that use region as a...