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Out in the Country: Youth, Media, and Queer Visibility in Rural America, by Mary L. Gray. New York, NY: New York University Press, 2009. 279pp. $22.00 paper. ISBN: 9780814731932.
Mary Gray's Out in the Country is a fascinating, multi-site ethnographic exploration and analysis of queer visibility and identities in rural Kentucky. Gray draws upon nineteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in the small towns of Kentucky and its border regions to explore rural queer youth identity formation, visibility, and media use. What emerges is a thoughtful and important challenge to longstanding "metronormative epistemologies" (p. 18) in LGBT and queer studies. This book is a significant empirical and analytic contribution to the sociology of sexualities and identities.
Metropolitan-based theories of LGBT identities associate queer identities with visible urban communities, and regard rural community life as a sort of geographic closet that is inherently hostile and inhospitable to queer identity formation. This ethnography of rural Kentucky queer youth requires us to consider the limitations of metrocentric theories of identity work. Gray shows students fighting for gay-straight alliances in rural schools, a homemaker's club hosting a community forum on gay teens, queer youth practicing drag in Walmart Supercenters, queercore youth using a local church as a boundary site for queer identity work, and rural gays and lesbians moving across different settings to express their identities. Lacking the institutional infrastructure and sustained visibility of gay enclave...