ABSTRACT
Tens of thousands of sexual minority people spend their childhoods—and often adulthoods—in rural communities. Yet dominant mainstream and academic discourses suggest that rural queer 1 people seek metropolitan residence in order to escape the homophobia central to (a metropolitan imaginary of) the countryside. 2 Those who endorse this position tend to ignore the dense interpersonal networks (Salamon 1992; Elder and Conger 2000), influential faith communities (Bahr and Chadwick 1985; Ammerman 1997; King, Elder and Whitbeck 1997), intergenerational family ties (Boswell 1980; King and Elder 1995; Elder, King and Conger 1996; Chan and Elder 2009), and strong attachments to place (Elder, King and Conger 1996; Ching and Creed 1997; Carr and Kefalas 2009) that influence the residential trajectories of rural young people (Howley 2006; Corbett 2007; Carr and Kefalas 2009), including lesbian, gay, and bisexual ones. 3 Others posit “rural queer youth and LGBT-identifying youth, contrary to popular narratives of escape to urban oases, stand their ground to name their desires and flesh out their local meaning” (Gray 2009, 3).
