Charis welcomes Rae Garringer in conversation with Suzanne Pharr for a celebration of Country Queers: A Love Letter. Part photo book, part memoir, part oral history project, this volume paints a vivid portrait of queer and trans experiences in rural areas and small towns across the US.

In 2013, Rae Garringer embarked on the Country Queers oral history project with a borrowed audio recorder, a flip phone, and a paper atlas in a Subaru Forester with over 160,000 miles on it. Raised on a sheep farm in southeastern West Virginia, they were motivated by an intense frustration with the lack of rural queer stories and the isolation that comes with that absence. "Queers, in all our forms, have always existed," Garringer writes, "all across this continent since before it was colonized."

After years as a DIY, minimally funded, community-based oral history project, the work now takes a new form in Country Queers: A Love Letter--a book of full-color photos and interviews with rural folks from Mississippi to New Mexico and beyond, with Garringer's account as traveler and interviewer woven through the pages. In these intimate conversations, we see how queerness--shaped, as all things are, by race, class, gender, and more--moves in rural and small-town spaces, spotlighting how country queers make sense of their lives through reflections on land, home, community, and belonging. While media-driven myths suggest that big cities are the only places queer folks can find love and community, Country Queers resists that trope by centering rural queer and trans stories of the joys, challenges, monotony, and nuances of their lives, in their own words.

Rae Garringer (they/them) is a writer, oral historian, and audio producer who grew up on a sheep farm in southeastern West Virginia, and now lives a few counties away on S’atsoyaha (Yuchi) and Šaawanwaki (Shawnee) lands. They are the founder of Country Queers, a multimedia oral history project documenting rural and small town LGBTQIA2S+ experiences since 2013. When not working with stories, Rae spends a lot of time failing at keeping goats in fences, swimming in the river, and two-stepping around their trailer.

Suzanne Pharr, Southern queer feminist and anti-racist organizer and strategist, approaches social justice work through understanding oppressions as both systemic and intersectional in their makeup and impact and then developing strategies that are inclusive of all affected. In 1981, she founded the Women’s Project in Arkansas with the goal of eliminating sexism and racism through dismantling systems of violence and economic injustice. Her work has been with multi-racial, multi issued organizations: co-founder Southerners on New Ground, director of the Highlander Center, and founding member of the Southern Movement Assembly. Pharr is the author of Transformation: Toward a People’s Democracy, In the Time of the Right: Reflections on Liberation, and Homophobia: A Weapon of Sexism. website: www.suzannepharr.com

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Country Queers: A Love Letter--Rae Garringer in conversation with Suzanne Pharr