Predominant cultural narratives have frequently painted rural areas as unfriendly and unprogressive spaces for LGBTQ people to reside and form their sexual identities in. However, scholars of the twenty-first century have begun to challenge this largely unquestioned notion of “metronormativity” that exalts the city as the be-all, end-all “mecca” of queer networking and identity formation. This essay focuses on four studies of LGBTQ people living in rural areas. The first is Mary Gray’s Out in the Country: Youth, Media, and Queer Visibility in Rural America, an ethnographic study of queer youth living in rural Kentucky in 2004. Emily Kazyak’s “Disrupting Cultural Selves: Constructing Gay and Lesbian Identities in Rural Locales” analyzes personal…show more content… Kazyak posits a “formula story” that dominates modern presentations of queer rurality; in this formula story, the main characters include the rural person who is gay and oppressed and the one who is heterosexual and homophobic (p. 562). This leads into the “migration story,” where the rural gay person moves to the city to escape their oppression. Her interviewees do not necessarily dispute the formula story, but their narratives demonstrate an important level of complexity and nuance that, if embraced in greater cultural narratives, would challenge the accepted notion that rural spaces are unsuitable for people who are queer-identified. Additionally, the people she interviews obviously do not fit into the migration story, as they all choose to live in a rural area rather than a city – although many of them have visited or lived in a big city previously. Her work documents how rurality helps to form, rather than prevent or deteriorate, constructions of gay and lesbian identities. The article emphasizes the rural-urban binary as a method of understanding differences that has ultimately helped her gay and lesbian subjects develop their sense of self by distinguishing their rural queer identities and culture from “urban” ones, either experienced or imagined. The participants, whether they…show more content… They are mostly correct, with one interesting exception. American respondents all emphasized a perceived “pressure to conform to a hegemonic gay masculine identity” within the city gay scene, “mainly based on body image and appearance” (p. 65). In other word, they tended to comment on and criticize a perceived superficiality of the city. French men, on the other hand, were more concerned with perceived effeminacy of the city and of its determination of “queen” identities, with the city “making” men effeminate. They expressed a notion of what a rural gay identity could and should be defined as – that is, not very different from a masculine, heterosexual identity, and certainly not like the “queens” of the city. The author discusses the predominant binary in Western Europe between the “good side” of homosexuality (the masculine side) and the “dark side” (the effeminate side) (p. 66) that affects many rural French men’s desire to present as traditionally masculine rather than asserting non-normative gender presentations. But other aspects of their narratives were common to both rural Americans and rural French men, and some were also similar to feelings expressed by Kazyak’s subjects. Many of the men simply felt that their values contrasted with those of “urban”
