Queerness and Small Towns

From Little Light, over at Feministe, a great post on being queer and rural:

We’re another subspecies, us rural queers. See, our small towns are hard on us, yes, but so are our queer communities. The default culture is an urban one, and it’s assumed–well, why would you stay in a town or a church or a country that didn’t welcome you? Why wouldn’t you come to the city? Isn’t the city better? Better culture, better hangouts, better imagery, better people? We didn’t have our own subculture, back home, with its own parallel institutions. Small towns can make you ashamed and isolated for who you love and what you are; why should the places we run to sneer at our accents and our clothes and our food and our music, in turn? Yeah, if you have the resources to run to the city, you probably do–but some don’t, and others are attached to their roots, their families, their cultural trappings, the dirt and sky and rock of where they live. Sometimes a deep love of place comes first. But still, our mainstream queer organizations and publications and politics focus on city people and city concerns, and just assume that the countryside is going to be a conservative cesspit, nothing to be done about it. For some of us, the country is home, even though we’re refugees, and we would love for it to change so we could live there safely, but we’re just demographic anomalies, apparently.

...

This assumption that queer folk are city folk is just not working. It isolates and abandons those of us out in the sticks making lives work, and it isolates those of us in cities, with its implicit message that if you venture out past the metro area without a helmet, you’ll dissolve. It limits our causes to just working for those of us all clustered together while the rest of the state fears and misunderstands what we’re about. It just ratchets up our ability to sneer.

Go read. It's a great post, and it raises a good question for me. I've noticed the urban trend among my friends that are queer, and it's very pronounced.