I've decided to move away from Second Life for a while and back into the queer side of things, so today I started Out in the Country: Youth, Media, and Queer Visibility in Rural America by Mary L. Gray.
Once again, I pick a text that immediately hits too close to home, as Gray was raised in the country like myself. I think she has the advantage over me though in that she apparently knew she was queer by the time she was 18 where I did not. Gray comments that "while the few lesbian couples with kids at my school showed me I could pursue a domestic life with another woman if I did so quietly, I wasn't really sure what else there was to do locally beyond struggle to raise children and make ends meet" (110-127) (NOTE: All numbers used for quotes are Kindle numbers). All I knew when I was 18 was that if I stayed in my small hometown, I too would likely end up married (unhappily), trying to raise children and make ends meet. I knew no gays or lesbians, although it was rumored that the gym teacher was a "queer." Words such as gay and lesbian were not even part of my vocabulary. While I didn't KNOW I was a lesbian, I knew I was different and college, much like Gray, was my way out.
Gray states that "as a media scholar, [she] set out to gather the details of rural young people's everyday negotiations of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender identities and engagements with mass and new media, through informal conversations, extensive interviews, and tagging along to see what [she] might see out in the country" (158-169). I know things have changed a LOT since I was a kid growing up in the country, and I look forward to learning what Gray discovered on her quest
Once again, I pick a text that immediately hits too close to home, as Gray was raised in the country like myself. I think she has the advantage over me though in that she apparently knew she was queer by the time she was 18 where I did not. Gray comments that "while the few lesbian couples with kids at my school showed me I could pursue a domestic life with another woman if I did so quietly, I wasn't really sure what else there was to do locally beyond struggle to raise children and make ends meet" (110-127) (NOTE: All numbers used for quotes are Kindle numbers). All I knew when I was 18 was that if I stayed in my small hometown, I too would likely end up married (unhappily), trying to raise children and make ends meet. I knew no gays or lesbians, although it was rumored that the gym teacher was a "queer." Words such as gay and lesbian were not even part of my vocabulary. While I didn't KNOW I was a lesbian, I knew I was different and college, much like Gray, was my way out.
Gray states that "as a media scholar, [she] set out to gather the details of rural young people's everyday negotiations of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender identities and engagements with mass and new media, through informal conversations, extensive interviews, and tagging along to see what [she] might see out in the country" (158-169). I know things have changed a LOT since I was a kid growing up in the country, and I look forward to learning what Gray discovered on her quest
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