Join Civic Media Senior Fellow Rae Garringer to discuss their new book, 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 United States. 

In 2013, 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 conversation with Garringer will be Civic Media Senior Fellow Adrienne Keene, author of Notable Native People: 50 Leaders, Dreamers, and Changemakers from Past and Present, and the co-creator and co-host of the popular podcast All My Relations.

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 and podcast documenting rural and small-town LGBTQIA2S+ experiences since 2013, the author of Country Queers: A Love Letter (Haymarket Books, 2024), and the editor of To Belong Here: A New Generation of Queer, Trans, and Two-Spirit Appalachian Writers (University Press of Kentucky, 2025). When not working with stories, Garringer spends a lot of time failing at keeping goats in fences, swimming in the river, and two-stepping around their trailer.

Keene is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, originally from southern California, and now lives on the East Coast. She writes on the Internet about representations of Native peoples in popular culture and has been writing her blog Native Appropriations since 2010. She’s also the author of Notable Native People: 50 Leaders, Dreamers, and Changemakers from Past and Present, and the co-creator and co-host of the popular podcast All My Relations. In her academic life, she researches and writes about Native students in the college process. In her free time, she makes Cherokee-style baskets out of contemporary materials, beads, and reads a lot of speculative fiction.

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