Rural Queerness
2014-Present
The most frequently expressed concern upon my saying I have to move out of the city, as far away as I can get, is will I have resources there? Other queer people? Access to healthcare? Not invalid concerns. But sometimes queerness cannot be the basis of an entire identity. Or perhaps it does not mean for an identity what many of us seem to think it means.
At sixteen I decided based upon all the rhetoric I could find in books, in films, on the internet, that despite growing up in the most beautiful place I know, despite loving near everything about my town, despite half my pastimes being linked to ruralness, I must be made for cities because of my queerness. I must have been born to escape everything that surrounded me because small towns and expanses of wilderness were not for queer people. There was nothing I could get my hands on that told me I could live a happy life without escaping to the absolute unknown of the urban and suburban.
But after three years here it has become very clear that finding a safer - not safe, but safer - place to be queer is also not happiness. Expanses of concrete makes me actively distressed. No river to swim in seemed like a tiny compromise when I first moved and now it seems imperative, I fantasize about driving the seven hours North simply so I can submerge myself in clean snowmelt.
