Scott Herring - Another Country: Queer Anti-Urbanism

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Another Country

SEXUAL CULTURES
General Editors: Jos Esteban Muoz and Ann Pellegrini

Times Square Red, Times Square Blue
Samuel R. Delany

Private Affairs: Critical Ventures in
the Culture of Social Relations
Phillip Brian Harper

In Your Face: 9 Sexual Studies
Mandy Merck

Tropics of Desire: Interventions
from Queer Latino America
Jos Quiroga

Murdering Masculinities:
Fantasies of Gender and Violence in the American Crime Novel
Greg Forter

Our Monica, Ourselves: The Clinton
Affair and the National Interest
Edited by Lauren Berlant
and Lisa Duggan

Black Gay Man: Essays
Robert Reid Pharr,
Foreword by Samuel R. Delany

Passing: Identity and Interpretation
in Sexuality, Race, and Religion
Edited by Mara Carla Snchez
and Linda Schlossberg

The Explanation for Everything:
Essays on Sexual Subjectivity
Paul Morrison

The Queerest Art: Essays on
Lesbian and Gay Theater
Edited by Alisa Solomon
and Framji Minwalla

Queer Globalizations: Citizenship
and the Afterlife of Colonialism
Edited by Arnaldo Cruz Malav
and Martin F. Manalansan IV

Queer Latinidad: Identity
Practices, Discursive Spaces
Juana Mara Rodrguez

Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and
the Limits of Religious Tolerance
Janet R. Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini

Boricua Pop: Puerto Ricans and
the Latinization of American Culture
Frances Ngron-Muntaner

Manning the Race: Reforming
Black Men in the Jim Crow Era
Marlon Ross

In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender
Bodies, Subcultural Lives
Judith Halberstam

Why I Hate Abercrombie and Fitch:
Essays on Race and Sexuality in the U.S.
Dwight A. McBride

God Hates Fags:
The Rhetorics of Religious Violence
Michael Cobb

Once You Go Black: Choice, Desire, and
the Black American Intellectual
Robert Reid-Pharr

The Latino Body: Crisis Identities in
American Literary and Cultural Memory
Lzaro Lima

Arranging Grief: Sacred Time and the
Body in Nineteenth-Century America
Dana Luciano

Cruising Utopia: The Then and
There of Queer Futurity
Jos Esteban Muoz

Queer Anti-Urbanism

Scott Herring

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York and London
www.nyupress.org

2010 by New York University
All rights reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Herring, Scott, 1976
Another country: queer anti-urbanism / Scott Herring.
p. cm. (Sexual cultures)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-8147-3718-7 (cl: alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-8147-3718-8 (cl: alk. paper)
ISBN-13: 978-0-8147-3719-4 (pb: alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-8147-3719-6 (pb: alk. paper)
1. Rural gay menUnited States. 2. Rural lesbiansUnited States. I. Title.
HQ76.3.U5H468 2010
306.76620973091734dc22 2009049618

New York University Press books are printed on acid-free paper,
and their binding materials are chosen for strength and durability.
We strive to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials
to the greatest extent possible in publishing our books.

Manufactured in the United States of America
c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
p 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Shane Vogel

Whatever our sensibility may be, New York gays are justifiably proud of their status as taste-makers for the rest of the country, at least the young and up-to-date segment of the population. Our clothes and haircuts and records and dance steps and decorour restlessly evolving stylesoon enough become theirs. In return for the costliness and inconvenience, the squalor and discomfort of our lives, we get to participate in whatever is the latest. We are never left out of anything; we know whats happening.

Edmund White, States of Desire: Travels in Gay America

Aesthetic intolerance can be terribly violent.

Pierre Bourdieu,
Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste

And I find I keep asking the same question, because of the history: where do I stand in relation to these writers: in another country or in this valuing city?

Raymond Williams, The Country and the City

A color insert follows page

Following page 98

THIS BOOK, BY no means a lifes work, was nevertheless a lifes lot for several seasons. The main idea hit me as I trudged into the Foxhole Lounge during a personal winter of 2003. I later refined the thesis when I visited Marys in the spring of 2006, and I enhanced my arguments after an evening spent at Uncle Elizabeths in the summer of 2008. Across this long half-decade, I composed portions in the Happy Valley, the City of Brotherly Love, and the City Too Busy to Hate. I completed its bulk in what a well-known Minnesotan once termed the vast obscurity of the Middle West, and in 2009 I revised it 51 miles south of the Circle City, 760 miles west of the Capital of the World, and 2,278 miles east of the City by the Bay. When granted the weak light of hindsight, I see that initial research was first conducted in the so-called Magic City of the South in the late 1980s. The words that follow pay tribute to the worlds I got out of and, at the same time, I have never left behind. They also commemorate places that have failed to receive the sometimes dubious honorific of a nickname.

Its the loneliest kind of lonely, sang Mama Cass Elliot, who then added that to do your things the hardest thing to do. I have often found her lyrics to be true enough, but I also do not forget the many who steered me through what could have been rough going. I want to first thank those who took their timetheir time outto sit down with my prose. These include Alison Bechdel, Barbara Ching, Michael Cobb, Ed Comentale, Denise Cruz (phenomenal), Tim Dean, John Duvall, Jonathan Elmer, Maria Farland, Jen Fleissner, Jonathan Goldberg, John Howard, Julia Kasdorf, Keguro Macharia, Victor Mendoza, Richard Meyer, Michael Moon, Charles Morris, Ben Ogrodnick, Andy Oler, Richard Rodriguez, David Romn, Ranu Samantrai, Siobhan Somerville, Rachel Teukolsky, Karen Tongson, Sherrie Tucker, Angela Ward, Sarah Withers, and, especially, Patrick Johnson and Robert McRuer. These last two readers offered cut-to-the-chase commentaries on the manuscript as it reached final submission, and the writing was that much stronger for their attention. As this book slowly came home, with each of you I embrace the principle of debt incurred.

I next want to thank those who took time to sit down with my Capote-on-steroids delivery. Oftentimes a public queryI well remember those made by Susan Belasco, Carrie Tirado Bramen, Jennifer DeVere Brody, Judith Brown, Chris Castiglia, Nick Davis, Alex Doty, Lisa Duggan, Rae Greiner, Matt Guterl, Sharon Holland, George Hutchinson, Jeffrey McCune, Sam Otter, Lloyd Pratt, Marjorie Pryse, Guy Reynolds, Ramn Rivera-Servera, Francesca Royster, and Jani Scandurahelped pitch me out of my hardheaded rut. Other audience members did likewise at the University of TennesseeKnoxville, the University of NebraskaLincoln, two Modernist Studies Association conferences in Burlington and Long Beach, Northwestern University (a dozen and one white roses to Sarah Black-wood for organizing an American Cultures Colloquium panel), the Deep Localities: The New Critical Regionalism symposium at Indiana University, the Emerging Rural, Nonmetropolitan, and Working-Class Perspectives in LGBTQ Studies symposium orchestrated by Nadine Hubbs at the University of MichiganAnn Arbor, several American Studies Association conferences in Albuquerque, Oakland, Philadelphia, and Washington DC, the University at AlbanySUNY, the University at BuffaloSUNY, and the Northwestern Center for Global Culture and Communication Summer Institute.