“I know we everywhere, but Black SOUTHERN people are and will always be my heart. The way we love up on each other. Take care of each other. Check up on each other, sometimes a little too much. It’s the cadence of our little sayings, the burst out loud laughter. The dramatics in the everyday stories of nothing. I love Black southern people.”
During Pride month, rural queer owned Juniper Moon Folk Art is doing weekly giveaways to raise funds for black-led organizations and bail funds working in antiracism and prison abolition.
“Community is a very complicated and roomy word. Rural queer people also have other layers of identity that inform their realities.”
“Ink revolutionized our way of speaking, the ideas of the dead are recorded in ink, the dead speak through ink, it just had this really mystical element to it.”
“There are gay rednecks, there have always been gay rednecks, and there always will be too.”
Along with the Civil Rights Movement, the blues, and the Moon Pie, we also have the American South to thank for a 50-plus year bounty of lesbian literature.
“We don’t talk about our roots as they relate to the heaviness of humid air recycled through our generations on swampy plantations. My family has never talked about it with me, at least. It feels like a small betrayal, choosing to go south when we were given a new chance in the West.”
The South’s conservative and religious majority has made it nearly impossible to suss out the queers in classic Southern literature and in the history books. That’s why this list exists.
This shiny new collection of queer Southern poetry and stories is guaranteed to stick to your ribs.
“It’s so easy to yearn and ache for people to fill the space surrounding you, but it’s so difficult to find those who can do so in a way that doesn’t immediately consume all your hard-won oxygen and freedom.”
We got chills and teary eyes in the first session when leaders from the southern based LGBTQ advocacy organizations we invited told us simply that we didn’t have to leave the south. I can’t remember ever having heard anyone tell me that so plainly before.
“I kept MapQuest directions to Albuquerque in the glove compartment of my car, just in case I needed to run away. When I graduated, I moved to upstate New York for college.”