McDaniel’s day-to-day life doesn’t necessarily look that different in quarantine. “When I say I’m going out I’m going to walk in the woods, that’s my main jam. It’s a very grounding time for me in a lot of ways, I’m able to slow down and experience the freedom that I have as a rural queer.”
Elison’s latest novel, Find Layla, looks at the realities of poverty and neglect for teens in the age of social media.
“I can’t speak for all harm reduction efforts, and I think the impacts can be different depending on who you’re doing outreach with or who you are centering, but here in rural West Virginia, it’s a small community; the impact is so apparent.”
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.”
“Bad sex education for queer kids it’s so violent and erasing and makes kids in rural places feel even more isolated.”
“I’ve come to embrace that ‘lack of decorum’ that I grew up in.”
“There are gay rednecks, there have always been gay rednecks, and there always will be too.”
Wmn Zine, the love letter to lesbians created by Jeanette Spicer, Florencia Alvarado, and Sarah Duell, is the exploring the radical nature of the word “lesbian.”
A queer company that makes a “fistin’ lube for lovers and others” is partnering with sexual advocacy and harm reduction groups while helping to erase tens of thousands of dollars of medical debt in West Virginia.
