Opinion: Flags of Contradiction: Queer Presence and Peril in Contemporary America

In much of the rural United States, and especially across the South, political slogans and cultural symbols are often treated as neutral décor. For queer residents, however, presence is always consequential and socially legible. In the South, Confederate flags are widespread—displayed on porches, alongside highways, mounted at crossroads—normalized through repetition and largely unremarked upon, even as their historical meaning is rooted in secession and racialized violence. A Pride flag, by contrast, is often read as a challenge or transgression, signaling difference rather than belonging. This contrast highlights how social imaginaries in the rural South structure who is acknowledged, who is sanctioned, and who must navigate precariousness in everyday life (Advocate, n.d.; Movement Advancement Project, 2019).

These contradictions have tangible consequences. Across rural America, an estimated 2.9–3.8 million LGBTQ people live in communities where nondiscrimination protections are often weak or absent, and harmful laws—such as religious exemptions—remain on the books (Equality Federation, n.d.; Movement Advancement Project, 2019). National data show that LGBTQ people are five times more likely than non‑LGBTQ people to be victims of violent crime and nine times more likely to experience violent hate crimes motivated by sexual orientation or gender identity bias (Williams Institute, n.d.). Isolation, limited resources, and lack of local protections exacerbate the impact of bias, making everyday visibility a risky but necessary assertion of identity (Rural Gender Violence & LGBTQ Youth, n.d.; Advocate, n.d.).

The symbolic economy of flags in the rural South—where emblems of historical treason are normalized and emblems of queer life are treated as controversial—reveals the everyday politics of belonging. While Confederate flags persist with relative impunity, Pride flags continue to signal both presence and vulnerability, particularly in areas with limited nondiscrimination protections (Movement Advancement Project, 2019; Equality Federation, n.d.; Advocate, n.d.).

These dynamics are compounded by federal policy under the Trump administration, which poses active threats to queer lives and legal protections nationwide. Since January 2025, the administration has rescinded federal nondiscrimination protections, restricted access to gender-affirming care for transgender individuals, removed LGBTQ references from federal surveys, and limited supportive services in education and health (KFF, 2026; Executive Orders 14151, 14168, 14187, 2025; Washington Blade, 2026). These actions intensify structural exclusion and make visibility more precarious, particularly for rural queer communities that already face isolation and limited local support.

Taken together, these forces underscore the complex position of queer people in rural America. Visibility is both necessary and risky, and everyday life requires navigating symbols, policies, and social norms that can threaten safety and well-being. While community ties and resilience persist, structural inequities and hostile cultural and political environments continue to shape queer experience, making the assertion of identity both a statement of survival and a demand for belonging.

References

Advocate. (n.d.). [Reporting on rural LGBTQ life, dynamics of outness, community ties, and safety].

Equality Federation. (n.d.). Where we call home: LGBTQ people in rural America. Retrieved from https://www.equalityfederation.org/resources/rural-lgbtq

Executive Order 14151, Ending radical and wasteful government DEI programs and preferencing (2025).

Executive Order 14168, Defending women from gender ideology extremism and restoring biological truth to the federal government (2025).

Executive Order 14187, Protecting children from chemical and surgical mutilation (2025).

Kaiser Family Foundation. (2026, January 5). Overview of President Trump’s executive actions impacting LGBTQ+ health. Retrieved from https://www.kff.org/lgbtq/overview-of-president-trumps-executive-actions-impacting-lgbtq-health/

Movement Advancement Project. (2019). Where we call home: LGBT people in rural America. https://www.lgbtmap.org/rural-lgbtq

Rural Gender Violence & LGBTQ Youth. (n.d.). [Context on unacceptance and challenges in rural areas].

Washington Blade. (2026, January 29). Expanded global gag rule to ban US foreign aid to groups that promote ‘gender ideology’. Retrieved from https://www.washingtonblade.com/2026/01/29/expanded-global-gag-rule-to-ban-us-foreign-aid-to-groups-that-promote-gender-ideology/

Williams Institute. (n.d.). Anti-LGBT victimization in the United States. Retrieved from https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/press/anti-transgender-legislation-press-release/

From the Ozarks, With Care

The Arkansas Ozarks stretch along long, winding roads and quiet hills where visibility is never neutral. In Care Of: Cord, Arkansas, grew from this landscape, grounded in travel, attention, and care. Fieldwork drives the project: visiting homes and businesses displaying pride flags, leaving invitations for queer individuals to participate, and returning later to receive letters in my P.O. Box. The process is slow and patient, shaped by the rhythms of rural life and the demands of ethical attention.

The beauty of this work emerges through encounters. Pride flags are rare but significant, marking both presence and possibility. Letters arrive from unexpected places, often through networks of friends and acquaintances, each carrying memory, survival, joy, and fear. Re-typing each one on a manual typewriter becomes a quiet devotion, a way to thread together voices into a living archive.

This project is about attention as much as collection. The long roads, small towns, and occasional abandoned landscapes reveal persistence, vulnerability, and care. The connections formed, sometimes brief, sometimes intimate, show how queer life in rural spaces circulates in subtle, unexpected ways. Even in isolation, networks of trust endure.

From a futurity perspective, these letters are traces of possibility. They record lives as they exist now while gesturing toward what can survive into the future. Each letter and every mile traveled contributes to a relational archive that insists on presence, however fragile and partial.

In the Ozarks, queer life persists quietly and carefully. In Care Of: Cord, Arkansas traces that persistence, mapping networks not in streets or coordinates, but in attention, trust, and the fragile intimacies of correspondence.

Speculating Queer Futures in Rural Spaces

Rural queer life is often imagined as marginal or invisible, yet these spaces sustain ongoing possibilities for presence and community. Queerness in rural contexts emerges relationally, expressed in subtle gestures, care, or memory rather than through overt visibility. Considering queer futurity prompts reflection on how life persists and evolves even under contemporary social and environmental constraints.

These futures are rooted in experience, place, and relational engagement. Rural landscapes carry histories of regulation, but they also harbor intimacy and improvisation. Rural queer life navigates these tensions, balancing survival with new ways of being and relating. Presence in these spaces is always partial and negotiated, yet it endures through practice and imagination.

Focusing on queer futurity emphasizes potential over absence. Even when rural queer life remains unseen, it shapes—and is shaped by—the surrounding social and material context. José Esteban Muñoz frames queer futurity as the horizon of life not yet realized, a space where new forms of existence and care can take shape (Muñoz, 2009). It highlights the practices that sustain resilience and the relational ways life unfolds, even in environments that feel inhospitable.

Attention to embodiment and affect deepens this understanding. Sara Ahmed observes that bodies orient themselves within environments, shaping perception and movement (Ahmed, 2006). In rural spaces, queer futurity emerges through everyday acts, trust, care, and creative engagement with place. Possibility is enacted relationally, inseparable from the environment itself.

Engaging with rural queer futurity challenges assumptions about who belongs in rural spaces and what forms of life are possible. It emphasizes not only survival but also the imaginative and ethical practices that sustain it. Rural landscapes are not simply sites of constraint; they are terrains of potential, where queer life continues in subtle, generative, and resilient ways.

• Ahmed, S. (2006). Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Duke University Press.

• Muñoz, J. E. (2009). Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. NYU Press.

Materials, Memory, and Rural Queer Presence

Rural landscapes are frequently depicted as sites defined by tradition, exclusion, or erasure, positioning queer identities as primarily urban phenomena. Yet rural queer lives persist, often through relational, embodied, and site-specific forms of presence that evade conventional documentation. My work seeks to explore these forms through site-responsive installations, material experimentation, and projected imagery, emphasizing the ways queerness is enacted, sensed, and sustained within rural spaces.

Materials function as both methodological and conceptual tools. Fabric, tanned hides, and other responsive surfaces absorb environmental shifts—light, wind, humidity—altering the legibility of projected images. These materials are not neutral; they carry histories of labor, attachment, and vulnerability, shaping the ways in which presence is perceived and experienced. By foregrounding contingency and responsiveness, the work situates rural queer presence as emergent, relational, and inseparable from its material and environmental contexts.

The work also engages with socio-cultural conditions that structure rural visibility. Pride flags, archival letters, and site-specific interventions highlight the negotiation of presence within spaces often marked by social precarity. In the Arkansas Ozarks, queer lives persist not through overt visibility alone but through relational networks, embodied practices, and traces embedded in landscape, architecture, and memory. These forms of presence challenge urban-centered models of belonging and documentation, revealing alternative modes of knowledge that are ethical, affective, and grounded in lived experience.

By situating queerness within materiality, environment, and relational experience, this practice models an arts-based research approach attentive to survival, memory, and speculative futurity. It demonstrates that even in contexts where visibility is constrained, queer lives persist—through materials, places, and the careful attention of both maker and viewer.