Another Country: Queer Anti-Urbanism

387 Pages·2010·4.22 MB·English

by  Scott Herring

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Another Country
SEXUAL CULTURES
General Editors: José Esteban Muñoz 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
José 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 María Carla Sánchez
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 Malavé
and Martin F. Manalansan IV
Queer Latinidad: Identity
Practices, Discursive Spaces
Juana María Rodríguez 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 Négron-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
Lázaro Lima Arranging Grief: Sacred Time and the
Body in Nineteenth-Century America
Dana Luciano Cruising Utopia: The Then and
There of Queer Futurity
José Esteban Muñoz
Another Country
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: 978-0-81473718-7 (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 men—United States. 2. Rural lesbians—United States. I.
Title.
HQ76.3.U5H468 2010
306.76’620973091734—dc22 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
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 decor—our
restlessly evolving style—soon 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 what’s 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