Visibility Interrupted: Rural Queer Life and the Politics of Unbecoming by Carly Thomsen

Abstract

Reviewed by: Visibility Interrupted: Rural Queer Life and the Politics of Unbecoming by Carly Thomsen C. J. Janovy Visibility Interrupted: Rural Queer Life and the Politics of Unbecoming. By Carly Thomsen. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2021. vii + 201 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $25.00 paper. The origin story goes like this: in 1978, after an epic struggle to defeat a ballot initiative that would have banned gays and lesbians from teaching in California public schools, the San Francisco gay-rights hero Harvey Milk told LGBTQ people that to achieve civil rights, we must come out of the closet. "Once they realize that we are indeed everywhere," Milk said of our opponents, "every myth, every lie, every innuendo will be destroyed once and for all. And once you do (come out), you will feel so much better." As a political tactic, coming out fueled more than forty years of progress. Carly Thomsen says it's time to reassess. Her argument is not with Milk (who doesn't appear in these pages) but rather with more recent "discourses, ideologies, and strategies used by dominant gay rights organizations" (31) that fail to consider the complex ways in which rural LGBTQ midwesterners experience community and happiness—which don't always require officially coming out. Those of us who live in such places will enjoy Thomsen's dismantling of the LGBTQ-rights movement's myopic metronormativity. But anyone who's marveled at the euphoric self-expression on display at tiny-town Pride picnics might also flinch at Thomsen's assertion that so much emphasis on visibility is counterproductive. It's an intriguing argument, one built around Thomsen's interviews beginning in 2011 with women throughout rural South Dakota and Minnesota (the states where Thomsen grew up). She bolsters it with detours into topics such as a controversy over Matthew Shepard's legacy; rural Flickr and Instagram accounts; the Rush Limbaugh show; an Obama-era White House meeting on rural LGBTQ issues that's distressingly disconnected from actual rural LGBTQ issues; and the case of Jene Newsome, an Air Force sergeant discharged under the Clinton administration's egregious "don't ask, don't tell" policy after Rapid City police officers saw a marriage certificate on her kitchen table. Visibility Interrupted adds layers to the [End Page 272] thankfully deepening field of rural queer studies, a branch of scholarship showing America as it really is. Thomsen does, however, write in dense theoretical language, so it'll frequently be confounding to readers outside academia. But Thomsen knows this: "Most of my interviewees found my argument mundane, boring, and obvious," she writes gleefully of the women who appear in her supplemental documentary, In Plain Sight. One of them jokes, "They gave you a PhD for arguing that?!" (147). Thomsen considers this a validation of her argument. It's probably also a validation of Harvey Milk's. [End Page 273] C. J. Janovy Journalist Kansas City Copyright © 2023 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln