rural culture

With the success of Gentleman Jack there is a fascination take on “queer rural” it tells us:

If the countryside appears at all in LGBT+ stories, it is usually only as somewhere to escape from. For many of us, this is a pattern that never fitted, and though we did the urban thing to burst (or tiptoe) from the closet, the lure of the rural soon overwhelmed the anonymity of the city. It didn’t feel like a choice, but something intrinsic that would have been dangerous to resist, like the act of coming out itself.

So it was for George Walton and Reg Mickisch, an elegant couple who met in the postwar rubble of London, and in 1972 headed for the sticks, opening a B&B in a tiny mid-Wales village. They became much-loved members of our thinly scattered community, and great friends. When they died within a few weeks of each other in 2011, aged 94 and 84, my boyfriend and I found that they had left us their old farmhouse. In us, they saw themselves, and the feeling was mutual. Their legacy was far greater than that though, for it included an archive of letters, diaries, photos, art and books that told a remarkable story. My book On the Red Hill is that story – and so many others.

In researching it, I read widely around the topic of the “queer rural”. There wasn’t much, at least not explicitly so. Even more than is normally the case with LGBT+ history, that meant learning to read the shadows, to spot fragmentary connections that had previously been denied or ignored. The truth was clear: we are not newcomers to the countryside. We’ve always been here. In Wales, there is a long tradition of yr hen lanc (literally “the old lad”), the unmarried uncle who might live with, or next door to, his equally unmarried friend. Every village had its hen lanc, and his female equivalents too.