is queer identity worth the loss?

In Eli Clare’s chapter losing home, he talks about the realities of living as a queer person in rural versus urban areas. Clare uses the words queer, exile, and class to describe the ways in which he has lost his home, queer being the easiest to explain, exile harder, and class “the most confusing” (Clare 36). While the terms rural and redneck often carry connotations of bigotry with them, Clare points out that rural white people are not any more homophobic than “the average urban person. Rather the difference lies in urban anonymity…in the face of bigotry and violence, anonymity provides a certain level of protection” (Clare 34-5). 

This is the appeal to many queer people of big city life. You can reinvent yourself, or show yourself as you have always been without fear of having to defend it to everyone around you. No one is there to report you to your family or your boss, and there are others equally happy to find solace in their anonymity together. The term metronormativity assumes that this is the only way to be queer, essentially being out/liberated/welcomed in the city versus being forced into the closet/being endangered in rural areas as a queer person. Eli Clare acknowledges that he doesn’t believe he “could live easily and happily that isolated from queer community…My loss of home is about being queer” (Clare 34). There is a sort of paradox in these sentences. A lot of being queer is about found family, found homes. People that accept you because the people who were supposed to didn’t. And yet Clare still refers to the town he left behind as “home” and describes at length the people and the places that he misses, the neighborly attitudes, the environment that made him who he was. Clare’s “home” holds both these qualities and also the fear of homophobia should he return and the abuse he suffered growing up. He asks the question “is queer identity worth the loss?” (40). Queer identity and community is what helped heal him of his trauma and find a sense of belonging, but it’s also what cost him his home. It’s the mix of his urban and rural identities that make him who he is today, but is the loss of home enough to make someone want to change themselves? It’s this dichotomy that allows Clare the grace to write with empathy about both types of queer and rural people that he is familiar with. He maintains that even if he can’t go to his home as it stands today, the connections between rural and queer people are still important, because they’re not two separate concepts. We can’t dismiss the importance of where we come from in favor of an anonymous urban lifestyle. But we can’t ignore the very real fears that come with being queer out in the open, so to speak. This paradox of queerness and home speaks to the difficulty of having many identities tangled up inside one person. You cannot have one without the other, they are all interconnected.