2016 OutBackHomeAnExplorationOfLGBT

Out Back Home: An Exploration of LGBT Identities and Community in Rural Nova Scotia, Canada (2016)

By KellyBaker?

This essay explores the identities and experiences of community among lesbians, gays, and transgendered people living in rural Nova Scotia, Eastern Canada. Based on fourteen interviews and participant observation, I consider how sexual identity is spatially constructed outside of the urban center, and uncover some of the ways in which rural LGBT identities and communities are experienced. Because academic and popular representations of rural areas often portray them as “backward” or “traditional”—and thus heterosexual—I look at participants’ reasons for living outside the city. How do rural settings influence the ways rural LGBT individuals identify? Do those who decide to stay in, or return to, their rural hometowns feel integrated within their communities? Do they experience a sense of commonality with other people in their area? Is community actively sought? In examining such questions, I challenge the prevalent assumption that LGBT communities are inherently urban. I also circumvent the widespread depictions of rural areas as being ultimately homophobic and hostile to LGBT difference. Lastly, I highlight the ways rural nonheterosexuality works to challenge dominant notions of sexual identity, community, and rural space.

A link to the entire paper is below.

2026

In June, 2026, Audra Williams of Rosefinch Mercantile & Tea Room created "Eight Takeaways" from the paper; she writes:

As a Queer-owned business in Queens County, we spend a lot of time wondering who else found a way to be themselves here. Who stayed? Who left and came back? Who was building a life before anyone was writing it down?
So we were very excited to discover that this village has its own role in 2SLGBTQIA+ history. Kelly Baker, who many of you know, grew up right here in Port Medway. Her family has lived here for five generations! Kelly came out at 17, and has said she was generally accepted by the community.
She went on to write her master’s thesis about the experiences of rural Queer people in Nova Scotia, pushing back against the idea that Queer life only really happens in cities. She talked to Queer and Trans people across rural Nova Scotia about what it meant to grow up here, leave here, stay here, return here, find community here, and figure themselves out here.
That research eventually became a paper called "Out Back Home: An Exploration of LGBT Identities and Community". It was published in the academic collection Queering the Countryside, making Port Medway part of a much bigger conversation about Queer rural life, belonging, neighbourliness, loneliness, visibility, safety, and home.
We made this gallery to share some of the lines from her work that we haven’t been able to stop thinking about. Happy Pride Month from all of us at Rosefinch.

Here is Audra's "Eight Takeaways" (pdf, 9 pages)

Kelly's paper is here (pdf, 27 pages)

The paper was initially included in Queering the Countryside: New Frontiers in Rural Queer Studies NYU Press in March, 2016.

Citation: Baker, K. (2016). Out Back Home: An Exploration of LGBT Identities and Community in Rural. Nova Scotia, Canada. 23 pages.

References

Among 106 reference, Kelly cites

Tags: AcademicPapersCategory