Documenting lesbian and gay lives in rural Australia

Rural landscapes and communities are varied, as are lesbian and gay experiences of them. In this chapter, I have demonstrated some of the diversity of lesbian and gay lives in rural Australia, and thereby illustrated some of the multilayered relationships between Australian ruralities and minority sexualities. I have engaged a critical reading of documentary texts-Since Adam Was a Boy (2006), The Farmer Wants a Life (2010), and Destiny in Alice (2007) - to discuss two relational examples: gay men from farming families in eastern Australia, and outback lesbian communities. The discussion has shown the complex mix of belonging and alienation experienced concurrently by rural lesbians and gay men. In doing so, I have stressed the spatial imperatives reconciling their sexual and rural subjectivities, discussing their vital experiences of isolation, migration, attachment to place, land, and nature., and the roles of intra-familial, cross-cultural, and inter-species relations in processes of belonging. I haven't sought to be comprehensive, or to fabricate a universal connection between rurality and sexuality, but to represent the geographical contingency and multiplicity of these relationships, and thus the juxtaposed difficulties and possibilities of rural lesbian and gay lives. This ambivalence-agency and potential alongside marginalization and constraint- is illuminated in the documentary texts. As such, the communicative function of the televisual-documentaries is critical: on the one hand, they empathetically educate mainstream audiences; on the other hand, they also speak to sexual minorities, and help form rural lesbian and gay communities and identities.