‘Staying bush’ – a study of gay men living in rural areas

Abstract

This study explored the experience of what it is to be a gay man and to live in a rural community. It sought to understand why gay men would want to live in places that are said to have a reputation for hostility towards them. The empirical data from the semi-structured interviews with twenty-one gay men living in fifteen small-town locations across New South Wales, Australia, was analysed using a qualitative method derived from phenomenology, ethnography and modified grounded theory. The distinctive findings of this thesis centre on these men's desire and determination to stay in the bush. They chose to stay in rural locations and effectively employed a diverse range of strategies to both combat the difficulties of rural life and enhance its advantages. The bush was the place in which these men could find themselves, be themselves and also find others like themselves. The space and the isolation of the bush gave them the latitude and the scope to live gay lives. This is why they stayed. By staying, they were also able to live out both the homosexual and rural components of their personal and social identity. Building on a brief look at the Australian rural past, the conceptual framework utilises notions of ‘the stranger’ and draws on resilience, agency and resistance theory to understand these men's ability to live in an unwelcoming place. Resilience allowed these men to cope and deal with the difficulties they faced. Human agency, the individual's capacity to exert autonomy over his life, is used to restore prominence to resistance theory. Agency is the catalyst to resistance and resistance fuels an individual's, and sometimes a collective's, opposition to the dominant social forces that inhibits one's agency. These men's desire to live in a rural place can be understood through theoretical considerations of place, the freedom of place and queer theory. Their satisfaction with life can be theorised through the application of a concept new to theory in gay literature - thriving. This thesis documents a largely unreported aptitude and proficiency by rural gay men to live in the bush. It suggests that their close affinity with place gives them a sense of belonging that, when combined with their concept of a gay lifestyle, effectively queers the places in which they live. That gay men can live fulfilled lives in the very places they are said to have fled evokes an innovative perspective together with an appreciation of what it is to be gay in the bush.