Queer Belonging

Project Statement & Gallery

Three rivers, three forests, three parks, two rocks, two gardens, a lake, an ocean, a ridge-line, a cabin, a bookstore, and a basketball court: sites of belonging. Queer Belonging shares the stories and portraits of twenty-four LGBTQIA+ individuals from California and the Southeast - Kentucky, Tennessee and North Carolina - photographed within places of personal significance. The resulting body of work is an archive of vulnerability, resilience, courage, and celebration exploring the intersection of sexuality, place, and belonging.

Stories are held in geography and landscape, yet whose stories are heard, seen, and remembered is determined by the access and power of the storyteller. As a community with a past history and current experience of  being erased and dictated by rules about where our bodies and relationships are permitted, this project seeks to queer the landscape. Centering LGBTQIA+ place-based stories serve as counter-narratives to the assumed inscription of heteronormativity and gender conformity, revealing the true diversity of experience and relationship.

The choice of location, California and the South, explore how these regions exist as imaginary polarized symbols of “freedom” and “oppression,” while aiming to disrupt and complicate these stereotypes that are projected onto them. These stories reveal that while certain cultural truths remain intact, discrimination and marginalization are not fixed in time or place.   Simultaneously, pride, celebration and kindness are not bound by geo-political lines. 

This collection offers greater perspective on these core questions: How is an LGBTQIA+ identity influenced by a cultural-geographical sense of belonging? If place is the intersection of people, culture and geography, how does place shape our sexualities and how do our sexualities shape place? Do the locations that offer a profound sense of belonging become more than mere landscapes? Do they become sites of belonging, of resting, of non-judgement, of freedom? 

Click images below to listen to interviews with project participants, or use the menu to the left (desktop view) or click the ‘+’ button to the right (phone view).