Green Escapes: Chicago’s Sapphic Nature Cultures and the Forging of Midwestern Urban/Rural Networks

In a 1973 issue of Chicago’s largest lesbian press publication, The Lavender Woman, a reader named Sue Koeber submitted a poem entitled, “What They Don’t Know Can Hurt You.” The piece details Koeber’s dissatisfaction with small-town lifestyle and excitement about her impending move to the big city. Ultimately, she presents her rural hometown as a beautiful but repressive place. This narrative is likely a familiar one. It presents visions of a liberating, queer urban metropolis against the “backward” rural town that any queer person craves escape from. This separation between the rural and urban has been fueled by a longstanding scholarly emphasis on the vitality of identity politics within narratives of queer liberation and contentment—a trajectory that often situates itself within urban, coastal metropolis such as New York and San Francisco, implying that such cities are the only real spaces for queer community building. This tendency has not only constructed rural locales and larger regions, like the American Midwest, as antithetical to queerness, but also often places white, gay men at the center of the story. My paper bridges this rural-urban divide within LGBTQ+ scholarship while bringing attention to Midwestern queer culture through an exploration of Chicago lesbians’ relationship to rural versus urban space between the 1970s and 1990s. Drawing on lesbian press publications, feminist, LGBTQ, and environmental activist coalitions, and leisure culture, my work argues that Chicago lesbians explored opportunities for autonomy and pleasure in both urban and rural places. Specifically, this paper investigates queer women’s ties to nature sought through the formation of lesbian separatist collectives in the country, women’s music festivals, and outdoor recreation. By providing further context to how natural areas based in rural locales became foils to urban space, my subjects reveal an alternative relationship between the city and its hinterlands.