The conditions of LGBT people in rural areas in the United States encompass a spectrum of experiences, influenced by geographic, cultural, and social contexts.
[5] This masculine dynamic allows for some lesbians to blend in quite easily, where typical female attire can be wearing flannels and cowboy boots.
[citation needed] Emily Kayzak notes that "the sexual identity of rural butch lesbian women is not invisible in urban lesbian cultures, their more butch gender presentations do not do the same work in rural areas because those gender presentations are also tied to normative (hetero)sexuality".
[6] For rural men, on the other hand, "publicly disrupting normative gender expectations arguably remains as, if not more, contentious than homoerotic desires".
Research on migration patterns between urban and rural areas also challenges a binary view of the two categories as well as the common narrative that queer-identifying individuals 'escape' to the city over the course of their lives.
Their essay illustrates how queer individuals move within and between rural and urban areas in response to the ways that each space limits and/or enables their identity formation and sexual expression.
[9] Rural queer farmers have been studied to complicate ideals such as feminine "labor of the home" and masculine "labor of the field", which mark the conventional standard for gendered agriculture,[10] but expectations of masculinity and femininity do not directly correlate with a particular type of farm practice for queer farmers.
[2] It is harder to mobilize communities in rural spaces where queer populations are less dense and financial contributions are limited.
[16] Once the new guardian's sexuality was discovered the court ruled against the biological mother's request, stating that "the adoption would not be in the best interest of the child."
Regional scholars have argued that the reliance upon visibility politics within queer activism in the United States is urban-centric, excluding and erasing LGBT individuals and communities in rural areas across the globe.
In media, rustic sexual expression can take the form of homosexual rape, as seen in Pulp Fiction and Deliverance, and bestiality, which is also a theme in these films.