T Reckling | Flyover Queer Culture: Returning to BFF’s Rural Billboards
Untitled (almost perfect circle), photography on 48 feet wide installed billboard, T Reckling and Adrian Silva, 2021. Documentation by Justin Grabenschroer.
I initiated a project with nonprofit Benson First Friday to develop a series of “rural queer billboards” in the summer of 2021 which affirmed my suspicions about larger arts labor issues and their relationship to queerness, particularly in rural places. As part of the ongoing disenfranchisement of intersectional queer and BIPOC artists outside of large coastal cities, arts labor in rural categories is infantilized or looked over because “the cities are where art happens!” — I was thankful to help facilitate this inaugural public art project, but admittedly it was harder than most art organizing I have done on either coast today. In most cultural organizations I have worked with, any assertion of ‘queerness’ is celebrated and even sought after. Often I think, for the sake of inter-community discourse, it is for business and arts funding opportunities but this can lead into corporate DEI economics and outright tokenization. The point of this project was to situate imagery in rural Nebraska-locales to signal to other queer people that queerness could intervene and be made visible in places where visual culture tends to be repetitive and even materially hostile, as we are seeing right now.
This meant dealing with companies. All arts labor touches commercial sectors eventually; most of these entities were not familiar with, and mostly disinterested in, ‘queer’ art projects. I mistakenly was bluntly honest with billboard companies in my first email introductions. I got many rejections. I eventually understood my own naive optimism and instead began to introduce the billboards as public art projects, no ‘queers’ involved. This (un)fortunately helped me secure a production and installation company and the project continued. My assumptions related to the discourse around public art projects, queer art, rurality, and unseen artistic labor were cracked open and continue to reform into more lucid epistemologies of ‘who belongs and where.’ The question I asked at the project’s outset still lingers: who ‘benefitted’ from installing billboard-scale queer imagery in these locations? Ultimately, I wish I had fought harder for stronger imagery. What we realized…what we snuck in…what we got away with… was, unfortunately, more subtle or abstracted imagery.
The territory we currently call Nebraska is an American imperialist project organized into being and defined by the forced removal of Indigenous communities and the socio-political constructs of redlining, allotment, and imposing arbitrary boundaries. For me, local engagement in this project pointed to the increasingly, treacherous political realities for minority identities and disenfranchised communities made even more dangerous by a cultural obsession with homogeneity, ‘hard work’, and ‘family values.’ I am queer trailer-trash, fondly, and grew up in a mixed race circuit of a family and take these experiences with me wherever I go in my arts career. I grew up near where, famously and tragically, Brandon Teena was born and then murdered. I didn’t know his story until I left home for college. Not knowing was not a coincidence. Knowledge circulates differently in rural areas. “We don’t talk about things like that” continues to be a quotidian tradition that enforces conservative norms even today. I knew this from a young age, and it factored largely into working in rural settings as an adult. Of course this discourse also, we must remember, holds much in common with lived experiences of immigrant and diaspora communities who have been working under globalist-western pressures. The gaps we find between rural contexts and cities in the USA open up many power systems and categories which need to be expanded and often overlap far beyond the States and often far precede even its conception. As writer, curator Monika Szewczyk says about artist Lala Meredith-Vula’s Haystacks project[1] which photographs agrarian moments in Eastern Europe:
“Beyond longing, which implies a painfully remote connection - hence nostalgia - there is be-longing, a more fraught matter still. In part, I would venture, because we tend to bristle at any notion that does not put us in the position of self-possession or ownership – of home or even just of our pain. … They put me in mind of a future (agri)cultural revolution, albeit in a minor key. Imagine, in other words, a transformation of rural space without forced relocations and re-education, quite the opposite, and all the more powerful for keeping in step with the natural time of people and plants and other living beings.”[2]
Queers move away, like I did, to “escape” these conditions. I think that queer ontologies, and increasingly, the intersectional LGBTQIA2S+ political struggles in areas with conservative governments, show us a mode of becoming that is crucial in 2023. While Grindr is joining the stock exchange and celebrating economic rarefaction[3], there are queers being covered up and erased from rural spaces.[4] A queer note: I was in New York City the day Grindr went public. Their public celebration started early in the morning to align with the exchange opening and ended at 1:00pm. I missed it by a few minutes but watched the large crew take down the stage where Lady Bunny and Rupaul-featured drag queens had just performed. What kind of queer celebration ends this early in the day? One that isn’t actually a celebration: but a photoshoot opportunity. I hooked up with one of Grindr’s technology engineers to learn more about the company's upcoming goals of competing with the popular Sniffies cruising platform. I remember him saying that he hated New York City and liked Chicago better. In Nebraska, a decisively ‘red state’, there may soon be legislation on the ballot to ‘ban’ drag queens and limit transgender health care. What does that mean when we consider it alongside the ongoing systemic oppression and erasure of Black and Indigenous people, the removal of legal protections for migrant workers, and the unsettling negotiations around bodily autonomy and reproductive rights?
I hope all of this reminds us of the fighting spirit that has been largely absent from contemporary LGBTQIA2S+ politics for a few decades now, a mark of more dominant assimilationist values. Writer Sara Ahmed, in her text What’s the Use? On the Uses of Use, offers the following that might give another framing to defeatist notions around land: “The less a path is used, the less a path is used. How strange that this sentence makes sense. — I have implied that use is an activity that leaves traces. These traces can become outlines for something: invitations to do something, to proceed in a certain direction.”[5] Our cultural production in Nebraska might be characterized as “flyover,” but to me this means that it is largely un-surveilled and might produce fantastic opportunities for coalition building, political organizing, and even dissidence in ways that we have yet to acknowledge.
The following text was not widely circulated, because it is indeed explicit, but I wanted to share the conceptual underpinning of one of the three billboards from the project, titled Untitled (almost perfect circle), produced by myself and Adrian Silva. For the imagery, Silva drew a ring in the dirt at his family’s farm in Gering, NE, which is located in western Nebraska, and took a picture of it with his iPhone. This iPhone photo of this circle of dirt was transposed onto a billboard located on the other side of the state where Brandon Teena and I were born. It created an echo, like signals bouncing back and forth from one site to the other. Access to the internet, in any subculture, creates wonderful glitches of communication that form identities. In this case, the echoes include the spectacle of a transgender person’s murder and intersecting contexts today.
I visited the spot in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park referenced in the text below to explore and somehow lean into whatever residual energy I could. The supplemental text includes hashtags in a similar ephemeral manner. As a metaphorical device, they allude to internet infrastructures’ pivotal role in mediating personal relationships and dialogues through space and time. This includes my own growing up in the country while having access to the internet as a queer young person. The text accompanying Untitled (almost perfect circle) follows:
"This collaborative #sign features #photography of a drawn #circle in rural Nebraskan dirt. The drawn circle is in gesture of lifelong activist David Buckel who tragically took his own life in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, New York on April 14th, 2018. Buckel strived for LGBTQA+ and environmental rights during his life; he was the lead lawyer of the estate of Brandon Teena, a trans youth who was murdered in Nebraska. This drawing in the dirt is a gesture of #queer catharsis by hand. It is meant to invoke many hidden memories of non-dichotomous trauma and solidarity, especially in non-urban sites of contemporary queerness, aka not suburban #twinks in #Brooklyn or #LosAngeles.
The case of death for Buckel was, sadly and strangely, self-immolation. A "near perfect circle" was burned into the spot where Buckel's body was found by a passerby in Prospect Park. In this locale a note was found that read: "I apologise to you for the mess." There was a ring of soil around this spot where Buckel's remains were found, speculated to have been placed there to stop the spread of any further #fire. Buckel's history as an environmentalist came into this process of constructing one's own death bed: conjuring imagery of #fairy rings and historical #imperialism impacts on sacred land(s).
The pictured ring of #dirt is both a homage to Buckel's work as an activist, and a gesture for queer #rage and kinship for histories to come. The billboard is placed in rural #Nebraska, near Brandon Teena's birth place, as a #quiet homage to this event and as a strange spectacle for passersby in a monotone landscape. The piece might evoke similar feelings to that of the #billboard series from artist Félix González-Torres, who died of #AIDS complications in 1996, whose #work dealt with similar themes of #loss, yearning, and found materials. There are fires that come with current #infrastructure #failures."
Also included in this billboard project was fantastic work from Katera Brown and Jared Packard who unpack their own equally important dialogues. I am thankful to the BFF Omaha team for the acceptance of this project; as a University of Nebraska-Omaha student I was their first intern and I will always remember their warmth. Thanks to Alex Jochim for his continued fantastic community labor. Congratulations to Pat Tetreault at University of Nebraska- Lincoln for 15 years of the LGBTQIA+ Center; we are lucky. Thank you to Justin Grabenschroer for documenting the project.
[1] https://www.documenta14.de/en/artists/13530/lala-meredith-vula
[2] Szewczyk, Monika. “ART IN ALL THE WRONG PLACES: Lala Meredith-Vula's Haystacks (1989-Ongoing) 2018.” Essay. In The Rural, 219–21. London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2019.
[3] https://www.npr.org/2022/11/19/1137792556/grindr-stock-ipo-lgbtq-dating
[4] https://sfonline.barnard.edu/cripping-queer-politics-or-the-dangers-of-neoliberalism/
[5] Ahmed, Sara. “What's the Use?: On the Uses of Use,” Page 46-48. Duke University Press, 2019.
T Reckling is an arts laborer, writer, curator, and teacher. Reckling attended University of Nebraska and went on to attend University of California- Los Angeles, University of Oregon, and New York University. Reckling is continuously engaging concepts of shadow cultural labor and messy queer ontologies. Reckling is always looking to collaborate with fellow queers. Instagram: @foreclosedgaybar