Queers are everywhere. That’s the chant and the dogma, but I think secretly most of us believe that, if we queers are not already living in some urban gay ghetto, we’re saving up for the bus ticket that will take us there and free us from the idiocy of rural life. The city queers I know want a country place, which is quite different from wanting a country life.

Michael Riordon, playwright and author of The First Stone, a book about homosexuality and the United Church of Canada, has chosen the country life. He and his lover moved to a crumbling house in Ontario’s Prince Edward County some 10 years ago. They’re still there. This book, though, is no local history. It’s the result of a year-long, cross-Canada search for the, as it turns out, not-so-elusive country dyke and fag.

He talked to some 300 of them (not all appear in this book). Though I wish he’d left out most of the coming-out narratives (there’s way too much of the “I knew I was different from an early age” stuff), Riordon is particularly good at teasing a full, breathing life story out of the very few pages that can be devoted to each subject. Life is in the details and we get them. We meet the woman interpreting the walk of a frightened doe along a beach in British Columbia. The boy sneaking out his bedroom window at night to meet his friend at the video store. A man standing alone in the rain, holding a placard protesting the Catholic Church’s opposition to gay rights legislation in Nova Scotia.

These are not all profiles in courage, however. Many of these people want simply to lead quiet lives, and be respected by their neighbours. Some of these people are not very nice. Many have, or have had, severe drug and alcohol problems, and not a few have tried to kill themselves. Riordon is careful to include roughly equal numbers of men and women, and is scrupulous about seeking out as many Quebeckers and native people as he can.

So we’re everywhere. Which doesn’t matter much, politically or even socially, if we’re not particularly visible. That is why the most glowing moments in this clear-eyed book come when someone or some ones reach out tentatively to the others like them in the bush, on the farms, in the villages that scatter out beyond the ghettos most of us know. Drag parties happen in the middle of nowhere. Family happens too, though it’s probably not exactly what the Reform Party has in mind (one man’s lover, for example, is also his adopted son). Much more happens “out our way,” in fact, than any city slicker (or many straight country folk) would ever guess. Riordon’s book is a compelling, warmly written guide.