1 Reimagining America’s Heartland
This is the story of becoming and being queer at America’s Roller Coast.1 On 26 June 2014, I boarded a plane from Frankfurt, Germany to Cleveland, Ohio to
In Fairground Attractions: A Genealogy of the Pleasure Ground, Deborah Philips defines the pleasure ground as a leisure space with infinite possibilities (1). This includes pleasure, desire, and satisfaction, with sexual pleasure as one possibility. In this chapter, I argue that amusement parks offer insight into queer subjectivity formation in rural North America. I investigate the relationship between rural amusement parks and queer subjectivities, analyzing how they intersect with, challenge, and reflect queer experiences by studying Cedar Point as a place of queer subjectivity formation.3 Using an interdisciplinary
Both primary sources deromanticize the pastoral/idyllic notion of the rural as a heteronormatively gendered and sexualized heartland by offering insight into the formation of queer subjectivity in the rural Midwest. While these sources are complimentary in their focus, they serve distinct roles within the analysis: the film provides a cultural and historical lens for elucidating the broader socio-cultural context of queer life in the Midwest during the late twentieth century, whereas the interviews offer first-hand, experiential insights that ground the analysis in contemporary lived experiences. Together, they trouble the opposition of imagined and real, global and local, highlighting the interplay between global cultural forces and local lived realities, and showing how the global and local are mutually constitutive in shaping queer subjectivities in the rural Midwest. This interplay relates to the broader argument of this volume, exploring how rural spaces, often idealized or overlooked in globalization studies, are in fact sites where global and local forces intersect.
The dominant trope of the urban in the life of queer individuals has largely prevented us from acknowledging the existence of rural queer communities in general, let alone associating them with rural amusement parks. As Kristin Hoganson has suggested, “what if, instead of treating these components of the heartland myth [meaning ‘[l]ocal. Insulated. Exceptionalist. Isolationist. Provincial. The ultimate safe space’] as forgone conclusions, we approached them as questions, as invitations to explore?” (XXIII). In contesting the dominant trope of urbanity equals liberation equals visibility in queer studies, this interdisciplinary exploration of the relationship between queer rural sexualities and amusement parks is guided by three major questions: What’s so queer about Sandusky, a Midwestern town? What’s so queer about Cedar Point? And what do cultural representations tell us about real-world queerness?
My argument is two-fold: first, I follow a trend in queer studies that rejuvenates US rurality as a space of thriving queer culture and social circles without making the rural appear “better” or more worthy than the urban. Second,
2 The Sexuality of America’s Roller Coast
In contrast to ostensibly more queer-friendly urban settings, the Midwest, primarily rural in character, is not traditionally associated with queer communities. Halvorson and Reno, in Imagining the Heartland, argue that the Midwest links to a whiteness, white supremacy, imperialism, and nativism that has been imagined as “middleness” and averageness (4). This perception allows a justification for and a projection of norms onto people and places that produce structural violence for everyone who lives outside the traditional white heteronormative binary. It reinforces a problematic white heteronormative masculinity, as the heartland is used as a canvas for projecting whiteness, labor, and masculinity (Halvorson and Reno 16). Rural space in general is stereotypically imagined to be hostile to queer individuals, prompting many to migrate to coastal urban centers, perpetuating the urban/rural binary (Halberstam 36). Scott Herring notes that the nonmetropolitan is often seen as a “perpetual site of isolation and exclusion,” resulting in the rich documentation of urban queer histories (10). Jack Halberstam’s neologism “metronormativity” denotes “the conflation of ‘urban’ and ‘visible’ in many normalizing narratives of gay/lesbian subjectivities” and the temporal-spatial equation of out and proud in the city versus closeted and ashamed in the rural (36; see also Abraham; Chauncey; and Houlbrook). This stereotypical view is rooted in perceptions of conservatism and sexual conservatism associated with rural values (Gray et al. 4). A small town like Sandusky, in this sense, would be an unlikely place to find queer subjectivities.4 However, this perception changes when considering the role of a local amusement park.
Distinguishing theme parks from amusement parks is key for understanding their potential as queer spaces. Both offer escapism, but theme parks center on specific themes, while amusement parks prioritize thrill and fun
In her article “The American Path: From the Pleasure Garden to the Amusement Park,” Naomi J. Stubbs traces the evolution of the cultural and social functions of pleasure gardens (7). As places with the simultaneous function of an idyllic garden and site of entertainment, commemoration, celebration, retreat, and technological advancement, they ultimately served to navigate the complexity of national identity (8). Pleasure gardens were grounds for “explor[ing] through performance (subconsciously and consciously) a variety of issues concerning American identities in a manner unlike other contemporaneous forms” (8). They already acted as places of inclusion and exclusion along race, class, and gender lines, as well as offering a mix of the rural and the urban, at the turn of the nineteenth century. According to Stubbs, they functioned as early sites of escapism from urban city life, promising a rural retreat within the comfort of the urban where one could let loose. Pleasure gardens, initially free and open to various populations, promised mixing and mingling if patrons adhered to genteel behavior. However, when patrons observed non-genteel characters, admission fees were introduced to guarantee exclusivity. The reputation of pleasure gardens had dropped by the mid-nineteenth century after they attracted more unruly behavior. Despite their complexities, pleasure gardens acted as places of identity performance and expression, blurring the urban-rural boundary. Similar to Bakhtin’s concept of the carnival, they were early examples of spaces where normative identities could be performed and subverted. They also quickly became industrialized by modern technology, paving the way for other venues such as public parks and world fairs, which would lead the way to the modern idea of an amusement park.
What is important to note here is the complex dynamic between vice (popularly imagined to be located in the city) and virtue (associated with the rural). The rural has been imagined as a place of manners and peace and bringing it to the modern city in the form of pleasure gardens resulted in these norms being adapted. Sarah Graham argues in “Unfair Ground: Girlhood and Theme Parks in Contemporary Fiction” that modern theme parks, like the pleasure gardens of old, reproduce heteronormative expectations and gender roles, and conservative attitudes, while at the same time revealing them to be social
When amusement parks are located in rural spaces, they challenge the assumption that rural settings only accommodate normative sexual behavior. While limited research has explored the influence of such environments on queer sexuality, Sean P. Griffin and Karen Tongson stand out as noteworthy exceptions. Griffin’s work, a rare monograph-length project, delves into the potential link between Disney parks and products and the gay community (98). Combining textual analysis with theoretical approaches, first-person accounts, and historical analysis, Griffin links the US gay liberation movement to the presence of gay and lesbian employees within the company, providing an alternate history of the Walt Disney company (94). He examines how the creation of LEAGUE (Lesbian and Gay United Employees) within the company has exemplified the possibility of queer readings of Disney products to mass audiences (93).
Furthermore, Tongson’s chapter “Behind the Orange Curtain” highlights the importance of considering new destinations and changing migration patterns in queer studies, and underscores how late capitalism has blurred distinctions between urban, suburban, and rural lifestyles and architectures (73). These works remind us that amusement parks are spaces where not only heterosexual but also gender and queer sexualities are formed and performed.
Also relevant to my understanding of amusement parks is Mikhail Bakhtin’s medieval carnival concept. Bakhtin has argued that the carnival “celebrated temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and from the established order; it marked the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms, and prohibitions” (1984: 10). The carnival created a two-world condition that
offered a completely different, nonofficial, extraecclesiastical and extrapolitical aspect of the world, of man, and of human relations; they built a second world and a second life outside officialdom, a world in which all medieval people participated more or less, in which they lived during a given time of the year.
(Bakhtin 1984: 6)
Amusement parks, too, create a world within a world, an in-between space (between rural and urban), allowing non-normative subjectivities to exist without societal repercussions during admission. Florian Freitag reminds us that entering a park means entering a distinct isolated world; amusement parks are “self-contained worlds which are geographically, visually, and ritually separated
Freitag’s reference to going through the turnstiles invokes Bakhtin’s notion of the chronotope or time-place of the threshold, which “is connected with the breaking point of a life, the moment of crisis” and linked to “the chronotopes of the street and square” as “places where crisis events occur, the falls, resurrections, renewals, epiphanies, decisions that determine the whole life of a man” – to which the amusement park could well be added (248). As a liminal space of in-betweenness, associated with a time that seems to have “no duration and falls out of the normal course of biographical time,” the transition marked by the turnstiles between the world outside the amusement park and the apparently extra-political realm inside it produces a sense of tension that offers the potential for personal exploration and reorientation (Bakhtin 1996: 248).
Borrowing from Sara Ahmed’s framework of orientation, I argue that amusement parks are places of sexual and gendered (re)orientation. If, as Ahmed states, “orientation is a matter of how we reside in space, then sexual orientation might also be a matter of residence; of how we inhabit space as well as ‘what’ or ‘who’ we inhabit spaces with” (1). Accordingly, the amusement park becomes a place in which queer subjects orient themselves sexually and spatially. They turn toward the amusement park as a form of escapism from the heteronormative outside world, position themselves as queer subjects in the park, and experience and perform their sexuality in the process of orienting themselves in this environment with other queer subjects. In that sense, it is a circular movement of arriving, becoming, and being, which ultimately leads to a reshaping of their personal sexual narrative in a way that does not necessarily remain confined to the amusement park.
3 Borderland Sandusky: the Road to Crystal Shores
Set in the year 1984 within the confines of small-town Sandusky, Ohio, the 1998 film Edge of Seventeen, conceived by screenwriter Todd Stephens and director David Moreton, depicts the coming-of-age and coming-out story of Eric (Chris Stafford), a 17-year-old teenager, who lives with his parents and two younger brothers in a predominantly white residential neighborhood. Todd Stephens’s trilogy, starting with Edge of Seventeen, delves into the theme of coming of age in Sandusky. The inaugural installment is followed by Gypsy 83 (2001) and Swan Song (2021). While Edge of Seventeen explores the journey of growing up gay in Sandusky, Swan Song addresses the narrative of aging within the queer context of rural America. Collectively, the trilogy not only captures individual journeys
Gilad Padva, in his comparative analysis of new queer cinema, has construed Edge of Seventeen as a “melodramatization of queer adolescence,” elucidating how the film employs extravagant and emotionally charged spectacles of tears, cries, and emotional turmoil to interrogate and disrupt the rigid and unchallenged norms of heteronormative institutions (358–359). Most interpretations of the film focus on Eric’s melodramatic transformational story from the confines of the closet to openly embracing his queer identity. While Edge of Seventeen is indeed a coming-of-age story, focusing on the location where this transformation is happening, the becoming, the in-between of sexual identities, and the space where sexual identity is formed, allows for a nuanced comprehension of the significance of rural Sandusky and its amusement park in Eric’s personal sexual roller coaster ride.
When Eric and his closest companion Maggie embark on their inaugural workday at Crystal Shores, an imaginary amusement park in Sandusky inspired by Cedar Point, we see a front windshield shot of two young people in an old Volkswagen car. This image captures the exuberance of youth as both protagonists joyfully sing along to Toni Basil’s resounding anthem “Hey Mickey.” Their journey commences in the streets of downtown Sandusky and takes them onto the highway that, along a causeway, guides them to the peninsula housing the amusement park (Figure 18.1). The scene physically and metaphorically
[b]orders are set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them. A border is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge. A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition. (3, emphasis in original)
The recurring visual juxtaposition facilitated by the shot/reverse shot montage cutting between Sandusky and Eric in the car effectuates a schism between Eric (us being the queers) and the inhabitants of Sandusky (who are turned into the them, the ones who position queers as unsafe and as such make life out of the closet unsafe for Eric). Edge of Seventeen thus suggests that Eric escapes the confines of the “normal” by driving along the causeway and working at the park. The park, across the border of the causeway, provides a welcoming place for people, especially queers and racialized minorities, who, in town, are turned into outcasts by a white heteronormative society, made to live on the edge of rural society. The park appears as a liminal space they can navigate as insiders.
The park’s remote location positioned on a peninsula’s steep edge sets it apart from the town. This spatial divide is reinforced by the absence, at the park, of Eric’s family and the traditional gender norms they affirm (Eric’s dad works, while his mother stays home and performs domestic tasks). Initially, Eric works at the amusement park to save for college in New York City, alluding to a narrative of progress that will lead him from rurality to urbanity. As he begins to explore his sexuality, however, the park evolves beyond a financial means, becoming a space where he can navigate his queerness in a rural context. Every time he moves across the causeway, Eric passes from the heterosexual private space of a conservative family to the homosocial semi-public space of a second family that accepts him for who he is. Eric’s journey to and from the park represent not only a physical transition but process of sexual (re)orientation that moves him away from heteronormative expectations of his town towards a queer self-understanding. His movement can be understood as a form of queer migration, aligning with Ahmed’s definition of migrations as a “process of disorientation and reorientation” (9). Eric moves away and arrives as he reorients himself in new and old places. Precisely because Eric keeps moving between these spaces, he becomes a threshold character straddling and challenging the boundaries of what the social environment defines as the good (heterosexual)
Eric quickly learns how to navigate this transitional borderland, but ultimately lets both worlds melt together, when his appearance, also outside the park, gradually takes on a rebellious aesthetic, including colored hairstyles and androgynous attire reminiscent of Boy George, David Bowie, and Billy Idol. The increasingly blurred division between the mainland and the peninsula of the amusement park thus reflects the changing relationship between Eric’s closeted sexuality in the private realm of his home and his openly queer character in (semi-)public spaces such as the local gay bar or the amusement park (Figure 18.2).
The amusement park’s significance for Eric’s coming out is highlighted in a few scenes during the first thirty minutes of the film and later on, when Eric walks along the marina after a confrontation with his mother, who found matches from the local gay bar in his jacket and accused him of being gay. In the latter scene, Eric is walking along the shore right across from Crystal Shores, and we are shown a shot/reverse shot sequence cutting between Eric and his view of the amusement park. This sequence emphasizes the pivotal role the amusement park plays in Eric’s self-discovery. These sequences can be read as cinematic representations of Ahmed’s “queer (re)orientation, visually depicting Eric’s shifting orientation towards his own identity and the space he occupies during his queer migration to a home of his self. Screenwriter Todd Stephens
4 A Place Like No Other: Cedar Point
Located between Toledo and Cleveland, Sandusky hosts the real-life counterpart of Stephens’s envisioned Crystal Shores: Cedar Point, America’s roller coaster capital. Southeast of Lake Marblehead and Kelleys Island, Cedar Point connects Sandusky’s Bay with Lake Erie (Figure 18.3). Established in 1870 as a beer garden with “water slides, a bathing beach, a dance pavilion, a twenty-room hotel, and the area’s first roller coaster,” Cedar Point became a popular beach resort at the turn of the century and would eventually grow into a modern amusement park with record-breaking thrill rides owned by Cedar Fair (O’Brien 58). Besides being “just a place to ride rides and have fun,” it emerged as a destination for queer individuals to explore their sexuality, build a community, and liberate themselves from heteronormative constraints (O’Brien 58).
Skyline view of Cedar Point, Sandusky, Ohio
Photograph by Marcel Strobel
Drawing from my own work experiences at the park in 2014 and 2016, which led to enduring friendships with colleagues and guests, I conducted three
Significantly, among my interviewees, the decision to work at the park had no connection to their sexuality. Born in Kansas, David, who was an 18-year-old freshman at the University of Colorado in 2012, learned about the benefits of working at Cedar Point during the summer from a friend at Theme Park Review, an American roller coaster enthusiast club that includes a forum for written exchange among its members. David found the enticing perks, including on-site housing and the opportunity to earn money to cover travel expenses and tuition, reason enough to make the cross-country move for a summer job as a ride operator, despite his lack of familiarity with the amusement park lifestyle.
Bryan, describing himself as hailing “from many places” due to his American, Lebanese, Syrian, Turkish, and European heritage, considers Sydney, Australia, where he was born and raised, his home. He identifies as gay but generally avoids categorizing his (sexual) identity. His primary reason for working at Cedar Point stemmed from his passion for amusement parks, a rarity in Australia. In contrast, Todd, a Sandusky native now residing in Wayne, Pennsylvania, and New York City, remembers Cedar Point as “a place that [he] was aware of as far back as [he] can remember.” During his childhood, his family would take him there once a year.
When I inquired about my participants’ relationship with Cedar Point, and its role in their life, David’s first response was:
I mean, that’s where I had my entire coming-of-age. It was basically what shaped my whole adult life. It determines where I am living now, and who my friends are. I went to college for one year but that was it. I guess
I had my young adult fun college time at Cedar Point. That’s where I did my growing up. That’s where I went from being a teenager to an adult.
For Bryan, Cedar Point was also essential to making him who he is now, although besides defining it as a space of fun and excitement, he describes it as a safe space where he could figure out who he was, what career path he wanted to pursue, and where he wanted to live. He acknowledges that when he initially moved to Cedar Point he had not yet come out, and that living and working at the park significantly contributed to his sexual self-discovery and eventual coming out. Bryan had harbored fears that his world would crumble if he revealed his sexuality, but the amusement park environment provided a supportive backdrop for him to do so: “I came out to my best friend at Cedar Point, and I distinctly remembered riding Magnum, one of the roller coasters I was operating, and thinking that nothing changed. I was still the silly person that I am.” Notably, echoing themes from Edge of Seventeen, Bryan’s narrative underscores the divide between the amusement park and the external world; he describes feeling as though he resided on the border between the accepting environment of the amusement park and the hostile realm beyond it.
Todd’s experience was similar to Bryan’s in terms of finding a supportive queer community at the amusement park. During his first summer at Cedar Point in 1984, Todd met his co-worker Rod, whom he instantly developed a crush on. After one season of flirting, Todd and Rod had sexual intercourse at Cedar’s, the on-site dorm for employees since demolished, on the day before the season ended. Todd remembers “walking out of there, down the midway, after the park had closed, still in his work uniform, realizing that his life had changed.” For Todd, the park was the place where he had his first sexual encounter and his first contact with other queer people who would serve as role models: “Sometime during the season, Angie, a butch-type lesbian I came out to, really was like a role model. She really had a major influence on my life, of just being like it’s okay to be queer. This was the summer that I came of age, and these people had a big impact on my life.”
A compelling contrast unfolds in all the narratives between the private and fully public spaces of Sandusky and the semi-private domain of the amusement park. Notably, Bryan and Todd embarked on their coming-out journeys at Cedar Point before sharing their truths in more private settings. The park’s ticketed and enclosed environment provided them with a secure sanctuary. Unlike the open streets of a town where anyone can freely come and go, Cedar Point’s restricted access and controlled entry created an enclosed atmosphere where queers could feel like insiders. In the streets and neighborhoods of the town, as Edge of Seventeen underscores, individuals are exposed to the gaze of
There appears, then, to be a unique connection between amusement parks and queer communities, as David suggests when he notes:
Coaster nerds and coaster enthusiasts in general have a high amount of queer people in it, and Cedar Point is like the mecca of amusement parks, so plenty of people travel there very very far to work. I mean, I drove for 24 hours in my car to get there. It was horrible but I did it. And so, I think that when you have a large population of people that travel to work at Cedar Point and a large percentage of those people are queer anyway because of their coaster enthusiasm, maybe that’s just how it all comes together?
Cedar Point’s status as a mecca for amusement park lovers attracts a diverse population, including a significant queer presence, to a dominantly rural environment. Bryan describes Cedar Point as having a profound impact on Sandusky, transforming both the town and its people, attributing this to the park’s welcoming and inclusive environment. He notes:
Yes, it was a rural community and it felt extremely accepting but that was because of the park. That shows that it can coexist meaning rurality and LGBTQ communities. But without Cedar Point, the town wouldn’t be the same.
Bryan also emphasizes that “the environment is particularly welcoming because creating memorable experiences is a big part of the attraction’s business”; the surrounding community, members of which are not only likely to repeatedly visit the park but also to find employment there, cannot but be affected by this atmosphere. Todd concurs with the notion that amusement parks serve as safe spaces for queer individuals, crediting Cedar Point as the place where he found the courage to be himself: “It really is the place. I can’t
All my interviewees could relate to the idea that amusement parks and their values of openness, amusement, and non-normativity contributed to their queer sexual subject formation. This association has also manifested historically. For instance, on 14 June 1969, members of the activist group ONE held an outing called “Gay Day” at Cedar Point, which turned into a huge annual event for the queer population in the area (Labadie Collection at UMich, Sexual Freedom Vertical File). In 2002, in The Blade, Toledo’s daily newspaper, Ms. Rogers, a park visitor, recalls that Gay Days at Cedar Point were “why [they] came … – because [they] feel comfortable. … Here [they] can be open. [They] are happy and have fun” (Blake). People from the Midwest, from other parts of the United States, and from all around the world, including me, were brought to this place because of an already existing passion for amusement parks, to make money, or simply because the park promised a thrilling time. Once there, as David jokes in the quote used as an epigraph for this chapter, “it only takes one season to turn a straight man into his true ‘gay’ self.” In 2018, Cedar Point trademarked the slogan “A Place Like No Other,” capturing the power that this place holds for its (queer) visitors as a place out of the ordinary capable of accommodating non-normative subjectivities.
5 The Future of Queer Community-Making at Rural Amusement Parks
The purpose of writing this chapter was to process my own coming-of-age and coming out experiences at Cedar Point by looking at the film Edge of Seventeen and my interviewees’ responses, creating an awareness of the influence of space and place as defined by Massey (1994) and Gregory et al. (2000) on queer subjectivity formation at an amusement park set predominantly in a rural, heteronormative space. I sensed that taking Cedar Point as a site of research would spark new knowledge about rural queer subjectivities and dispel the myth of the heartland as a realm of uncontested straightness in the United States (Manalansan et al. 1).
In line with Bakhtin’s chronotope of the threshold, the park creates a timeless in-between space where sexuality can be freely reoriented from an adherence to heteronormativity toward a liberating queer affirmation. The complex process of queer identity formation within what Anzaldúa terms a “borderland” leads to a challenging and reimagining of heteronormative structures
My reading of the film and of my interviewees’ stories also evokes a critique of the queer visibility discourse, which dominantly associates coming-out narratives with becoming visible as queer in the urban. The image of the rural as a “flat, homogenous, and the type of conservative, anachronistic place where queer people necessarily suffer” is deconstructed by the fictional experiences of Eric and the real-life experiences of Todd, Bryan, and David (Thomsen XIV). This does not imply that the rural or the Midwest, as a whole, are peaceful havens for queer people; hate crimes and (structural) violence against queers occur in both urban and rural areas. What it does show is that queer individuals have created community in times and places traditionally associated with an absence of or particular hostility to queerness. By demonstrating how Cedar Point operates as a site of queer community formation within a rural setting, my chapter directly engages with this volume’s larger argument about the “spectralization” of the rural. It challenges the notion that rural areas are mere sites of regressive social structures that haunt society, and instead presents them as dynamic spaces where alternative identities can flourish. In this respect, my work contributes to the undoing of the rural as a space that “only some bodies can comfortably inhabit,” challenging the “enduring prevalence of the idyll and pastoral as lenses for looking at the rural.” Instead, it opens new kinds of attachments, queer attachments, to the rural.
Ultimately, acknowledging these queer attachments, including lived experiences, struggles, achievements, and narratives of queer people, requires a thinking beyond the rural-urban binary, and a focusing of attention on specific spaces in the urban and the rural, such as amusement parks, that challenge the spectralization of queer identities and foster the becoming and recognition of queer communities in urban and rural realities.
I use “queer” as an umbrella term encompassing sexual desires or practices outside traditional sexual and gender norms. While this chapter primarily focuses on the lived experiences of queer men working at Cedar Point, I am situating their experience in the broader queer community and academic field of queer rurality and urban studies, providing the potential to study other identities not mentioned in this chapter. Throughout my study, I also want to honor my interviewees’ use of “gay” to refer to their male same-sex desire, knowing that the term “gay” is now also widely used to refer to a distinct white urban upper-class sexual identity.
See Golden Ticket Awards by Amusement Today from 2010–2013. https://goldenticketawards.com/past-gta-winners/.
The terms space and place have a complex history with a multiplicity of meanings that have changed over time, particularly in the context of postcolonialism, human geography, feminist studies, and literary studies (see Gregory et al. 767–773). They are crucial for understanding social and cultural life in geography (Johnston and Longhurst 15). Drawing from Doreen Massey’s idea of space as a dynamic “configuration of social relations within which the specifically spatial may be conceived of as an inherently dynamic simultaneity,” I use space to represent distinct configurations of “social relations,” particularly queer space, emphasizing its dynamic non-static nature (4). These various spaces are essential to the study of gender, sexuality, and their intertwined power dynamics, where space is viewed as complex, changeable, discursively produced, and infused with power relations that intimately connect bodies and their experiences (Johnston and Longhurst 16). In this context, place serves “as a particular articulation of those relations, a particular moment in those networks of social relations and understandings” (Massey 5). Cedar Point, for instance, serves as a material place within a heteronormative space. It acts as a setting where subjects, particularly amusement park employees, experience emotions related to their sexuality.
For a comprehensive overview of rural queer studies, see Beemyn; Brown-Saracino; Gray et al.; Herring; Nicolaides and Wiese; and Thomsen.
While Todd Stephens granted permission to use his real name, I am using pseudonyms to protect my other participants’ privacy.
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