Where We Fit: Building Queer Country Dance Community on the pages of The Roundup

Lately, I’ve been in a nearly constant place of reckoning with my sense of home, internal and external, and how much both have changed. Not that change is inherently bad, it’s not. The person I am in the moment has grown in undeniable and breathtaking ways (honestly, I can’t believe I’m here).

I moved to California from the east coast in 2008 to work at an international newsprint magazine that had been documenting global variations in punk culture and music since the 1970s. It was a labor of love – community-driven, globally-connected, and defiantly analog in a world rapidly trending digital. It was a rough time for print media. Everywhere I turned, magazines and newspapers were folding, and bookstores shuttered as Amazon surged in used book sales. The smartphone revolution was dawning, and I remember feeling helpless, wondering where our scrappy magazine fit in this changing landscape and how we would cobble together enough money to print the next issue. Our team was small – just three of us at the helm – and we were constantly caught between the traditional, rigid values of the board of directors and the rising tide of digital media. 

I wouldn’t enter the world of agriculture until a decade later, when I signed up for a sheep shearing course in Northern California on a whim. But I realize now that the same impulse led me to both print media and working with livestock: a craving for tangibility, for embodied, material work. I craved the same things at age 23 that I did at age 33, and now again at age 40 – hands blackened by dirt and ink, groundedness, and a sense of community that outlasts my phone battery. I craved real connection.

That craving surged again last fall. After two years of working as a shepherd for a contract grazing outfit in southern California, I had just stepped back from the work for a long break. I was in the midst of a major transition, untethered from the daily rhythms of land-based work, and unsure where I belonged without my boots on the ground. I missed my livestock community and the authenticity that came with being in constant relationship with animals and place. Around the same time, I attended a weekend-long queer country dance convention – one of many that happen throughout the year – and felt a surge of momentum. It had been nearly fifteen years since I worked at the punk magazine, but suddenly I could feel its pages again, feel the way it gathered people across distance through a shared culture. I wanted to recreate that feeling, but this time, through the lens of queer country dance.

And so, from late-night conversations with my line dance bestie, fueled by dance floor antics and too little sleep, The Roundup was born. 

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The Roundup is a submission-based newspaper dedicated to documenting the vibrant, motley culture of queer country dance across the US, past and present. Veronica and I created this chronicle to deepen a sense of community among queer dancers and to offer connection that doesn't rely on a screen. It’s a living, breathing archive of joy, movement, memory and belonging, tactile proof of our presence in both country dance and country culture more broadly. It’s about legacy and about reminding ourselves – and others – that we’ve always been here and always will be. 

Now, instead of stepping out of my trailer at 5am to check on sheep, I’m hunched over a mess of submissions, frantically piecing together essays, art, photos, personal ads, and dance floor ephemera into newspaper layouts that my friend, Nat, has generously offered to design. I’m tired. I can’t work through the night on a deadline like I could in my early twenties, powered by coffee and raging punk records (though it does sound pretty fun to try!) Newspapers aren’t like magazines - they don’t hold space the same way. Magazines contain much more freedom, more movement and flexibility. You can leave empty, open space for artistic flair, you can be spacious and experimental in design. It’s not the same with newspapers, whose framework is formulaic, constricted to columns, quadrants and rectangles. Newspapers are a puzzle. All of the pieces have to fit. 

Country dancing is similar. It’s about spatial awareness, about fitting into lines and squares on the dancefloor. And never have I been more spatially-aware than I am now, arranging the expansive arc of submissions we received for this newspaper. I find myself constantly thinking about fit – considering where things fit, how to connect all of the disparate pieces, to make them harmonize together and flow like a herd across the page, in messy but thematic alignment. 

That word – fit – keeps surfacing for me. Where do I fit? How do my identities, interests and histories align, how do all of the threads of my life fit together? The word haunts me as I write this newsletter for Women in Ranching when, even though I certainly pass for a woman, I don’t identify as one. Where do I fit here as a nonbinary queer person? 

The Roundup became my answer: space made by and for queer folks carving out a place in country dance culture. On a recent episode of the Vibe Check podcast, poet Saeed Jones spoke about the role of historically gay enclaves—places like Provincetown or Fire Island—as sanctuaries from scrutiny, places where queer people could breathe more easily. I think that same impulse drives many of us to country culture and rural life. We’re not running from culture - we’re remaking it on our own terms. We’re drawn to spaciousness, to the open sky, to possibility.

The Roundup is our own little newsprint enclave, where we all fit. It ties together these practices (dancing, country life and holding a newspaper in our hands) that root us in our bodies, in presence, in concrete community.

Both queerness and ranching can often feel like solitary positions to uphold, but it's the collective that sustains us, and, like the Women in Ranching newsletter, The Roundup reminds us that we are not alone. The Roundup is our call to stay connected – boots on the ground, hands on the page, bodies in motion, entangled together as we build real belonging.

To purchase and learn more about The Roundup, visit theroundup.news