Queering CoMO: exploring the queer small city ecology of Columbia, Missouri, between 1991 and 2021

This paper employs Brown-Saracino’s [Brown-Saracino, J. 2018. How Places Make Us: Novel LBQ Identities in Four Small Cities. The University of Chicago Press] framework of queer city ecology, which emphasizes the unique cultures of individual cities, to explore the historical and contemporary queer geographies of Columbia, Missouri, a small, Midwestern college city. Using qualitative interview methods, this paper draws from an in-depth, purposeful sample of individuals who self-identified as part of the LGBTQ + or “queer” community in Columbia, Missouri, at some point between the time period of 1991–2021. This paper advances the small city ecology framework by finding there are fragmented queer social and cultural geographies within Columbia, Missouri, dependent partially on the LGBTQ + identity of the member of the community, but also on the various types of queer spaces available to those members.