My husband and I love camping, and as our family grew, we transitioned from a tiny pup tent with our first baby, to a pop-up camper with three little ones, to multiple tiny tents as they got older and wanted their own space. Now that we are on our own again, dreaming of an airstream, the cute camper on the cover of Angela Yarber’s memoir immediately drew me in, though I have to admit that this sixty-six-year-old cis-heterosexual woman did not immediately recognize the pretty door as being a vertical rendition of the latest LGBTQIA+ flag. Queering The American Dream: A Memoir of Family, Travel and Revolutionary Women chronicles the eighteen months that Angela Yarber, her wife, and their toddler camped across America, always on their guard against cisheteropatriarchy, while reenvisioning their own American dream. The book is interwoven with stories of sixteen mythical and historic revolutionary women who inspire and sustain Yarber and her family’s journey. Understanding more about the Queer community and their struggle against transphobia feels especially important now as Diversity, Equity and Inclusion initiatives are targeted and civil rights protections undermined. Reading this book and googling its terminology has been instructive. (*A glossary of terms from the LGBTQ+ Resource Centre at UC Davis appears at the end of this review).

In response to heterosexism and microaggressions within her church in North Carolina, Yarber, a queer white clergywoman, upends her “queer little family” from their comfortable home and embarks on an eighteen-month transcontinental journey to rediscover her faith. In their pop-up camper, fondly named Freya, Yarber, her wife—an ethics professor, unhappy with the ethics at her university—and their toddler, encounter a great deal of rain, transphobia, and mansplaining along the way. Further, in the primitive campgrounds where they volunteer as camp hosts for months at a time, they encounter a disappointing lack of showers.

In true sermon style, Yarber takes a humorous approach to describing their camping difficulties and her exasperation with the heteronormativity they encounter, while seriously discussing wide-ranging contemporary issues, from intersectional eco-feminism to the sexual politics of meat. Through this she weaves stories of an inspiring “subversive sisterhood of saints”: brave women who defied the norms of their day, women who replenish her courage, women who have been excluded from religious iconography, women whom she has painted as “folk-feminist icons” and brought along in a green plastic bin. Her paintings are done in a folk-art style with giant red hearts blossoming from the women’s chests, and Yarber exhibits and sells them en route to bolster their income.

Each chapter contains these intersecting threads: their “travelations,” Yarber’s musings, and the stories of one historical and one mythical woman saint. Among the historical figures, Yarber includes the camper’s namesake, Freya Stark, who eschewed Victorian conventions to become one of the first Westerners to explore Persia, thus “inspiring and empowering  many women travel writers that have followed in her fearless footsteps,” and Pauli Murray, a queer black women and civil rights attorney, who had her admission to Harvard Law School reevoked when they discovered “Pauli” was not a diminutive of Paul, and who, at sixty, became the first African American woman to be ordained as an Episcopal priest.

The mythological saints include Old Testament Lilith, who escapes Adam’s demands for subservience in the Garden of Eden and saves her soul by climbing over the garden wall; Guanyin, the Buddhist Goddess of Compassion and Mercy, an ancient male bodhisattva in India, who by the twelfth century had evolved into a feminine Chinese deity, and today, depicted as male, female, genderless, or androgynous, is claimed as an icon by vegans, pacifists and queers; and Mary, mother of Jesus, who Yarber envisions as a “queer saint with a belly full of divinity embracing us in all our beautiful diversity.”

In this memoir, the word “queer” is used many times. Yarber explains her use of queer as first, a handy umbrella term to include all LGBTQIA+ people, second, a way to deconstruct gender power binaries, such as male/female and cisgender/transgender, and third, as a way to reclaim the word by reverting back to the dictionary definition: to “intentionally transgress or subvert.”

At first I found the frequent repetition of “queer,” especially in “my queer little family” and our “queer little family,” irritating and unnecessarily repetitive. But eventually I understood this intentional reclaiming of language as a socio-political protest—words like “queer,” which have been used by the dominant group as a slur to denigrate and ostracize a minority group, become empowering when reclaimed and used to positively self-refer.  Reddy Chandon, in Keywords for Gender and Sexuality Studies, as if describing Yarber’s use, writes that “those who seek more to disturb, shatter, or undermine the heteronormative cultural order especially claim the term.”

Though navigating their way safely around and between the heteronormative expectations of camp hosts, motel owners, car mechanics, and nearly everyone else they encounter fills much of their “travelations,” Yarber also relates the pleasures and difficulties of camper life with a wry joy. For instance, at their first campsite in Vermont they encounter a major hurdle: mosquitoes. Yarber writes: 

And yet in recent days you could have found me, the vegan pacifist, clenched fist flying towards the canvas walls of the camper, while shouting, “Die mother fucker!” and crushing the life of a helpless mosquito, blood now spattering across the canvas and onto my knuckles. . . .

It didn’t start quite so violently. It began with essential oils, which actually smelled quite nice. And the mosquitoes nibbled Ru’s neck and legs. It progressed to swatting and a “natural” bug spray.  And the mosquitos attacked the poor little dude’s forehead. I’d say, “Sorry mosquito,” while uttering a little prayer of gratitude for the bug’s short life as I squashed it in a washcloth. I tried to be nice. I tried to follow my principles. I really did. But no matter how many times Elizabeth swatted and said, “Don’t you bite my baby,” they just wouldn’t listen.

One other vital thread pulses through her work, the story of Yarber’s beloved younger brother’s addiction. As he descends further into hopelessness, the readers’ empathy for Yarber and our curiosity on the nature and extent of his problem keeps us turning the pages. This, and the story of their travels, provide a nice balance to the denser, more theoretical sections of the text.

Anticipating potential questions from readers, Yarber acknowledges both her privilege in taking off nearly two years to travel and the leap she takes to tell the stories of revolutionary women of color. She explains that as their stories have mostly been ignored and excluded by history, as a queer feminist she feels a responsibility to “shout them from the rooftops.” She hopes that the women’s determination and struggle will encourage her readers to reject the idea of anyone being marginalized and excluded from the American dream, and she challenges all who experience discrimination to imagine a better life for themselves: “There are revolutionary women behind you and radical imagination within you emboldening you to queer the American dream. Will you accept this emboldening?”

Ultimately, Yarber envisions a country where heteronormativity is no longer the norm, where it is possible for those outside of this paradigm to be themselves without judgement or censure. This book suggests a new queer reality, while simultaneously reclaiming and, in fact, trumpeting a word once used as a slur, bringing all those who identify as queer toward a place of empowerment.

*Click here for a glossary of terms from the LGBTQ+ Resource Centre at UC Davis