Earlier this summer, Cyndi Lauper’s True Colors Fund and the Drake Law School united with the USDA to support a subset of the rural population that has often found itself erased: lesbian farmers.

Just one of a series of events designed to reach queer farmers and other LGBT people in rural areas, the event, which took place mid-August, inadvertently drew the nation’s attention to the incredible women working in agriculture today.

The event, for which Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack was the keynote speaker, originally sought to help LGBT people to sign up for USDA programs like food stamps and housing loans, with “programs and services that exist to protect, promote, and strengthen LGBT members of rural communities,” according to a pamphlet provided by the USDA.

The summit sought to support the members of this subset of the rural community, who are often unaware that they have a right to these services.

“Contrary to widely held myths that the LGBT community is largely living in affluent metropolitan areas, studies show a very different and more realistic picture of the LGBT community,” the USDA said. “For a number of reasons, many people in the LGBT community choose to live, work, and raise their families in the rural communities that the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) is proud to serve.”

When he got wind of the summit, right-wing radio personality Rush Limbaugh came back with a mind-boggling response, calling the program an “attack” on what he has deemed the last conservative bastion: rural America.

“Here comes the Obama regime with a bunch of federal money and they’re waving it around, and all you gotta do to get it is be a lesbian and want to be a farmer and they’ll set you up,” Limbaugh ranted on the air. “I’m like you; I never before in my life knew that lesbians wanted to be farmers. I never knew that lesbians wanted to get behind the horse and the plow and start burrowing. I never knew it. … The objective here is to attack rural states.”

But Limbaugh’s view of rural areas is completely misguided, according to NBC News. Setting aside for a moment that most modern farmers have long since forgone the horse and plow, the USDA is not handing out subsidies to queer farmers, but rather guiding them toward programs already in existence to which they have a right. And to top it all off, no one is encouraging LGBT people to move to rural areas: they are already there.

“We have this perception that LGBT people leave rural areas and I think that’s not actually true,” said Naomi Goldberg, policy director for the Movement Advancement Project and a speaker at the Iowa LGBT Rural Summit. “Breaking the stereotype that LGBT people don’t live outside of cities is really important.”

Her research shows that 96 out of 99 Iowa counties are home to gay couples who are raising children. The largest proportional increase in same-sex couples in the 2000 census occurred in rural areas.

Limbaugh’s narrow view of the truth has set off an assortment of tributes to lesbian farmers, from a musical theater response created by Kathryn Lounsbery to “America Needs Lesbian Farmers” t-shirts.

Inadvertently, his tirade brought increased visibility, not only to this event, but to rural members of the LGBT community, bringing about the very reality that Limbaugh sought to criticize: members of the LGBT community who thought that the door to rural living was closed to them can now see the truth.

“It’s not just about acknowledging LGBT farmers,” Professor Colin R. Johnson, author of “Just Queer Folks: Gender and Sexuality in Rural America,” told NBC. “Its also about communicating to a generation of rural youth … of saying to people who are demonstrably leaving, that you can remain. You can remain and not be boxed into a kind of way of life before you have the opportunity to shape it.”

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Female farmer image via Shutterstock

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Odd as it may be, many people still think of farmers as grizzly old men who have been working the land for what seems like 100 years. But in reality, farmers come in all shapes, sizes, and genders, and those farmers may even have a different sexual orientation than what you’d expect.

Yeah, we know it seems strange to forward this article with those specific words, but to us, it was worth saying because according to Bitch Magazine, the queer farmers of America have to deal with farming stereotypes of all sorts. Who is considered a typical farmer? And what does he or she look like? Also to ponder: What do “queers” look like, and what are queers doing for work?

All of these incredibly deep questions are broached in the documentary that was created by the Queer Farmer Film Project, “Out Here.” Jonah Mossberg, farmer-filmmaker, made the movie to examine what farming means to LGBT people. This is the basic gist of the film, according to Bitch: “After conducting more than 30 interviews during four years of touring farms [in] the United States in a borrowed car, ‘Out Here’ shows snapshots from life on seven farms run by LGBT people.”

While the film examines what farming means to LGBT farmers, it also explores the types of farms they have, too. (Many of the farmers in the doc support sustainable agriculture and “community-based food systems.”)

Bitch reports that Mossberg got the idea for the film when the filmmaker was 18 years old, and just getting into the idea of farming — it also was the same time Mossberg was coming out. “[Farming] gave me meaningful work, it gave me nourishment, it gave me activities to do where I felt strong and valued,” the filmmaker states.

“I didn’t know too man other queer people who were farming, but I sure wanted to. In the Bay Area there’s quite a few urban gardeners and farmers, and we started the Rainbow Chard Alliance—we’d get together and have potlucks and seed swaps, and I love that kind of camaraderie and kinship with other queer farmers and gardeners. I love hanging out and chatting with most people who are interested in plants—I love to nerd out on that stuff—but there was something super special about hanging out with a bunch of other queer people.”

To find out more about Mossberg and the film, read the entire Q&A over at Bitch.

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Image from Queer Farmer Film Project

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