Is sex different in the Midwest? Is it specific to a city, town, or square mile? Does it smell a certain way, feel a certain way? When I picked up Robyn Ryle’s novel-in-stories Sex of the Midwest, I admit I was looking for an easy answer to the question of what Midwestern sex could be. As someone who’s spent seven years in the region (Ann Arbor, Ypsilanti, Chicago), I also wondered if I would see myself reflected in its pages. Chicago, where I live, certainly feels unique. It’s a city that annually hosts the International Mr. Leather, a multi-day convention and contest celebrating kink, fetish, and desire. It also hosts International Mx. Leather, a more gender-inclusive series of events. I was recently told about a group of men who, monthly, masturbate together and advertise their gathering on Eventbrite. There’s the Leather Archives and Museum, which has pornographic coloring sheets and free crayons in their library. My friend hosts workshops on masculinity and consent out of their Little Village apartment. In other parts of the Midwest, I imagine other constellations of desire, some of them similar. I imagine there are people tottering out of strip clubs under a fiery post-thunderstorm sky. Young people diving into soybean fields to escape their parent’s judgement. Candid conversations over wine and cheese. Raunchy ones in dive bars. Long flat roads that lead to lover’s houses. Basements that needed to be tested for radon (a naturally occurring radioactive gas in many Midwestern regions) before an orgy can take place. Somewhere, I’m guessing, someone has lost the urge to masturbate after the smell of farm manure drifts into their room. Even with my personal encounters with sex culture in the Midwest, I didn’t relate to Sex of the Midwest, but maybe that was exactly its point. 

This linked short story collection takes place in the fictional town of Lanier, Indiana (population 12,234) and explores the fragile landscapes of desire among its residents. The book begins with all adult residents receiving a mysterious email with the subject line of “Invitation to Participate: Sexual Practices in a Small Midwestern Town.” As in many small towns, people immediately began to talk. Contrary to what the title suggests, you won’t find graphic depictions of sex and kink in these pages. Instead the survey acts as a piece of twine: characters are threaded carefully throughout, each a luminous bead. What unfolds is the opposite of a survey—it comes across as a rebuttal to the idea that small town Midwestern life can ever be fully captured. 

To this end, Sex of the Midwest presents a lush cast of characters. In Lanier there’s Nancy, an octogenarian who experiences a crush for the first time since her husband passed. Rachel, a middle-aged bartender, finds, amid drag brunches and spilled bloody marys, a knack for writing and a beautiful brokenness inside herself. Sam, Rachel’s step-daughter, navigates her girlfriend Ava’s visit to her hometown. Their conflict is not based around their queerness, but around Ava’s skepticism and subsequent fetishization of small town life. Sam, in particular, is irked by Ava’s assumption that Lanier didn’t have gay people. “Did Ava think gayness was something that drifted in the city air but nowhere else?” Sam complains.¹ 

This is something Ryle is adamant about even if the majority of the characters aren’t queer. Queer people live everywhere—not “even” in small towns, but vibrantly in small towns. Speaking of her own small Indiana town, a visiting drag performer says, “Half the men in town belonged to a ‘secret’ club that traveled to the gay bar in Chicago, once a month, like clockwork”.² A professor of sociology and gender studies at Hanover College and an author of two books on gender, Ryle treats her characters with deftness and an empathetic weight, pushing back against the notion that small town life can’t be profoundly queer. At the same time, she’s not interested in painting Lanier as a place independent of bigotry or pain. For example, COVID’s corporal phantom presses down on these pages. Lanier is scarred—literally and figuratively by the pandemic. People are gone, people are sick, people are just dandy until they look beneath the surface of themselves. 

A main character, Don Blankman, is deeply resistant to the COVID vaccine, up until and continuing after a bout of COVID so violent that he was hospitalized for weeks, leaving him with a lung described as “swiss cheese.” He’s surly towards his wife (and is cheating on her) and said about his one Black friend, “Jackson was barely Black. He’d never brought up any of that Black Lives Matter’s bullshit”.³ Ryle is delicate with this character—gently condemning, but simultaneously conceiving of him as part of a system designed to exploit the lonely, to push them further into radical politics. 

Perhaps her condemnation is too gentle. There is an optimism in these pages that sometimes teeters on naivete towards the depths towards where real life can go. Don Blankman is racist, but keeps his thoughts to himself (in my experience, bigots rarely do). Characters struggle with mental health, but not to the point of addiction or death. The result is not saccharine by any means, but intentionally gentle, occasionally frictionless. Aside from that brief mention of Jackson, race is hardly mentioned. Lanier only has 56 Black residents, and I found myself wondering about them, whether they found their small town beautiful, too. I understand why a white writer may have made the decision to step aside on matters of race, but considering how carefully she handles her other characters, this feels at times more like an omission than a recusal. 

The book spars with and is in some ways a rebuttal to the infamous Middletown studies.⁴ In fact, “Sexual Practices in a Small Midwest Town” is referenced by one character, Sam, as a “sexual Middletown”.⁵ These studies, which took place in the 1920’s, were conducted by Robert Staughton Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd, a husband and wife ethnographer duo. They diligently surveyed the white residents of Muncie, Indiana, a city they deemed to be the most average of American cities. The questions spanned life, work, and play, painting a picture of the platonic ideal of white American middle-class life. The resulting books flew off the shelves, even during the Great Depression. 

The Lynd’s survey was far less explicit than “Sexual Practices in a Small Midwest Town,” but similarly sought to elevate one place to be representative of America as a whole. Notably, the Lynds excluded the data collected from Black residents because it skewed the story they wanted to tell of wholesome pastimes and bright futures unmarred by systemic racism. As Himanee Gupta-Carlson stated in Muncie, India(na): Middletown and Asian America, “their practices of inclusion and elimination highlight the hostile racist and anti-immigrant climate of the era.” 

By making one small town emblematic of the whole, more is lost than gained, Ryle argues, and it’s impossible to do so without a flattening. At the end of the book, Rachel, a bartender coming into herself as a writer, describes Lanier as both “small” and “a whole universe.” 

I think about my Midwest. It’s very different from Lanier. It’s based around more populous cities than Lanier. It’s water-logged, like when my basement apartment flooded in Ypsilanti, Michigan. It’s marred with grief from when my dog died in a hit and run on Sheridan, and it’s quite a bit raunchier than Robyn Ryle’s Lanier. It’s where I fell in love for the first time in ten years. Where I was single (often gloriously so) for six of those ten. Where I finished a novel. Where I met many incredible friends. Where I had a roach infestation. Where I dipped my toes in the lake. Some of these things could have happened anywhere, but Sex of the Midwest argues that it’s important that they happened here. 

While I’m certainly not arguing against surveys as a whole (many provide valuable data, including in the fight for world justice) there is a violence in the Middletown survey that Ryle prods at. How can the stories of a place and its people be distilled in such a way except through omission? And furthermore, how can a town so specific that capturing it would be like capturing lightning in a bottle ever represent anything other than itself? 

Ryle’s deft specificity forms the idea that a town can ever be fully captured to slowly unravel. A health department worker allows a hot dog salesman, formerly her sworn enemy, to wash her hair. A woman in her 60’s finds that she loves the quiet spaces her husband has left behind when he’s hospitalized with pneumonia. A young man on the run from his own malaise, pretends to be a writer, then crumples when he has to admit his lie. “Everyone gets so excited when someone new moves to Lanier,” says Nancy, the octogenarian in a fledgling relationship, “Someone they think is important or interesting or famous. Can’t lie. It gets old after a while. I mean, aren’t we enough?” That’s what Sex of the Midwest gets across. Every place is itself. Every place is enough.

. . .

Works Cited

1. Ryle, Robyn. Sex of the Midwest: A novel in stories. Arlington, MA: Galiot Press, 2025, page 71. ↩︎
2. Ryle, Sex of the Midwest, page 41. ↩︎
3. Ryle, Sex of the Midwest, page 7. ↩︎
4. Pekow, Suzanne. “Middletown Studies Throughout the 20th Century.” American RadioWorks – Hard Times in Middletown: How the Middle Class Became the Brittle Class, January 2018. https://americanradioworks.publicradio.org/features/muncie/f1.html. ↩︎
5. Ryle, Sex of the Midwest, page 208. ↩︎

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