Real Queer America
LGBT Stories from Red States
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4.2 • 13 Ratings
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD FINALIST
A transgender reporter's "powerful, profoundly moving" narrative tour through the surprisingly vibrant queer communities sprouting up in red states (New York Times Book Review), offering a vision of a stronger, more humane America.
Ten years ago, Samantha Allen was a suit-and-tie-wearing Mormon missionary. Now she's a GLAAD Award-winning journalist happily married to another woman. A lot in her life has changed, but what hasn't changed is her deep love of Red State America, and of queer people who stay in so-called "flyover country" rather than moving to the liberal coasts.
In Real Queer America, Allen takes us on a cross-country road-trip stretching all the way from Provo, Utah to the Rio Grande Valley to the Bible Belt to the Deep South. Her motto for the trip: "Something gay every day." Making pit stops at drag shows, political rallies, and hubs of queer life across the heartland, she introduces us to scores of extraordinary LGBT people working for change, from the first openly transgender mayor in Texas history to the manager of the only queer night club in Bloomington, Indiana, and many more.
Capturing profound cultural shifts underway in unexpected places and revealing a national network of chosen family fighting for a better world, Real Queer America is a treasure trove of uplifting stories and a much-needed source of hope and inspiration in these divided times.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this clever combination of easy travelogue and thoughtful exploration of queerness in America, journalist Allen retraces her transformation from a Mormon missionary in Utah to a transgender woman living happily in rural Florida. With Billy, her wife's ex (also trans), in the passenger seat, she tours the country looking for what she calls the "real" stories of LGBTQ experience, finding a vibrant bar in Jackson, Miss., featuring fabulous drag queens, and the comfortable LGBTQ youth center in Provo, Utah, fittingly named Encircle. Allen makes the case, bolstered by statistics, that these red-state oases produce tight-knit, supportive queer communities, which can result in measurable happiness. Allen combines stories of hope and even a funny reunion with her wife at the place where they first met the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction in Bloomington, Ind., appropriately enough with events happening at the same time elsewhere in the country: the 2017 white supremacist march in Charlottesville, Va., and attempts to remove legal protections for LGBTQ people. Her approach is firmly inclusive; she acknowledges the limitations of her perspective as a white woman, giving readers a brief explainer on Kimberl Crenshaw's concept of intersectional oppression. Queer readers will nod knowingly at the descriptions of finding gay-friendly hangouts and questioning whether public hand-holding is safe in a new area, and readers without that experience will still enjoy Allen's charming, humorous recounting of the ultimate road trip through rainbow-colored America.
