Samantha Allen is a trans woman and ex-Mormon who lived for a time in Provo, Utah. She recently wrote a book called Real Queer America. The basic idea is to take a road trip through red states, chronicling the LGBT communities therein. She drove from Utah to Texas to Indiana to Tennessee to Georgia.
Her premise is that the red state American crucibles produce unique LGBT spaces. These are spaces where LGBT people have to overcome differences and find common ground, avoiding the kind of arcane squabbling found in New York or San Francisco, where communities are large enough to divide into warring subgroups.
The book itself is pretty good. It’s a worthwhile travelogue, and it does show how smaller places can be as radical and beautiful as larger ones. Not that I don’t have any quibbles. She organizes the book more around legislation than movements, and there are thorny issues of gentrification and homonormativity that she sometimes overlooks.
But this post is less a review of Real Queer America than a reaction to one of the stops on Allen’s road trip. She visits Bloomington, Indiana, where I lived for 6 years.
