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.
Samantha Allen’s Bloomington
Allen landed a summer fellowship at the Kinsey Institute in 2012, and so she moved to Bloomington to accept it. She returned 5 years later while she was writing Real Queer America, reflecting in the book on the changes between the initial stay and the visit.
She formed her initial impression of Indiana on the basis of its politics, which were lousy in 2012. Mike Pence was the governor. And while it’s true that Indiana had gone blue for Obama in 2008, that was a rare bright spot. Unsurprisingly, Allen was apprehensive.
What she found in Bloomington was a small oasis in the red desert. Something of a liberal bubble, but one where an LGBT person could find some sense of community. To her credit, Allen nods at intersectionality here, where the more white and male and homonormative you are, the more likely you are to find an LGBT community in Bloomington.
She writes a lot about Rachael’s Café, a coffee shop and restaurant in downtown Bloomington that was owned and operated by a trans woman. She also writes about The Back Door, Bloomington’s only gay bar. And various other cocktail bars, coffee shops, and restaurants.
What she notices most of all is how many places closed in the 5 year gap between 2012 and 2017. As she puts it in Real Queer America: “The sites of queer culture are ‘ephemeral’…popping up and shutting down with the same hurried persistence of the rodents in a frantic game of Whac-A-Mole…Corey and I found our version of queer Bloomington, plumbed its depths, and consigned it to memory. It feels as if we walked across this town four years ago on a queer suspension bridge that fell apart as soon as we crossed it.”
My Bloomington
Okay, so that last bit sounds familiar. I lived in Bloomington from 2001 to 2007, and the little oasis in a red desert is a huge part of my past. Like Allen, I visited Bloomington in 2017. And so it was fun to compare my notes to hers.
Many of the places Allen writes about opened, and closed, entirely within the 10-year window from when I moved in 2007 to when I visited in 2017. I had never heard of Rachael’s Café’s or The Back Door. We had one gay bar when I lived in Bloomington, but it was called Bullwinkle’s.
It was fine.
Lots of the places I remember had closed by 2017. Places like the Secret Sailor or Boxcar Books. The Vid‘s still open, but it’s much different (and generally not for the better). A select few places, like Soma Coffeehouse, are still open and pretty much the same as 10 years ago.
And we do create different kinds of community. Mine was more at the intersection of lefty, goth, queer, redneck, and bookish. I’d much rather be at The Vid, The Office Lounge, or the bowling alley than at some of the places Allen mentions, like The Bluebird. Allen and I do share an appreciation for Mother Bear’s pizza, which I lived across the street from for about 2 years.
Real Queer America and College Towns
I appreciate the travelogue, but writing about college towns hammers home a point for me: in the US, there’s much more of an urban/rural divide than a red/blue state divide. Sometimes a college town is just a college town, whether it’s in New York, Iowa, or Alabama. It raises for me the issue of the location of ‘real queer America.’
It’s instructive to compare Bloomington to the rest of south and south-central Indiana. Nearby Martinsville is a traditional center of far right activity. And the Indiana Klan had about 250,000 members in the 1920s, including the governor and most of the state legislature.
Bloomington has its racism and its challenges for LGBT people. But it’s not rural Indiana. While I sometimes claim Bloomington as my adopted hometown, I’m actually from a rural area about 60 miles southeast.
The shit that happens out there is way too interesting to make up. A bit down the road, there used to be a group called the Traditionalist Worker Party. Basically a white nationalist group.
So, they split up about a year ago. Why? The group had two co-founders. Co-founder 1 was married to co-founder 2’s stepdaughter. 1 was also having sex with 2’s wife. 2 was upset about this, and confronted 1 in a trailer. The result? 1 choked 2 out, and 2 fled to the local Walmart, where he called the police.
Got all that?
Life in rural southern Indiana is usually less interesting than this. Sure, there’s a meth lab here and an HIV outbreak there. And, yes, there are factory layoffs. But there are lots of nice people.
Did I ever tell you my hometown claims it has the longest consecutive Fourth of July celebration in the country?
You know, real American shit’s going on.
The challenges involved with being queer in rural areas are often different from the ones in college towns.
N.B.
Image source: Pastelitodepapa (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homosexuality_and_The_Church_of_Jesus_Christ_of_Latter-day_Saints#/media/File:SLC_Temple_Rainbow_Flag.jpg)
