(God speed.) And Gina Mallisham, a member of the Pride advisory board in Birmingham, says wryly, "Adversity is nothing new to disenfranchised people in the South." Birmingham, she says, " is a very affirming city," with a gay community big and active enough to support a 10-day, tri-county Pride celebration, a gay softball league, and a chapter of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence (a protest/performance art troupe of queer "nuns"). That “ no promo homo” bill still on the books? An amendment which removes stigmatizing language and the homophobic provision passed the state’s Senate and awaits House approval before being signed by the governor. In May, Alabama Public Television decided it wouldn’t air a groundbreaking episode of children’s show Arthur, which depicted a same-sex marriage between teacher Mr.
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State law still dictates that teachers must tell students "that homosexuality is not a lifestyle acceptable to the general public." In 2017, the state legislature moved to ban gays from adopting needy children, and the owner of a movie theater refused to show Beauty and the Beast because of a gay-coded character. The best hope for a state so often behind the civil rights curveīona fides: Birmingham has a solid infrastructure of support for its LGBTQIA+ population, but gay sex was illegal in Alabama until 2014. There's a bubbling-up effect that starts on the ground." ESB Professional/Shutterstock "These are state legislators' constituents as well. "When cities begin to make a stand, state legislators take a notice," Persad says. You never know where that momentum will go. If your city isn't on here, there's always time to get to work. (One simple metric that recurred: Where would a same-sex couple be most comfortable holding hands in public?) The hope is, in these cities, a visitor or newcomer could enjoy the best overall experience.Īs Allen writes in her intro, “if the dominant LGBT narrative of the twentieth century was a gay boy in the country buying a one-way bus ticket to the Big Apple, the untold story of the twenty-first is the queer girl in Tennessee who stays put.” People in these states are doing The Work, and it’s about time they get some recognition. We also wanted chill places with an LGBTQIA+ scene, so we asked locals for their observations and impressions. In choosing cities to recognize, we looked often to the HRC's most recent Municipal Quality Index, which scores cities' LGBTQIA+ legal protections on a 100-point scale. Nothing can be queerer than getting out of your comfort zone.” As Samantha Allen writes in her book, Real Queer America: LGBT Stories from Red States, “the only way for people on the coasts to understand how states such as Mississipppi, Texas and Tennessee are evolving is to stop flying over them and start going to them. And you can't judge a city simply by the voting habits of people nearby. The trench work for equality is happening in cities most blue-staters couldn't find on a map. It's easy to sniff at the slow progress in Mississippi - but who in America is fighting the good fight like Jesse Pandolfo, who runs the gay bar in Jackson? Likewise you might fault Iowa for flipping back to red in 2016 - but almost no one is pushing harder for broad civil equality than the people of Iowa City.
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Cities in the likes of Wyoming and Kentucky and Arkansas are the best chance for leading their deep-red states toward overdue changes.
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"Cities are the most immediate iteration of democracy that we have," says Xavier Persad, legislative counsel for the HRC in Washington, DC.Ĭity councils are simply faster and more nimble than state legislatures.
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In every one, cities are ahead of the curve in making life more welcoming - and more safe - for diverse peoples. The better news is, states are hardly monoliths. That's the discouraging news, if you're living in any of those states, or if you care about equal rights. Nationwide, the Human Rights Campaign counts 31 states that don't have comprehensive laws to protect LGBTQIA+ people from discrimination in housing, in employment, and in receiving services. But don’t be discouraged: The arc of American history is long, and it's rainbow-colored.īack in those naive, hopeful days of 2016, the Republican candidate for president won 30 states, making them, for the next four years, "red states." Thirty is a lot of states, all with varying levels of protections for their LGBTQIA+ citizens, but we can safely generalize on this: As a group, these states are lagging. Even in the year of our lord, 2019, the US is still a sea of red (trigger warning: the 2016 presidential electoral map is bleak). After blowing through rural Georgia and suburban Kansas City in the three, tear-filled seasons of their Netflix hit, the Fab Five finally achieved what countless community and activist groups couldn’t before: Full-blown equality and acceptance of “the gays.”Īh, wishful thinking is such a privilege. The Queer Eye guys came, they saw, they tszuj’d.