Featured Book: Real Queer America: LGBT Stories from Red States, by Samantha Allen
Real Queer America: LGBT Stories from Red States
By Samantha Allen
Print Length: 321 pages
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company (March 5, 2019)
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.
What They’re Saying
“Real Queer America is a book necessary for anyone in — or allied with — the queer community, especially those of us who see the bad news day after day. [Allen is] sharing the beauty of the spaces that LGBTQ+ people have carved out for themselves, and she’s giving credit where credit is very much overdue, because it’s the queer folk who live and stay in red states — whether by choice or due to a lack of options — who have to survive there and work to make them better.”―Los Angeles Times
“Samantha Allen’s America is filled with buoyant queer people in supposedly red states living their lives with resilience and joy. This moving journey starts out in Utah–but Allen’s road ultimately takes the reader to the center of her heart. Surprising, inspiring, and thoughtful.”―Jennifer Finney Boylan, author of SHE’S NOT THERE and LONG BLACK VEIL