Real Queer America: Inspiring LGBT Stories from Conservative States | LGBTQ+ Travel & Community Experiences

The minute this book landed on my doorstep, I dove right in and didn’t come up for air until I had finished the chapter on Johnson City. Reading through Samantha’s queer roadtrip across America, I let the locales and characters wash over me. The political and social asides sprinkled throughout were never surprising to me, but always relevant to the passage at hand. They add historical depth and context for the familiar and unfamiliar alike. The story invites you in like a warm bath and tries to leave you with a gentle scrubbing of your biases and preconceived notions. It promises not to scald you with cries of “Transphobe!” and “Ignorant!” if the stories and humans within its pages don’t conform to your previous notions of queer life in red states. It gently leads you down the same road the author takes: heartbreaks, joys, and mundane inbetweens. I feel so represented in these pages as a member of the LGBT community, but it also gave me plenty to learn from and chew on. Your take-aways from this book are not prescribed like a lecture. But there’s hope that you might change your thinking in some way to be kinder, more gentle to the souls depicted therein. This book is well-written enough for either single-sitting bingeing or multiple-day digestion. I promise you’ll find the sense of joy and camaraderie everyone needs more of these days, regardless of your feelings on the topic at hand, with the same sense of nostalgia as though you had taken the road trip yourself. If you feel any desire to crack this one open, I promise you’ll enjoy it cover to cover.