I, too, wish the data interpretation & distinctions were more rigorous; the degree to which Allen included statistical analysis in this book at all, served mostly to make me wish for another book where it were done more in-depth. Which is only sort of semi-fair of me, I think: this book is really more of an activist travelogue/memoir, and only uses stats to shed occasional light on problems and solutions that are primarily being observed anecdotally. Still! Kind of frustrating.

Allen goes on to argue (in the very next paragraph, but I had to cut my excerpt off somewhere, LOL) that Halberstam's "quietly, if not comfortably" construction considerably under-sells the quality of the lives a lot of red-state queers are living. Although, how convincingly she makes that argument really varies from state to state and individual to individual. For some of the places she talks about I was pretty much convinced; for others, I felt she was soft-pedaling the challenges her interviewees were facing in order to celebrate the positive change they were involved in making. (Hearing other people's opinions at my bookgroup really highlighted to me how difficult this line is to hit: the boundary between "depressing" and "uplifting" is very much a moving target, and we ended up having a conversation where a bunch of people were like "This book is so depressing!" and I was like "I... kind of think this book is not depressing enough??") But your point that positive, strong community-building can coexist with, and be strengthened by, oppression and restriction is probably the cornerstone argument of Allen's entire project, so fwiw that argument is far from absent.