On geographical diversification of queer life in the US

[breathedout]

More and more LGBT people seem to be operating on a similar wavelength [to that of the author, a trans lesbian who prefers to live in a small "red state" city rather than a large coastal one]. I asked Gary J. Gates, the most widely cited demographer of the American LGBT community, what evidence he has seen of queer demographic shifts away from coastal big cities over the last decade.

He pointed me to his recent Williams Institute analysis of U.S. Census and Gallup polling data, which compared the concentration of same-sex couples in American cities in 1990 to the percentage of their LGBT population from 2012 to 2014. (It's an imperfect comparison, but given how hard it is to gather data on a small population like the LGBT community, it's one of the best available.) And the results are striking: Salt Lake City leapt up thirty-two spots in the overall rankings between 1990 and the 2012-2014 time period. Louisville, Kentucky, rose thirty slots over the same period. Norfolk, Virginia, and New Orleans, Louisiana both jumped more than twenty places. Meanwhile San Francisco remained static, Los Angeles fell two slots, and New York had a staggering eleven-place slump.

Gates believes that this discrepancy speaks to the social change happening in many red-state cities. As he wrote in the analysis: "Substantial increases in LGBT visibility in more socially conservative places like Salt Lake City, Louisville, and Norfolk likely mean that these areas are not as different from cities like San Francisco, Austin, and Seattle (all with long histories of fostering social climates where LGBT people felt more comfortable) in their acceptance of the LGBT community today than they were twenty years ago."

Indeed, an "important explanatory factor" for that data, as Gates acknowledged in the analysis, is the increased "willingness" [I, breathedout, would argue "ability"] of LGBT people in conservative areas to come out of the closet. In other words, although the analysis probably indicates some degree of population shift, [there is also an element of simply revealing that... ] LGBT people have been building beautiful lives away from the coasts for years. [...] But because the media overwhelmingly focus on the tragic things that happen to queer people in red states, that kind of community building often goes unnoticed by people on the coasts. As Jack Halberstam wrote in In a Queer Time and Place, "Too often minority history hinges on representative examples provided by the lives of extraordinary individuals"—among them LGBT people who have been murdered in conservative parts of America.

"[In] relation to the complicated matrix of rural queer lives, we tend to rely on the story of a Brandon Teena or a Matthew Shepard rather than finding out about the queer people who live quietly, if not comfortably, in isolated areas or small towns all across North America," Halberstam wrote.

—Samantha Allen, Real Queer America: LGBT Stories from Red States

The real strength of this book is in the individual stories of people Allen talks to on her trip across the country, from the queer Latinx youth organizers of Aquí Estamos in South Texas, to Temica Morton, the Black woman who spearheaded Jackson, Mississippi's first Pride Parade in 2016 as an add-on to a queer community bar-b-que she's been hosting for years, to Smoove G. and Nicci B., co-owners of the Back Door: Bloomington, Indiana's beloved queer bar and gathering-site. But those stories are—for reasons similar to those cited by Halberstam above in relation to the (inter)national news media!—difficult to excerpt out of context. I had my quibbles with the book overall, mostly relating to Allen's lack of acknowledgement that some people just genuinely love big cities as much as she loves small ones, but I am absolutely in agreement with the idea, as expressed here, that when it comes to queer narratives we desperately need to expand our geographical focus and tell stories about ordinary living-their-lives queer people who are from places other than New York City, and to a lesser extent San Francisco and LA (although I freely admit I adore SF and LA narratives, having personal connections to both those places.) The NYC and coastal-big-city stranglehold on US storytelling both fictional and non-fictional is REAL. And it is, as Allen points out here and as I'd echo despite having lived in big coastal cities my whole life and loving them dearly, doing us all a big disservice.

I was also interested in Gates's data on shifting queer demographics over time. Whether they come from a real population shift away from big coastal cities or whether they're more a result of increased quality of life/ability to come out for red-state queers, they do still indicate measurable change. Which is a big part of Allen's point: things are (slowly) shifting for LGBT people in red-state America, and there are a lot of fascinating and encouraging stories to be told about the activists and regular queer folks who call these places home.

Comments

[nyctanthes]

I feel like I should read the book and the study instead of (or at least in addition to) commenting on them. That said...

It's interesting to think about how LGBT emergence in/migration to red states tracks with overall population flows. I believe about 14% of the U.S. population moves every year, and for at least a couple of decades now there's been movement away from the Northeast to the Southeast and the West/Southwest.

Also, since I'm babbling about demographics, what is the age distribution of the LGBT folks in the survey. How many are younger people looking for jobs or education? Older people who need to make their retirement dollars stretch and want to pay lower taxes? Etc. etc.

The NYC and coastal-big-city stranglehold on US storytelling both fictional and non-fictional is REAL.

For sure. For queer stories and others. Then when you add in the "we all have an MFA/we all went to the same writers' workshops/we publish in the same lit magazines..." It's why I read so much lit in translation.

[breathedout]

Ha, yes, Allen does go on to talk about how these numbers mirror the general demographic shifts over the past decade or so—actually in the paragraph represented by "[...]," which was my ill-fated attempt to make my excerpt more concise. That said, if you're after satisfying statistical discussion of demographics, I would maybe try reading the study rather than the book; that's definitely not where its strengths lie, and most of the uses of stats are similarly surface-y. :-/

I like the lit-in-translation (and English-language lit from other countries) solution as well; getting back to that was a big reading goal for me this year and so far I'm doing pretty well on it & finding it really rewarding. That said, I also wish it was easier to pick up a book from/about my own country and not have it be yet another story about New York! I had a couple years where I declared a full-on moratorium on NYC stories, because I was just so sick of hearing about it. But the problem is that such a preponderance of books are written (and movies and shows made) about it that just by strength of numbers some of the really excellent ones are going to be among their number. Blah.