"So if you want to catch all three in one night, you can!" "Showtimes are strategically launched," Mallisham says. B'ham's main queer bars- Al's on Seventh, Our Place, and Quest Club-all have their own cast of drag queens. There are also LGBTQ+ book clubs, church groups, and youth centers-check out the Magic City Acceptance Center, which hosts a number of affirming youth groups, particularly for QTPOC and trans kids under 14 along with their parents.
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 an LGBTQ+ 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"). Until 2019, state law dictated that teachers must tell students "that homosexuality is not a lifestyle acceptable to the general public." And a slew of anti-trans legislature is now making its way through state government, banning trans kids from playing sports, mandating that school children only use the bathroom associated with the gender listed on their birth certificate, criminalizing gender-affirming healthcare for trans youth, and barring teachers from discussing gender identity and sexual orientation in any context deamed developmentally or age-inappropriate.
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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. Central Alabama Pride, Inc.īirmingham has a solid infrastructure of support for its LGBTQ+ population, even though gay sex was illegal in Alabama until 2014. Talk to your city leaders-you never know how far that momentum will take you. And if your city didn’t make the cut, now’s the time to get to work.
These 25 cities represent the most LGBTQ+ friendly locale in each of America's republican-majority states, according to the HRC’s most recent Municipal Equality Index. 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 only gay bar in Jackson? Likewise you might fault Iowa for flipping from blue back to red in 2016, but almost no one is pushing harder for broad civil equality than the people of Iowa City. The cities on this list are strategically positioned to lead deep-red states toward overdue changes.
The trench work for equality is happening in cities many blue-staters couldn’t pinpoint on a map. “Cities are the most immediate iteration of democracy that we have,” says Xavier Persad, senior legislative counsel for the HRC in Washington, DC. In every one, cities are ahead of the curve in making life more welcoming-and more safe-for all residents regardless of sexuality or gender identity. Did you know that Norman, Oklahoma, population 124,086, scored higher than Baltimore, Maryland, a city that hasn’t voted to elect a republican presidential candidate since 1988? Maybe those divisions aren’t as deep as they seem. But in reality, using hard numbers provided by the Human Rights Campaign’s 2021 Municipal Equality Index to determine the most LGBTQ+ friendly city in each state that went for Donald Trump in 2020 can only help to strengthen the idea that we’re all in this together. What a time to be alive.īreaking things down into red states and blue states, especially at a time when the country is so politically and socially split, might seem like we’re reinforcing that ol’ problematic us vs.
But on the other hand, we’ve got powerful lawmakers coming out against LGBTQ+ rights at an alarmingly rapid clip, throwing around bills that threaten to destroy all the progress of the Civil Rights Movement with a single signature. On one hand, we’ve got swathes of motivated young elected officials and organizers committed to popping the over-inflated balloon of structural inequality by any means necessary. The state of the LGBTQ+ nation-much like the state of the rest of the nation-is quite precarious these days.