Book Review: In Search of Gay America

By Al Preston

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            For a lot of folks, when they think of a gay community, they think of a queer neighborhood or center in a big city. They think of New York or San Fransico. Of masculine women and feminine men. Drag Queens and sex parties. Every and all social norms broken along one short strip of gay owned shops.

            More bigoted people might add to that image that queer people are sexual deviants if not outright predators. Leftist activists that want to destroy society’s general conventions. They’re against religion, for crime, and are trying to destroy life as they know it.

            We, however, know that we are just trying to live our lives as our full and true selves just like everyone else. However, the queer community that are in cities do have a hard time seeing our community any other way (in a far more positive light, of course). Queer people have congregated in the cities because it’s safer, more accepting. Where there’s community and support. However, that’s not at all true. Some of that image is very white and male still.

            There are queer people everywhere, and they don’t all go to big cities to live as themselves. They’re on farms and in coal mines. They hold political office in small towns and reviving lost traditions from their culture or finding a way to make a space for themselves. They’re finding healing, community, and acceptance through religion.

            We are, truly, everywhere.

            To some, that may be scary. For us, that’s reassuring. No one wants to be alone, especially in the toughest places to live.

            While we know the image of queer folks in the city and of activists, it’s rare to be able to picture the average LGBT+ person. Especially ones who don’t live in big cities.

            Niel Miller’s In Search of Gay America is a close look at the average queer person. He looks for those in small towns and those who haven’t made a big name for themselves. We historians often say that place matters when talking about events. Location can tell us a lot about events and why they happened in those places instead of elsewhere. For the queer folks Miller talked to, this is especially true.

            The American South and Midwest are often considered dangerous places for LGBT+ people, even the cities. These places are often considered to be where the most conservative of America live. However, that is a very surface level, stereotypical view of those areas.

            Cities across America have thriving queer communities. Small towns are also often home to a number of LGBT+ people who are active community members. The reason we don’t think of them, or struggle to see these communities, is because to be queer in these places look very different than what we imagine on the coasts.

            Once again, place matters. Being LGBT+ almost has to be different in order to exist in other places. Even the goals and desires of queer folks in different places are not like the ones in the cities on the coast. Their needs and desires are very dependent on what is going on around them. If its just living as their authentic self like a lesbian coal miner in West Virginia. Or if its just to improve their town like a gay mayor in Bunceton, Missouri. Or even to organize themselves like the Chippewa indigenous American LGBT+ groups in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

            Even on the coasts the goal isn’t to change society. They simply just want to make a place for themselves. Like James Tinney, the pastor at a black, gay church in Washington D.C., or a gay cop in San Francisco. Others do want to make some big changes, like a former methodist pastor who tried to get the United Methodist Church to change their views on their gay clergy. Some just wanted to live quietly as themselves in the place they wanted. They didn’t want to be the heroes. They wanted to just be average citizens.

            Miller wanted to find these different queer folks and was surprised to find that, for the most part, these people he spoke to had quiet a bit of success. Not at first, and not all of the time, of course, but they weren’t getting the bigotry they were expecting.

            They found that, after some initial pushback, most people stopped caring. They were most likely talking behind people’s backs and spreading gossip, but they eventually stopped doing things in their faces. The key, it seemed, was multi-layered. One; many of the people in small towns only knew of the image of city gays and had never met one. Two; stereotypes are not universal. Three; the gay people in their towns, weren’t doing anything.

            The unknowable is always scary, especially when all you do know is a curated scary image. Once many of these people finally met the queer people around them, they found them…just like everyone else. Most didn’t look any different from how they dressed and if they did, they were just as invested in their home and livelihoods as them. They were—people! Suddenly, the vision of a city queer trying to take on the world became the homely image of their neighbor just living life.

            Queer folks come in all shapes and sizes, backgrounds and lives. In small towns everyone knows each other, so they find that the queer people around them are just like themselves in so many ways. It’s a quiet kind of acceptance, the kind that keeps the peace. Not everyone is so lucky and not everyone is happy with that.

            What Miller found was that there was no one way to be queer and everyone had their own battles. No matter how quiet they wanted to be. Even in institutions that are typically homophobic have their fair share of LGBT+ people trying to get by and make a difference.

            Pastors trying to get support for queer folks, politicians supporting gay rights. A rare few places where being queer was so accepted, a gay rights bill felt unneeded.

            While searching for gay America, Miller found America.

            I did enjoy this book quite a bit, although I felt the order was a bit confusing. He jumped around in time and space quite a bit from section to section. I wished he was more detailed about his conversations with people, although he did mention at the beginning of the book that some people wanted some information restricted. I can also acknowledge that at about three hundred pages, going into more detail would probably double the size.

            This is another book for an audience that is ‘in the know’ about queer history. Not so much because it is telling us queer history, but because it is a product of its time. The events Miller and the people he spoke to are referencing are current events for them. This was published in 1989 when many of those things were actively happening or in recent memory.

            Something of interest is the methodist pastor. Rose Mary Denman realized her lesbianism while working as an active minister for the United Methodist Church which had a law stating that queer people could not be pastors. A trial was held by the church not to prove Denman was a lesbian, she had made that quiet clear to them, but to decide how she would be punished for being a lesbian pastor.

            The jury judging Denman allowed her to keep her ordained status, making it possible for her to be a pastor for other denominations, but denied her the ability to be a methodist pastor ever again. That was the lightest sentence they could have given her.

            Denman, while happy she could continue her religious work, was a bit upset because she wanted this trial to start a conversation. The clergy in charge of the trial refused to let it be that way, but Denman was sure it was a small push in a larger effort.

            Now, in 2024, the United Methodist Church is going through a schism along the line of whether or not queer people could be clergy or welcome at the church at all and if they could marry in their churches.

            When he started seeking out people to talk to for this book, Miller was searching for where the future of queer folks was headed. Now, thirty-five years later, it’s beginning to arrive.