lot of blame in schools. there s more anti-lgbtq going on in schools than we expect. overall i think the road will get easier. i was moved when i went to utah. i m transgender myself. i m an ex-mormon. you know, i had a road to acceptance with my own family when i came out. when i went to utah i met transgender kids who came out to their mormon parents and their parents first reaction was i want to you be happy. i want to figure a way forward for you in this life. i don t want to stand in the way of that. that s encouraging. the book is real queer america lgbtq stories from red states. samantha allen, thanks so much. morning joe is back in a moment.
i think, you know, we still see folks needing to get out of more rural areas to an urban environment to find lgbtq acceptance remember but they will go st. louis or norfolk, virginia or salt lake city rather than feeling the need to get to the ocean. samantha, one thing that strikes me about the long march of gay rights in this country is how it was slow and all of a sudden extremely fast. all of a sudden gay marriage reached huge acceptance, was approved by the supreme court, and part of it, i think, was people learning that their neighbors were gay, having personal relationships with people who were queer, and i wonder if you think that as queer people are living in places that are not centers of liberalism as they spread to places like dayton or stay in those places that they were from, if that s going to be the leading cultural edge of political change in some of these places and towns and states that are not historically
trying to figure out ways to support them while observing a pretty conservative faith. it was remarkable. so why did you decide to write this book and what surprised you most in the process. you know, i to write it shory after the 2016 election. i saw, you know, a fair amount of commentary of people on social media dismissive towards red state america. you know i still encounter that flyover country attitude from friends who live on the coast. i wanted to kind of go out there and say no, this is what lgbtq life is like in these places, it s not uniformly awful. yes there s lots combat at state legislative levels, lots of lgbtq bills being proposed, but these places themselves are often warm, welcoming places to live. so, samantha, there s a school of thought and i don t know how large or popular the school of thought is, but it does exist that out there in the
as legally friendly to gay people? yeah. that s exactly the phenomenon i was exploring. look, i think the kind of engine that s driving the lgbtq movement in this country is precisely that, people coming out to their friends, relatives, co-worker, that s happening more and more. millennials as we know are out as lgbtq at record rates. millennials are also not moving to cities in the south and west. so that s going to just be a radical makeover for the country, i think. so, samantha, i think maybe the principle wish that any parent has for a child is that at minimum you want your child to be happy. absolutely. so, a young child, lgbtq child, a queer child is the route the road to happiness getting easier or is it getting the same, kind of difficult in rural communities? you know, i think if you look at data on this, there s still a
yesterday mika and mike barnicle spoke with author samantha allen about her travels through many of the states that voted for donald trump through 2016. here is their conversation. joining us now is award winning journalist and daily beast senior reporter samantha allen. she s out with a new book called real queer america, lbgt red states. she traveled to document to places that almost half of the lbgt narrative calls home. the untold story of the 21st is the queer girl in tennessee who stays put. welcome to the show. tell us what else you found in