It’s easy for pundits, even those in progressive spaces, to write off the Midwest as boorish, backwards, and behind the times. But in almost every area of LGBT liberation it is the Great Lakes states and those around them that really led the way for further organizing. From queens bashing back when haters invaded their space, to the first chartered gay rights organization, the watershed moment in American sex, making it onto to the ballot — and winning — to striking down unconstitutional laws that barred transfolk from expressing their gender … it all happened first in Flyover Country.

The history of LGBTQ activism in the United States, when it is told at all, is often framed in terms of the coasts. Perhaps an unconscious bias favoring stories from glamorous major metropolitan areas, like New York, San Francisco, Washington DC, or Los Angeles, the exploits of groups, individuals, and events in these places are regularly highlighted as metonyms for the state of LGBTQ people in America at large. But there is so much more in rural and “middle” America than corn, cows, and conservatives. There’s queers, too, and always have been!

Like elsewhere in the US, there were and are diverse genders and sexualities to be found in small towns and college towns in the Midwestern United States. LGBT people were not complacent with the status quo in the Midwest and they were far from isolated from one another. While the homophile movement of the 1950s and the post-Stonewall gay pride movement exploded on the coasts, they were stoking the spark that started in the heartland.