Transgender Road Trip: We Saw Westboro Baptist Church and So Much More!
You know the story of hate, but have you seen the message of love across the street?
The hateful message written on the Westboro Baptist Church building wouldn’t have attracted a transgender married couple as tourists, even if it was on the way of our long journey from the east of the United States to the west. We’ve seen enough hate to consider this message unremarkable, if disgusting. What is truly remarkable is the queer sanctuary that made an art out of love just across the street from that ugly place.
Equality House is managed by a global non-profit called Planting Peace. It exists to send a message of kindness, love, and support for LGBTQ+ people in response to the hateful message offered by Westboro Baptist Church. If you haven’t heard of the Westboro Baptist Church, an image of this place gives you a very good idea of what they stand against: our existence as queer people.
For the photograph below, I covered the slur shown in their website, “godhatesf***.com”, with a little rainbow, but the message is still very clear. A sign over the door reads, “Sodom gave itself to fornication & homosexuality & is an example, suffering the vengeance of eternal life.” My middle finger somehow got in the way of the picture, but you can still see the signs on the building.
“Fear God,” one sign demands.
This church knows a lot about terror. They’ve terrorized funerals of US service members and spread hate as much as possible. This mean-spirited message makes the houses across the street look all the more beautiful. One house is painted in rainbows, with a sign out front saying “Black Lives Matter” in large letters. On the side of that building, pictured at the beginning of this article, are seemingly endless messages of love and compassion painted all over the siding.
“Love will stand.”
“You are beautiful.”
“God is love.”
“Peace over fear.”
“Treat everyone like it’s their birthday.”
“We cannot remain silent!”
“There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.”
All of these signs and more made me smile.
The other house is painted in the colors of the trans flag: blue, white, and pink. The fact that they would think to paint an entire house in these colors is both very touching and indicative of the negative attention that trans people are getting around the country as so many laws target us.
These efforts to show support for our community mean everything. I hope you will read about these little houses in Topeka, Kansas, and allow all of the hate across the street to inspire you to support an initiative of love like this. Just because we’ve escaped the American South, where a battle to erase people like us rages on, doesn’t mean that I’ve forgotten where I come from. I want places like this to succeed as sanctuaries for all of the queer and trans people who can’t afford to just leave unfriendly places.
I remember all of the hours we spent just lounging around the local LGBT Center in Raleigh, North Carolina, on weekends where it sometimes felt like the only safe place to be ourselves. That was nearly every Saturday for us before the pandemic confined us. The spider web of glass refusing to shatter completely on a door covered in metal bars there made it clear that they had to fight to keep that space safe. Places like that exist despite the constant threats because people like us absolutely needed them to exist. What they offer is irreplaceable for people who may otherwise be afraid to leave their homes.
It’s been an incredible trip for us as two trans people crossing over 1,700 miles of the United States, maybe especially for the moments where we forgot we were transgender in all of the wonder of finding new beautiful places all around us. Before we had the opportunity to see the polarized space of love and hate in Topeka Kansas, we stayed overnight in Kansas City, Missouri. That was a perfect space to just be another anonymous couple enjoying the sights.
I love seeing the street art of different cities. In Kansas City, we stayed in the Library District, where we found lots of art of both the formal and more informal kind all around us. The picture above is of beautiful mountains overlooking a beach at sunset. In a landlocked city, this image must feel like a faraway fantasy for most people.
Below is some bright graffiti I found while walking around. I’ve always been attracted to graffiti as a way that a city expresses itself through artists that have mastered sharing a secret message quickly in the night, when no one is watching. The picture below is artwork sprayed in blue, black, red, and purple all over a brick wall.
We also enjoyed some amazing food at a little restaurant called PokéSan on the second floor of a building overlooking the city. It was nice to just have a break from everything to eat and process everything we’d seen during our trip so far.
I ordered a big bowl of poke with mango, every kind of raw fish I could find on the menu, seaweed, cream cheese, fresh wasabi, and lots of other delicious things.
We stayed in a B&B that was someone’s very nice high rise apartment with an overlook of the city available. It’s awesome how sometimes you can get more space and luxury for as much or less than the average cost of a hotel through a gay B&B app we use, without the hassle of having to show our ids with deadnames at a front desk of each hotel.
At night, from the rooftop overlook, we could see a circle of large blue statues on the side of a building, as pictured below. I walked down the street to get a better look and was mesmerized.
Between each city was the countryside that changed over time as we drove through each state. There was the dark granite that we drove through in North Carolina and Virginia that faded into the lighter color of what looked like limestone to me, as we passed into Kentucky. There were hills that weaved through forests into the flattest grassland I’ve ever seen as we crossed the border from Kentucky to Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, and finally into Colorado.
I remember being surprised when a friend in New York once told me that she missed the sky that you could see in other states. I’d never thought about the absence of sky, but as we drove through that flat land that made the sky feel all encompassing, I could see exactly what she was missing in those skyscrapers. Those plains were a beautiful sight, even if each bathroom break was a carefully planned excursion that sometimes tightened the stomach with nerves.
Overall, I’m so glad we took this trip. I’ve never experienced anything like it. After traveling across two time zones in a car, I’ve seen so many things I never could have anticipated. We escaped a storm and some dangerous flooding in the mountains on the border of Kentucky. We were surprised by hundreds of gay naked bike riders passing us as we finished our dinner in St. Louis, Missouri.
We even got to stand by the love and protection offered by Equality House, across the street from the full force of hate that was the Westboro Baptist Church. As I sip tea in a coffee shop in our new home city, I marvel at everything we have seen over this past week. It has been an incredible journey that I wouldn’t trade for anything.
Thank you for joining me on it by reading this.
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