C.J. Janovy’s No Place Like Home unearths the forgotten stories of the fight for LGBT rights in Kansas

“Often,” C.J. Janovy writes of gay-rights activists in her new book, No Place Like Home: Lessons in Activism from LGBT Kansas, “these citizens knew they would lose, or that they might win at city hall but that their victory might be reversed by angry petitioners. But part of the point was to engage in a few months of debate that brought news coverage, forcing their friends and neighbors to think about things that had never occurred to most people in these communities.”

It’s one of many passages in the book illuminating how the lives of activists, wherever they may live, are often so very Kansan: hardscrabble, precarious, requiring of pluck, persistence, and faith. No Place Like Home was published in January by University Press of Kansas, an academic imprint, but Janovy’s book reads mostly like a work of boots-on-the-prairie reporting. (She is currently a reporter and editor at KCUR and was editor of The Pitch from 2000 to 2010.) Janovy traverses the state and tracks down the most vital and compelling voices in the fight for LGBT rights during the essential decade leading up to the legalization of gay marriage in 2015. She dusts off their stories and serves them up to us in bright detail: an economic development director ambushed by bigoted locals in Trego County; the formation of a gay-straight alliance at a Hutchinson high school; grassroots efforts to expand LGBT rights in places like Manhattan, Salina, and Roeland Park; and, of course, the neverending legislative battles in Topeka.

In late January, Janovy gave a reading at the Lawrence Public Library attended by several of the activists profiled in No Place Like Home. A few days later, she dropped by Monarch Coffee to chat about the book.

The Pitch: One of the things that struck me about the book was how granular it is — how it really drills down on the tiny, often-forgotten details on which movements hinge. A blizzard in the capital gives reporters the extra day they need to untangle some intentionally confusing anti-gay legislation. Somebody votes a certain way because they don’t want to lose their chairmanship of some committee. Was it important to you to capture that level of detail?

Janovy: That’s the stuff people I talked to told me mattered the most. I’ve always believed that state capitals are so much more important to real people — to citizens — than what happens in Washington. And those details you mention, that’s how statehouses work. Most people don’t even know who their state reps are, but they make these huge decisions that really, truly affect your life. And my feeling is that, if you’re paying attention to those details, everything that goes into those decisions is just as dramatic and important as what happens in Washington.

Not to make this about The Pitch, but many of the stories in the book took place during the years you were editing The Pitch. Was that one of the ways you found your way into these stories? 

Really, not much in the book comes from my Pitch days. We did some stories about Jerry Johnston, who was one of three pretty high-profile, media-hungry ministers that was pushing the marriage-amendment [which banned gay marriage] bandwagon in Kansas. I remember I wrote about him in 2005, when we got the first intimations that he might have some money trouble. Judy Thomas at the Star did a whole series of stories on him that exposed him for the charlatan he was. I also wrote a column in 2004 saying gay marriage was the dumbest idea I’d ever heard.

How come?

It wasn’t our issue, marriage. It was kind of foisted on us in 2004, when [George W. Bush advisor Karl] Rove and the GOP saw it could be a great issue for them to get their base out. For me, and for many others, we just didn’t want to get fired from our jobs or kicked out of our apartments for being gay. We wanted access to healthcare and public accommodations. The marriage issue felt like a distraction from that.

Why did you decide to write this book, and when?

There was this weird two-year moment between 2013 and 2015, where you had these inconsistent laws. [In 2013, the Supreme Court found unconstitutional a federal law restricting marriage to opposite-sex couples, but it changed little for states — including Kansas and Missouri — that had passed legislation banning gay marriage.] I thought, This is a very strange moment in American culture. And I also felt that there was no better place to write about it than Kansas. We’re in the middle of the country, we’ve got Westboro [Baptist Church, famous for its anti-gay rhetoric] in Topeka, and we’re a state that holds a kind of mythical place in the American imagination. I knew people would be surprised by these stories.

I was working at KU at the time [as director of communications at the university’s medical center], and I guess I missed writing and reporting, too. And then when I started driving out into Kansas and meeting these incredible people, I felt a great responsibility to tell their stories.

It’s kind of an unusual book in that you tell these separate stories that relate to the same topic — the battle for LGBT rights — but that are usually connected only by their sense of place: Kansas. Was it a challenge not to have a strong narrative thread running through the book, or was that freeing?

Yeah, in some ways it’s a little like a dozen Pitch cover stories thrown into a book. That’s partly because that’s just the way I knew how to write. But it’s also because there were all these different fights, different events, different dynamics in all these towns I write about. Because of the hyperlocal nature of activism, each town had its own different story.

The word “lessons” is in the subtitle of the book. How much do you view it as a “how-to” book? Or as a reference for future activists in whatever civil rights battles come next?

I think there is plenty to learn from the people’s stories in the book, and I think probably what you take away from the book depends on which stories you find most personally relatable. But I do think there are three big themes, if I had to list. One is prepare to lose. In many of these stories, people lose twice or three times before they get a win. But with each loss, you win new friends and allies. The second lesson, or theme, is to be gentle with your allies. They’re humans, they’ll say stupid stuff, but fighting with them takes energy away from fighting the real fight. Three is just: Do something. There are spots in the book where somebody sends an anonymous card of congratulations or bakes lemon bars or some other small gesture. Trying to make a positive change takes everything. It takes organizers. It takes big personalities that can appear on TV and make your case. But the lemon bars make a huge difference, too.

Janovy’s book, No Place Like Home: Lessons in Activism from LGBT Kansas, is out now via University Press of Kansas. You can buy it here or here.