2019 Stubbendieck Great Plains Distinguished Book Prize Winner: No Place Like Home: Lessons in Activism from LGBT Kansas by C. J. Janovy

Throughout my reading of C. J. Janovy's No Place Like Home: Lessons in Activism from LGBT Kansas, winner of the Great Plains Distinguished Book Prize, I was reminded of a student in an introductory course I taught at the University of Nebraska Omaha, almost twenty years ago. I had all my students keep a journal tied to course concepts. One journal prompt asked, "What cultures do you belong to?" encouraging students to consider the various communities they were members of, thinking beyond religion or ethnicity. I have never forgotten one young Omaha man's entry about visiting the Boystown neighborhood of Chicago (one of the largest LGBT communities in the Midwest) and how he felt, for the first time in his life, like he was a member of a community. He was not alone, and he could truly be himself without fear.

As Will Fellows wrote in his "Gay and Lesbian Life" entry in the Encyclopedia of the Great Plains (2004, 329): "Social isolation is a major force in the lives of gay men and lesbians in the Great Plains, especially in small towns and rural areas." This isolation resulted in "the tendency for many gay and lesbians to leave their hometowns for larger cities within and outside the region."

Home is a complicated concept for many: it is not always the warm, fuzzy, safe place of Hollywood films. For some members of the lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender (LGBT) community, home was a place they had to leave in order to be true to themselves and to find a family that accepted them for who they truly are. Certainly, for some that may be true, but not for all. My Omaha student was not from a small town but he had experienced isolation and had to leave the state, not just the city, to experience community. Not all members of the LGBT community leave the Plains. Some may choose to leave but not all stay away forever. Many return to the Plains, to a landscape they call home.

Home is a paramount concept for C. J. Janovy's No Place Like Home: Lessons in Activism from LGBT Kansas. Janovy reflects on the experiences of Americans who proudly call the Kansas Plains home and their efforts to stake their claim to the landscape. She considers the challenging questions of "Whatever 'a Kansas lifestyle' is, shouldn't LGBT citizens be allowed to live it just like straight people? Are we crazy for wanting to?" Drawing from extensive interviews, Janovy, who is an experienced journalist, recounts the efforts of Kansas LGBT community members fighting for discrimination protections, beginning in 2004 and through 2015. Though they were defeated on many fronts, the effort brought LGBT Kansans and allies together, knitting together and building a community of those who previously had felt alone and unwanted. Ultimately, "LGBT people had made quiet and sometimes surprising progress in Kansas," they "ended up making friends in one of the country's most inhospitable states," and while they "lost at the ballot boxes, they were winning in other ways" (13–14).

Like the epic hero's journey (as in Joseph Campbell's work) or perhaps like the epic story of Plains homesteading, the story of Kansas's LGBT activists begins with a defeat/challenge and progresses through a regathering/learning stage and a reassertion before reaching the transformative stage. But rather than focusing on a single hero, Janovy gives us many: it is both the stories of individuals as well as the collective story of Kansans and we might say even of plainspeople, in their own words.

Janovy breaks the narrative into four parts—"The Defeat," "The Dustoff," "The Comeback," and "The Transformation"—capturing the evolution of Kansas's LGBT community as well as broader Kansas society. Each section is composed of several chapters, with each chapter telling the story of a skirmish within a Kansas community, reflecting the experiences of a variety of individuals, communities, and situations. Janovy captures the essence of the work and effort it took the...