It's 2013, and I'm a 22-year-old queer who's moving to Kansas to paint a house rainbow colors directly across from the notorious Westboro Baptist Church hate group. I don't know much about Kansas except that it's in the middle of America and famous bigots live there. It doesn't matter, though, because I won't be there long.
I never left. Over the next five years, I learned that the politicians are more dangerous than the hate groups, and that the people of Kansas are nothing like the politics that dominate.
I arrived to a state in crisis and ordinary people doing whatever they could to try to fix it: A mom walked more than 60 miles hoping someone would pay attention to schools, a student chased legislators through the statehouse trying to keep guns off college campuses, a rabbi was arrested holding a sit-in against voter suppression.