Atlanta

LGBT Travel Guide

Why you should go to Atlanta !

Check out any map charting the voting trends for elections in the United States, and the metropolitan region of Atlanta immediately leaps out, a dark blue island in a sea of red.

This means that over the years it has become a destination for liberal southerners who break the Dixie mold and those who want their big-city with a bit of southern flavor. Queers from all over the South have claimed Atlanta as their safe-haven in a conservative country. Both the city's arts and nightlife are unequaled anywhere nearby.

But, Atlanta does not only hold significance for only gays and lesbians and friends. It is one of the few cities in the South, in the country for that matter, where the presence of an African-American upper class is palpable throughout. That's because the history of the city can read like an index of the Black Experience in America: the birthplace of Martin Luther King, Jr., the cradle of hip-hop, and today, despite the work it still has to do, a vibrant example of what a city looks like when the divided come together.

Sure, sometimes it seems like an unforgiving, sprawling mess that is still trying to fend its way through hostilities, those within and without. Yet this struggle is what makes Atlanta so essential. It's a hard, strange stone that requires patience and hard love to see it as something precious. It's a city whose community, radical politics, and arts have to be fought for, particularly surrounded as it is by such inhospitable badlands. "Freedom" is never a given here, but rather a hard-won collective effort that under such circumstances can never be taken for granted.

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