“I told my partner, ‘We need to leave now,’” she recalled.
The night before, in August 2022, Grapevine-Colleyville ISD had approved the district’s version of “Don’t Say Gay” rules. Trans kids were effectively banned from playing school sports and would be made to use bathrooms matching the sex on their birth certificates.
To Hurley, whose family was living at the time in a city south of Fort Worth, that vote was the last straw. Her trans son had already endured a lot at a relatively young age. Earlier that summer, while at a youth Pride picnic, protesters screamed at the LGBTQ+ kids in attendance that they were “pedophiles” and would “burn in hell.”
Hurley had to warn her children about speaking to strangers after Texas GOP leadership directed authorities to investigate as “abusers” families of trans kids receiving gender-affirming care. A knock at the door could be Child Protective Services ready to take both of her boys away.
It was all too much, and exhausting. Hurley knew the time had come for her family to leave Texas.
"We should never have been forced to move because of who my child is," Hurley said during a news conference announcing the “Stop Hate in Real Estate” initiative. "We tried to stay and fight but couldn't risk sacrificing him to the cause."
So, soon after GCISD’s vote, Hurley put her home up for sale, she told the Observer. A mortgage broker herself, she’d enlisted a service called “Flee Red States” via the Plano-based Texas Pride Realty Group, as her family prepared to migrate to Colorado.
Flee Red States assists LGBTQ+ community members in relocating to bluer pastures. It grew out of a more localized version, initially dubbed “Flee Texas,” after founder Bob McCranie started fielding calls from other deep-red U.S. pockets. The service connects clients with LGBTQ+ and allied real estate professionals, who help them secure a soft place to land.
The stakes are high: The Human Rights Campaign (HRC) recently declared a state of emergency for LGBTQ+ Americans for the first time in the organization’s decades-long history.
“I told my partner, ‘We need to leave now.’” – Brianna Hurley, former Texas resident
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In June, HRC reported that Texas had produced 20% of all anti-LGBTQ+ legislation nationwide at that point in the year. Skirmishes over laws targeting drag queen story time and gender-affirming healthcare unfold elsewhere in the U.S. each day.
Hurley described living in constant fear while still in Texas. She likened it to sitting in a pot of water that’s slowly being turned up to a boil. The incremental temperature changes may not have fully registered at the time, but looking back, it’s clear to see the “water is quite warm.”
The current anti-LGBTQ+ trend among conservative lawmakers has prompted more progressive states — including Oregon, California and Vermont — to serve as refuges for those on the queer migration trail. Some companies are now joining in the resistance. The job-search website Indeed, for instance, is reportedly offering $10,000 for trans employees needing to leave for inclusive states.
Texas Republicans, meanwhile, continue to test the limits in legislation, ever expanding an already virulently anti-LGBTQ+ agenda.
The advocacy organization Equality Texas tallied 76 anti-LGBTQ+ bills filed in the state in 2021. This year the count has nearly doubled to 141.
Hurley and her family now live in Colorado, a move that was “absolutely 100% worth it” but that came at a significant financial cost. She keeps up with the news coming out of her former state, where some of her LGBTQ+ friends and friends with transgender kids still live.
“We had a good-sized queer community down there,” she said. “And I'm terrified for all of them.”
When Bob McCranie came out in 1992, gay people "didn't have rights,” he said. He could be denied employment and he could be denied housing, just because of his sexuality. But the LGBTQ+ community fought hard over the years to make strides in the eyes of the law.
To McCranie, the latest anti-LGBTQ+ push is both “intentionally destructive” and cruel.
“It feels worse to have them stripping those rights away, rather than to have not had those rights to begin with,” he said.
Speaking with the Observer in early September, McCranie sounded equally troubled and determined. He’d helped some 28 groups of people flee red states and planned to follow suit himself in the coming months.
In 2022, discussions with friends had started to reveal a throughline, he said: Where would you go if you moved away? What’s your plan B? Before long, McCranie launched Flee Texas, which would later become Flee Red States. It clearly resonated. People from other conservative corners of the U.S. soon began to get in touch.
“I realized this is a universal conversation going on in the gay community,” McCranie said. “I'm not stirring this up and making it happen. People are already migrating.”
McCranie is quoted in a Realtor.com article in June titled, “The LGBTQ+ Migration: Why Many Are Leaving Everything Behind to Move Across the Country.” Houston-based Realtor Anita R. Blue told that outlet the official number of LGBTQ+ migrants is unknown but undoubtedly on the rise.
The trend has begun bleeding over into the housing market, Blue continued: “Housing’s going to suffer. People don’t want to live or buy a home in a state where they don’t feel safe.”
After the June 2022 overturning of Roe v. Wade, which had for decades enshrined the constitutional right to an abortion, some political observers wondered what would happen if the issue of gay marriage were to again reach the U.S. Supreme Court. Seven years prior to Roe’s reversal, the landmark high-court ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges legalized same-sex marriage nationwide.
Considering the force and direction of today’s political winds, McCranie worries that gay marriage could be the next right to be swept away. And he fears what could come of queer couples’ property rights should the issue get kicked back to the states.
When Texas Pride Realty Group started in 2009, McCranie explained, there was an idea that LGBTQ+ Texans would be safe as long as they lived in blue hubs like Dallas, Houston and Austin. He can’t say that today.
McCranie’s realty group helps sell homes without disclosing sensitive information, such as reasons for leaving the state. It also assists in connecting clients with experts in other parts of the U.S. or countries who will treat them with dignity.
He advises some to cut and run as soon as they can.
“If you have a trans child, you need to get out of the jurisdiction now. And you don't want to call Sally the Realtor to help you, because Sally the Realtor may not like trans kids either and turn your ass in,” he said. “You want to hire somebody who gets your family, understands, gets you out quietly and then gets you to a location where you can be safer.”
Texas lawmakers approved a slew of anti-LGBTQ+ bills in 2023, including those targeting gender-affirming care and drag shows. Laws like these prompted the Canadian government this year to caution U.S.-bound queer travelers about what they could encounter in states that restrict gay and trans folks’ rights.
McCranie believes it’s gotten to the point where LGBTQ+ people need to move assets and money out of conservative states before lawmakers clamp down even more.
“It sounds hyperbolic. It sounds like, ‘Oh gee, Bob, you're just stirring up the pot and you're fearmongering,’” McCranie said. “If you study history, look at the headlines.
“I am not going to be on the last train out of Paris.”
“I realized this is a universal conversation going on in the gay community. I'm not stirring this up and making it happen. People are already migrating.” – Bob McCranie, Flee Red States
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At the same time that Texas has begun to bleed LGBTQ+ residents, newcomers from other parts of the country continue to pour in. The Los Angeles Times wrote earlier this month that “droves of Californians” are moving to the Lone Star State.
Gov. Greg Abbott touted Texas’ draw this summer during a bill-signing ceremony for a law that effectively bans trans athletes from playing in college sports. Texas “is a very welcoming state,” he insisted when asked about LGBTQ+ constituents who feel shunned, adding that lawmakers would continue to “protect all Texans and their freedoms.”
Johnathan Gooch, communications director for Equality Texas, noted that the Lone Star State holds on to its natives more than anywhere else in the country. To him, it says a lot that so many choose to remain: They’re attracted to Texas’ culture, grounded in homegrown friendships.
But Gooch is also well aware that the state’s political pressures have driven some away — at least, those who can afford to leave. He says Equality Texas has heard stories from parents with trans kids who’ve been put in a terrible bind as they mull uprooting their families. In some cases, one parent will move away with the children while the other stays behind for their job.
And transgender men and women are now leaving as their own healthcare access becomes jeopardized, Gooch said. The ban on gender-affirming care for LGBTQ+ youth has implications for trans adults, too, in that some specialists are now relocating their practices or being forced to shut down.
Activist Johnathan Gooch is staying in Texas and fighting for his rights in the capital.
Jana Birchum
McCranie knows that Flee Red States will have its detractors. Some critics insist that there’s a blue wave on the horizon, that LGBTQ+ Texans should remain and work to turn the tide.
He views it differently.
“The idea that we're going to win against [Florida Gov. Ron] DeSantis or win against Greg Abbott is absurd,” McCranie said. “We've lost this ground. Get to someplace safe.”
The FBI logged a nearly 20% rise in anti-LGBTQ+ bias crimes in 2022 over the previous year. This comes as former President Donald Trump, the current GOP primary frontrunner, has turned increasingly combative toward the LGBTQ+ community.
Speaking with the Observer in early November, McCranie relayed that he expects to see a spike in people leaving red states closer to the 2024 election.
No Texas Democrat has won a statewide race in some 30 years, he pointed out. Even the most promising candidates, such as former gubernatorial hopeful Beto O’Rourke, often fail by double-digit margins.
The way McCranie sees it, LGBTQ+ Texans can stay in the battle if they want, but they also shouldn’t be faulted for opting to get out of harm’s way. Perhaps they’ll see the merit in moving to a purple state and “defending the line” there.
Nearly every year, in nearly every election, LGBTQ+ people have fought to gain or simply maintain their civil rights, he said.
“And it's just exhausting,” he continued. “It's exhausting to always have your identity used as a political football to get votes.”
McCranie recently took his own advice. He packed his belongings and headed to a purple state on the East Coast.
“I know at the end of the day, when I go to sleep, my family's happy, they're fed and they're safe. That’s all that matters to me.” – Paul Lewis
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For the last year of Ryan Lewis’ time living in Texas, he was scared. He carried a gun wherever he went, checking to make sure it was there before holding his boyfriend’s hand in public.
“I realized I was doing that, and I really hated it,” he told the Observer in September. “I don't do that here.”
These days, Lewis calls Michigan home. As he described his decision to say goodbye to Texas, where temperatures soared as high as 110 that month, rain fell outside the open windows of his new place, the air a cool 70 degrees.
Lewis sought the help of McCranie, whose team he credits with preparing his house for sale quickly after watching Texas’ landscape turn more hostile toward the LGBTQ+ community. Lewis, who is bisexual, said his 8-year-old “was pretty adamant that they were not a girl” from the time they were around 3.
Raising a non-binary kid in a deep-red state was a little scary, Lewis said. A teacher once informed his child they weren’t allowed to use the bathroom if they were neither a boy nor a girl, sending them home crying.
Lewis soon realized that a teacher or parent who didn’t approve of his decision to let his kid explore gender could potentially alert Family Services and spark an investigation: “That was when I started calling everybody, and we all coordinated and said, ‘We need to get out of Texas.’”
He’d noticed a shift in tone over the past couple of years “in how people were interacting with us” in Texas. White supremacists and other extremists were becoming increasingly emboldened, turning up outside events. Lewis understood that these types of hateful displays sometimes happen in big cities but became alarmed when they started occurring more frequently.
And Republicans had ramped up legislative attacks against LGBTQ+ Texans, so much so that the state’s GOP branded homosexuality as an “abnormal lifestyle choice” in its 2022 platform.
“They have normalized hateful rhetoric against the queer population as a whole, to the point that it has mobilized the base of extremely violent people who have no problem showing up at a drag show armed and ready to kill,” Lewis said. “I'm not willing to risk my kid with armed Nazis. I'm just not. So, that's really the crux of it.”
Paul Lewis, partner of Ryan Lewis, also trekked up north. (The two coincidentally have the same last name.) Until moving to Michigan in July, Paul had lived in Texas his entire life.
Tension hung in the air everywhere Paul went in his former state, he said; by contrast, Pride flags brighten many windows in his new hometown. Michigan leadership recently expanded the state’s anti-discrimination law to cover gender identity and sexual orientation. Officials have also worked to attract more LGBTQ+ community members to the Great Lakes State.
Critics may question their decision to leave, but Paul believes there’s “more than one way” to fight, adding, “I know at the end of the day, when I go to sleep, my family's happy, they're fed and they're safe. That’s all that matters to me.”
Ryan echoed that sentiment: The move to Michigan was challenging.
It was also worth it.
“It was not easy. It was very stressful. It was very expensive. But we are all so much happier,” he said. “You know, my kid is thriving in school and I’m not afraid of their teacher — I'm not afraid of other parents there.
“I'm just not afraid.”
