Parker Ross and Ellis Deputy met between a painting and a blanket.

It was last November, soon after they’d both moved to Peoria from out of state, at a local art show for Transgender Day of Remembrance. They each had works on display and that night, there was a reception for the artists.

Ross’ piece, a painting of a transmasculine figure called “What Do You See?,” and Deputy’s, a multicolored quilt that signified healing, were on exhibit right next to each other.

The chance encounter is something Deputy likens to a Hallmark movie (“It was really cute,” he said of meeting his boyfriend). But it was also a moment made possible by the couple seeking solace in the same city just a few months prior.

Amid an increasingly hostile environment for the LGTBQ+ community under the second Trump administration, people are flocking to Peoria for a reprieve. While the diaspora of LGBTQ+ residents from less welcoming areas of the country is something blue states, Illinois included, are no stranger to — especially as the political divide in the United States deepens — it’s an exodus that local advocates and community members say has been acutely felt in this midsize Midwestern city.

With the city’s notorious middle-of-the-road reputation (“Will it play in Peoria?” as the phrase goes) and locale in what’s typically thought of as a more rural and red part of the state, it may seem an unlikely safe haven.

The draw is something that’s difficult to define with precision. But interviews with local real estate professionals, area organizations and recent newcomers like Ross and Deputy point to Peoria’s affordability, range of local LGBTQ+ resources, midsize but small-town feel and fiercely proud queer community. Alongside state-level LGBTQ+ resources that have long been known to be some of the strongest in the country, Peoria has become a particularly apt choice for refuge.

This time last year, Ross was in Missouri, and Deputy was in Iowa. By the summer, the threat of discriminatory policies and an emboldening of anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment in their home states had them packing their things.

Since moving to Peoria, they said they’ve had more room to breathe, and just be.

“For the first time in a little bit,” Ross said, “(I’ve) had a place to rest and reevaluate and figure out … the future.”

Making a move

Ross, 24, had lived in Columbia, Missouri, since he was 14. His family settled down in the city, which sits about two hours west of St. Louis, after they spent much of his childhood moving around, a function of his dad’s job. His parents, who met in Columbia, returned with the hope that they wouldn’t move again.

Moving to Columbia, Ross remembered, was nice. The change came just as he was starting to explore his identity, and it allowed him to start anew.

Ross, who was assigned female at birth, began feeling dysphoric around puberty. He’d always expressed himself the way that he wanted to — he was tomboyish in ways, very outdoorsy, kept his hair short — but it wasn’t until he got older that he knew “something’s weird,” he recalled. He started thinking about his sense of self and gender expression. Right before he and his family relocated to Columbia, he began going by nonbinary. The move to Missouri gave him the chance to pick a new name, to reintroduce himself.

Through high school, he continued to explore. Though he didn’t yet know what he wanted long-term, theater helped. Acting gave him a license to audition for and find himself in different male roles, to wear different clothes and play. By the time he was a senior, he remembered getting cast in a female role for the first time in years. It was fun, he recalled, but it was a character — it wasn’t him.

“In retrospect, it really felt like drag,” he said. It was one of those defining moments when he realized, fundamentally, how he wanted to present and be perceived. Over the next few years, he transitioned to align with his identity as a man. It was around then that he started to notice the LGBTQ+ community, especially transgender rights, become a talking point in a way he didn’t really understand.

The recent backlash against America’s LGBTQ+ rights movement has been mounting for a decade, according to Billy Huff, director of the University of Illinois at Chicago’s Gender and Sexuality Center.

The onslaught, and what spurred it, is complex, Huff said. He pointed to the rise in prevalence and visibility of transgender people in the early to mid-2010s and that with representation, often comes the double-edged consequence of vulnerability and rebuff. The election of President Donald Trump in 2016 and a broader shift among Republicans, who have grown less tolerant in recent years, have also emboldened attack, Huff said. Anti-LGBTQ+ legislation across the country has steadily escalated, especially policies to restrict transgender existence.

In Columbia — which houses the University of Missouri and, as is often the case with college towns, leans blue — the backlash started to hit home in 2020, Ross remembered. That’s when Missouri saw its first gender-affirming care bans proposed.

The backslide, which ran parallel with Ross’ transition, was jarring, he said. He funneled his frustration into getting more involved locally but at that point, he was already weighing where he could move. His parents and younger brother were, too.

For this tight-knit family, it was difficult seeing discourse grow increasingly hostile, Ross’ mom, Meg Ross, said.

“Watching the wear and tear on Parker … you know, year after year of the legislation and just the ugliness,” she said. Deciding to leave was hard, Meg Ross said, but she needed her family to be safe.

They started to research and take exploratory trips. Areas like Michigan came up in conversation. But as they considered their options, Peoria caught their eye in online discussion boards.

Why Peoria?

Especially for a city of its size — nearly 112,000 people, per latest census data — Peoria has a wide breadth of LGBTQ+ resources, much of which has taken shape over the past four decades.

Prior to the 1980s, the LGBTQ+ community in Peoria seemed to largely exist underground, according to Huston Mathias, a local middle school social studies teacher who, in the last few years, has been working on a personal project to document the city’s LGBTQ+ history. Through his research, Mathias has found that the AIDS epidemic of the ‘80s and early ‘90s prompted more formal community organizing and, in turn, more outward recognition.

Mathias pointed to the 1990 founding of Central Illinois Friends, a Peoria-based nonprofit that was initially borne out of concerns with the local response to the AIDS crisis. Today, the organization provides low- to no-cost HIV/STI treatment and LGBTQ+ care at clinics across Central Illinois.

“Friends is probably the portrait of the growth,” Mathias said. In 1999, the city welcomed Acorn Equality Fund, which works to support LGBTQ+ people and their allies through scholarships and grant funding. That same year, a Peoria Pride Cruise launched from the city. “Come One Come All,” a July 1999 newspaper advertisement for the event read.

By 2009, Peoria had its first Pride festival. In the years since, the city has seen support and celebration continue to multiply, from LGBTQ+ primary care available downtown to, most recently, the launch of a local LGBTQ+ community center.

The space, founded by Central Illinois Friends, opened on Jan. 20, 2025. The third Monday of January, it marked Martin Luther King Jr. Day, but it was also the day Trump entered office for the second time.

For Central Illinois Friends, Jan. 20 offered the chance to highlight resilience, both in commemorating King’s legacy and, the organization says, showing there’s good to come.

“What better way to celebrate our grand opening,” Central Illinois Friends Executive Director Deric Kimler said, “than … to give people that light that was on a dark day for so many others.”

The building was an aspiration years in the making. With the space, the nonprofit sought to create a hub that was welcoming in every way possible, somewhere that offered LGBTQ-centered services and connection but also cultivated community between people from all walks of life.

On one floor, the center has a clinic that caters to both gender-diverse care and sexual health. Down the hall, affirming counselors provide talk therapy. Upstairs, there’s an inclusive library that’s open to anyone wanting to snag a new read, study, even sleep.

There are conference rooms available for meetings and events, where bookings so far have run the gamut from civic engagement to a bachelorette party. And tucked away in the corner of the building, there’s a closet full of clothing that gender-diverse people can peruse as they please without the pressure of going to a store.

The center is also home to six other area organizations that, before last year, didn’t have any brick and mortar of their own.

‘I just don’t feel safe here anymore’

Kimler often fields out-of-state calls, typically from people in areas less welcoming than Illinois who are looking to move, he said.

“(They’re asking) what school should my kid go to? What other resources are out there besides you?” he said.

Over the past six years, Peoria real estate agents Mike Van Cleve and Jacob Rendel have seen an influx of transplants to Peoria, they said.

They credited much of the early interest in relocating to Angelica Ostaszewski, a Peoria transplant who, in 2020, started posting videos to her TikTok channel encouraging people to move to the city. Her posts garnered her thousands of followers, widespread media coverage — and relocations. When Ostaszewski spoke to the Tribune in 2022, she listed Peoria’s job availability, affordability and welcoming environment as primary draws.

Van Cleve and Rendel have since seen referrals shift from Ostaszewski to Facebook and, more recently, to Reddit.

Data from the Peoria Area Association of Realtors shows that there’s been nearly 800 Peoria home sales to out-of-state buyers from 2022 through mid-March of this year. Of those, Florida has produced the most non-Illinois buyers at 95, followed by California, Texas, Arizona, Iowa, Indiana and Tennessee.

There is a slate of reasons that spur someone to move, Van Cleve and Rendel said, from quality of life to climate to income tax. But safety is also a factor they’ve been hearing from clients more and more.

“When we think about our transplants, right, we have lots of people that have come from Florida,” Rendel said. “And the first conversation is: ‘I just don’t feel safe here anymore.’”

The city’s lower housing costs are also a selling point, Rendel added. Zillow research in recent years has shown that LGBTQ+ homebuyers and renters typically pay a premium to live in areas that offer legal protection from discrimination.

When Charlise Lee, a mother of nine, set out on leaving Texas a couple of years ago, she needed a big house that she could afford. The 41-year-old spent two and half years researching before she came across Peoria on a random search. Lee had spent most of her life in Dallas, but in 2019, she and her family moved to a small, more conservative Dallas suburb called Princeton. It was a big shift, said Lee, who identifies as pansexual.

Though usually someone who keeps to herself, Lee in tandem with a few community members ended up launching an LGBTQ+ advocacy group to fill a gap they saw in the suburb. Their organizing was met with harassment and threats, Lee said. Three of her kids dropped out of school and her car, which boasted pro-LGBTQ+ stickers, was vandalized, she recalled.

“We just got tired,” she said.

In 2024, Lee and her family took a weekend trip to Peoria and fell in love with the city. They officially made the move last summer. It’s been a relief, Lee said, knowing her family left when they did.

“I feel like we kind of got out just in time,” Lee said.

Running

The day after Trump was reelected, Ross’ mom turned to him and said: “We’re going to move.” After years of weighing where and when to go, their timeline changed.

“It’s one thing to look at the rhetoric that was going around and is still going around … (but) the fact that it was successful was a turning point,” Ross said. To him, the election seemed to embolden people to be louder and more open with their rebuke.

He worried for how that would translate into policy. Not long after the election, a state lawmaker proposed legislation to prohibit documents from listing any sex other than the one assigned at birth, similar to a law Kansas imposed earlier this year that invalidated hundreds of driver’s licenses held by transgender residents.

“That one scared me,” Ross said. And it wasn’t just the change itself but how fast it happened.

A state away in Iowa, Deputy felt a similar shift. He was used to the feeling.

Deputy grew up in Waco, Texas, in a conservative, fundamentalist Christian family. Early on, Deputy knew it wasn’t safe to be queer. He remembered when he saw a same-sex couple for the first time.

Barack Obama was president and he watched, on his parent’s TV, as the couple lobbied to legalize same-sex marriage during a broadcast of the “Today” show. He turned to his mom and asked, “Why can’t they get married?” She replied, “No, that makes God sad,” Deputy said.

Assigned female at birth, Deputy grappled with his identity as he got older. He recalled not having much of a sense of self and making himself as small as possible. It wasn’t until he went to a liberal arts college in San Antonio that he had the space to figure out who he was and what he wanted.

His freshman year, Deputy made a personal deal that if he could get into a sorority, it meant “you can be a girl enough, and you’re fine,” he said. When he didn’t, Deputy took it as a sign, or as he said, it was “another drop in a rapidly filling bucket.” Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit.

Deputy moved back home and there, he felt the loss of what he had been building toward. It was devastating. Everything felt like it was falling apart, he said, and it was then that he sat alone in his room and asked himself: If he didn’t have to worry about social obligation, what would he do? Move away, shave his head and change his name, he replied. So he did.

Deputy solidified his understanding that he was a transgender man around the spring of 2021, he said. Two years later, he was set to graduate and began thinking about what was next for him. But toward the end of his undergraduate education, the threat of more restrictive laws, especially for trans residents, started to loom. Deputy said he turned his attention to graduate schools out of Texas, so he could leave.

He landed at Iowa State and, at first, the move was a welcome change. He found his community and felt insulated from day-to-day discourse. But then more anti-LGBTQ+ legislation and laws started to come through that state’s legislature. And after the election, like Ross, Deputy felt the animosity intensify.

He remembered last year taking one of his friends who was trans to the hospital and watching as “he was treated just absolutely deplorably by the hospital staff,” he said. That’s when Deputy knew he needed to move.

He narrowed his scope to areas within driving distance of Iowa. Initially, he thought he’d end up in Minneapolis but after a visit, it wasn’t a fit. Peoria, though, was more his speed.

When he was considering cities he could move to, Deputy had a checklist of things he was looking for, among them a good coffee and craft store. On a visit to Peoria, he walked into the latter and met a woman with a pride tattoo on her arm. She told him she was an ally, and that “the queer community is huge here.”

“I loved her,” Deputy said. He thought, “Hey, this seems pretty safe,” and took her at her word.

Deputy says he’s felt more of a cushion since moving to Peoria.

“I feel like I’ve been running my whole life … (but) I don’t feel like I’m running right now,” he said. Still, that inkling is hard to shake. Deputy said the possibility that he may have to flee again lingers in the back of his mind.

Tentative relief

Unease is something Melinda Sparks-Renner sees, and feels, a lot these days. The pastor at Imago Dei Church in Peoria says it’s been palpable in her congregants and in her own family.

The mom of four moved to central Illinois from Alabama six years ago to be a part of Imago Dei, one of Peoria’s several inclusive churches. Her daughter Celeste, who’s transgender, moved with her. But two of her other kids, who also identify as LGBTQ+, still remain in Huntsville.

Since Trump’s reelection, Sparks-Renner has had conversations with her 26-year-old transgender son, Sam, about whether he’d leave Alabama and move to Peoria to have better access to gender-affirming care.

Through the first Trump administration, Sam Randolph used to wake up every day and think through a game plan should he need to leave Huntsville, he said. He had a bag packed in the trunk of his car just in case.

In recent months, he’s grappled with whether it’d be easier to live somewhere else. Earlier this year, he got to the point where he thought he’d have to break his lease and move to Peoria after changes with his health insurance momentarily put his health care at risk. He has since regained access, but his premiums are more expensive.

Sam often thinks about whether he’ll be able to stay in Alabama long-term. Huntsville is home, but “if I end up having to leave … that’s just the path that I’m destined to take,” he said.

His sister has tried a few times to persuade him to move to Peoria. Celeste Randolph wants all her siblings to move to the city with her and her mom, the 19-year-old said.

“We all align with something in the LGBTQ+ community and at some point, that needs to be brought into question,” she said. “It is safe to even exist down there under this presidency?”

She said it’s been difficult grappling with her relative comfort living in Peoria with her brother at risk in Alabama.

For her, moving to Illinois has been life-changing, she said. If she had stayed in Huntsville, she thinks it might have taken her a longer time to come to terms with her identity. But moving, she said, encouraged her to embrace herself. She remembered when she saw her first big Pride festival in Peoria — something she thought was exclusive to big cities.

“Never in a million years did I ever think I would witness the kind of community that I currently witness here,” she said.

For Ross and his family, they say they’re just starting to feel settled. Ross is looking forward to getting involved in local theater and the drag community. When he thinks about the move, it still frustrates him — the circumstances and that he didn’t feel like he had a choice. But ultimately, it’s been a good change.

His younger brother, Wylie, is especially glad they left. Back in Missouri, Wylie really worried what staying would mean for Ross and their family. As of last month, Wylie said Peoria doesn’t quite feel like home yet, but that it’s starting to.

The change has been good for him, too. Like his brother, Wylie met his boyfriend in Peoria.

He’s also from Texas.

The Associated Press contributed.

tkenny@chicagotribune.com