As I sit in an Albuquerque auditorium at the 3rd Annual New Mexico Draggy Awards, surrounded by drag queens, kings, and everyone in between, I find myself wiping away tears for the second time that evening.
New Mexico transgender advocate Bunnie Cruse is standing on the stage giving out an award for activism, and she calls Democratic U.S. Congresswoman Melanie Stansbury to the stage.
“Your existence is an act of resistance; an act of resilience and fuck Trump!” shouts Stansbury from the stage while wearing a black and white dress and a beat-up pair of red Converse. Fans clack, and the crowd erupts in cheers.
Related: Dispatches from Route 66: How queer communities are rebuilding safety along the Mother Road
Albuquerque: Where hope took the stage
Stansbury then quotes an invocation she heard earlier that week at the opening of the Obama Presidential Center: “Hope is a call to action. Resilience is a call to action. Change is a call to action, and continuing to fight for our democracy is a call to action.”
Hope radiates from the stage. I’m just passing through New Mexico, yet I find myself feeling seen by an elected official in a way I rarely do back home in Ohio.
Less than 24 hours earlier, I had been in Amarillo listening to transgender people describe contingency plans for their families if one of them were detained. Now, in Albuquerque, a member of Congress stood onstage at a drag awards ceremony celebrating the very community that had been living in fear just one state away.
My third week on Route 66 searching for the Mother Road’s LGBTQ+ story, past, present, and future became a study in what hope looks like when communities feel safe enough to be visible. To better understand why Albuquerque felt so different, I sat down with leaders from Bold Futures, a statewide advocacy organization for women and people of color.
A museaum display in Albuquerque, New Mexico.Alysse Dalessandro for The Advocate
“I think that’s one of the most beautiful things about organizing with folks is that they don’t even know about their brilliance until they’re given a safe place to sort of feel some softness and have some space,” shares Bold Futures Executive Director Charlene Bencomo.
That emphasis on safety is intentional. Bold Futures has been organizing for these marginalized voices since its founding in 1999, and its community-driven approach reflects New Mexico as a whole.
“New Mexico is a really unique place, and I think it is because of the culture and the heritage that we have,” says Bencomo. “We are more community-driven than individualistic a lot of times. We move in community. So when we’re taking a story to a decision-maker, we’re not just saying, ‘Here are the statistics, this is the bottom line.’ We’re saying, ‘Here are the statistics, here’s the bottom line, and here are the people who are going to tell you about what it looks like in their neighborhood.’”
Charlene Bencomo’s words that New Mexicans “move in community” stuck with me during my four days in Albuquerque. By the end of my time there, I understood exactly what she meant.
Related: Dispatches from Route 66: Discover the queer stories hidden along the iconic road trip
Pride written into the road
The more time I spent in Albuquerque, the more I realized that resistance was woven into the fabric of New Mexico. During a Route 66 History Tour in the city, I learned that long before Route 66 reached the city, New Mexico had already fought to preserve its identity by resisting pressure to rename the territory during its path to statehood.
Just 14 years after becoming a state, Route 66 cut through the heart of town. Today, that same stretch of Central Avenue continues to tell Albuquerque’s story. Unlike many places I’d visited along Route 66, here you don’t have to dig through museums or archives to find its LGBTQ+ history. It’s painted directly onto Historic Route 66 in the form of rainbow crosswalks.
Writer Alysse Dalessandro standing at the Route 66 sign in Albuquerque, New Mexico.Alysse Dalessandro for The Advocate
I learned that these crosswalks commemorate the city’s first Pride March, when 25 University of New Mexico students marched from Morningside Park to the intersection of Morningside Drive and Central Avenue in 1976.
To this day, Albuquerque’s Pride march still traverses Route 66 down Central Ave. Each year, Bold Futures hosts a Family Pride in Morningside Park. For the organization’s 15th Family Pride, they themed it around a Quinceañera Fiesta, intentionally weaving Pride into this Mexican cultural tradition.
“We have all the cultural staples but then make them part of Pride,” shares Bold Futures Deputy Director Heather Smith. “So now you’re also exposing people who are there, who are not familiar with those cultural traditions; they’re learning them, and it’s a cultural exchange.”
Rather than asking LGBTQ+ people to choose between their cultural and queer identities, Family Pride celebrates both at once and invites the broader community to learn alongside them.
Route 66 hasn’t just been a gathering place; it has also long been a place where LGBTQ+ travelers searched for safety, sex, and community. A 1977 edition of Bob Damron’s Address Book, a national gay travel guide, listed the stretch of Central Avenue from the University of New Mexico to the area near The Loon as a cruising spot.
Old Downtown Albuquerque.Alysse Dalessandro for The Advocate
The queer-tolerant hotels such as the Alvarado Hotel and the Franciscan that once lined Central Ave are gone, but new hotels are still filling that need. Although the Bob Damron Address Book is no longer the go-to resource for LGBTQ+-friendly places to stay, the intention behind this book’s existence is still something I use on my own travels.
While looking for safe places to stay along Route 66 as a queer traveler, I used the Booking.com Travel Proud filter to find accommodations in Albuquerque. This allowed me to see only results for hotels that have completed Booking.com’s LGBTQ+ hospitality training. It led me to Hotel ZAZZ, a woman-owned boutique hotel along Route 66. Here was another place where I felt safe and seen.
The “other” Route 66
This visibility continued when I visited the Albuquerque Museum exhibit: The Other Route 66: 100 Years of People, Identity, and Place in Albuquerque. While other museums mostly idealized Route 66, this exhibit intentionally sought out the narratives most often ignored, presumably for their discomfort: the migrant experience, the exoticism of Indigenous communities, and the dangers for Black travelers, to name a few.
Once I reached a sign that read “The ‘Other’ Route 66,” I finally found my own visibility. Museum after museum, I felt erased and othered, but here was finally a visible inclusion of the LGBTQ+ experience on display in a Route 66 exhibit. The small display included 3 reproductions of ads for Central Ave’s gay clubs, a Pride route map, and a recent photograph from a local Pride. It was not much, but it was something.
Preservation as Resistance
At the Arizona Route 66 Museum in Kingman, I learned about Angel Delgadillo, the Seligman barber whose efforts are widely credited with launching the preservation movement that saved Route 66 from fading into history. After Interstate 40 bypassed Seligman and Route 66 was officially decommissioned in 1985, Delgadillo noticed visitors still going out of their way to stop at his barbershop to reminisce about the Mother Road. He decided to do something about it.
As I listened to the story of Route 66’s preservation, I realized it wasn’t really about saving a highway. There was a faster way to cross the country. Preserving Route 66 was about preserving the stories that gave it meaning. It was about refusing to let a community disappear. It’s Andie Smith showing up to the Edwardsville Town Square every Friday. It’s Steve Blundell buying the District Hotel. It’s Chief Egunwale Amusan creating the Real Black Wall Street Tour. It’s me driving more than 3,000 miles to document the LGBTQ+ history of Route 66 before more of it disappears. Different communities. Different histories. The same determination to refuse erasure.
Klingman, Arizone Route 66 sign.Alysse Dalessandro or The Advocate
Delgadillo rallied fellow business owners to secure historic recognition for Route 66, founding the Historic Route 66 Association of Arizona and creating a preservation model that communities along the Mother Road continue to follow today.
“If Angel Delgadillo and these other rallying people had not fought for their communities and for Route 66, it would just have remained forgotten about, “ Katie Barthlow, a communications specialist for the Historic Route 66 Association of Arizona, told me.
One of the Historic Route 66 Association of Arizona’s former officers is an out gay man. I didn’t have the opportunity to interview him during this trip, but learning he had helped preserve Route 66 left me wondering how many other LGBTQ+ people had quietly shaped the Mother Road without becoming part of its public history.
The Arizona Route 66 Museum doesn’t yet answer that question. But museum leadership readily acknowledged that LGBTQ+ history belongs in the story of Route 66 and that uncovering it will require the kind of archival research and community connections that have shaped my own journey. Alongside exhibits on the Green Book, the class struggles of the Dust Bowl migration, and the contributions of Asian Americans like restaurateur Charlie Lim, the museum paints a broader picture of who shaped the Mother Road, even if that work isn’t finished yet.
Making space to be seen
Kingman’s Route 66 history is thoroughly documented. Its LGBTQ+ history is far less visible. Unlike Flagstaff, where Pride flags lined storefronts, I had to search much harder for signs of queer community in Kingman.
I found Gideon Freeman, owner of The Bearded Baker, sitting beneath a Progress Pride flag hanging outside his garage-turned-home bakery. He tells me about how he helped to bring the first Mohave Pride to Kingman in 2019. Their first Pride event saw more than 3000 attendees. For him, Kingman’s lack of LGBTQ+ visibility isn’t about lack of support but a lack of space.
“We just need more space here to connect,” says Freeman. “There’s a lot of us here, we just don’t see each other very often. So we’ve been trying to build that community.”
Freeman directed me to Feral Tattoo, where I expected their regular Wednesday art night but instead found a group gathered around a table discussing voter education and sharing stories about life as LGBTQ+ people in town.
Just as Angel Delgadillo realized preserving Route 66 would depend on ordinary people taking action, I’ve found the same is true of the LGBTQ+ community along the Mother Road. In places with fewer dedicated resources, that work often falls to individuals like Feral Tattoo’s owner, Willow Kroenke, who are willing to make themselves visible.
Kroenke told me that being visibly queer has made them fear for their family’s safety, but they also don’t know how to build community without that visibility.
“I think if there was any lesson in Route 66, it would be to look at the people that have been fighting for equal rights for the last hundred years,” says Kroenke. “I look at what the Black Panthers did with the Rainbow Coalition. When I don’t know what to do, I make kids breakfast because that’s what they did. When I don’t know what to do, I bring my friends flowers because that’s what Marsha did.”
Listening to Willow, I found myself crying in a tattoo shop in Kingman. Three weeks earlier, I had set out looking for the hidden LGBTQ+ history of Route 66. By the time I reached Arizona, I realized that history doesn’t preserve itself. It survives because ordinary people choose to carry it forward: for their neighbors, for their communities, and for those who come after them by refusing to let the stories of those who came before disappear. That, more than anything, has been the story of Route 66.
