From a small radio studio in the heart of the Deep South, the voices of gay and lesbian Southerners suddenly filled the AM airwaves. “For far too long,” the announcer stated, “talk radio airwaves have been dominated by the people who talk about us. Starting this fall, we speak for ourselves!” What began as an experiment—Rainbow Radio, South Carolina’s first gay and lesbian radio show—has grown into a grassroots-driven community radio show that, since 2005, has offered diverse, accurate, and often unparalleled stories of gay and lesbian Southerners, their families and their friends.

Citadel cadets and drag queens, a slam poet from Columbia and a Spartanburg schoolteacher, a seminary student in Atlanta and a gay Army vet just back from the Middle East, West Columbia rednecks and rural Texas tomboys, as well as South Carolina’s first lesbian Congressional candidate. A young man talking about his gay uncle and a retired attorney talking about her gay son. Two boys who dare to dance at the prom, a psychic who may be attuned to the gay agenda, and a dying man who makes his last visit to church on Christmas.

These voices have now been collected in a book, Out Loud: The Best of Rainbow Radio, edited by Ed Madden and Candace Chellew-Hodge. Their stories will inspire you, enrage you, and transform the way you think about what it means to be gay and lesbian in the South.