In late 2023, Hulu released We Live Here: The Midwest, a documentary that doesn’t just observe its subjects but seems to sit beside them at their dinner tables, in their pews, and in their living rooms, listening. Directed by Melinda Maerker and executive produced by David France (Welcome to Chechnya), the film profiles five LGBTQ+ families living in America’s heartland. It is a portrait of contradiction, where prairie landscapes meet political hostility, and where love tries, against all odds, to make a home under skies that sometimes feel unwelcoming.
One of the families at the heart of the story is that of Nia Chiaramonte and her wife Katie. Their lives carry the kind of texture that can only come from decades of shared history, two kids who first met in second grade at a Christian school, became best friends in middle school, fell in love in high school, and eventually married. They built a life around ministry, faith, and their five children. But when Nia came out as a transgender woman in 2018, the ground beneath them shifted. The church didn’t slam the doors on them, but the subtle exclusions, the “slow push” as Nia describes it, spoke volumes. Leadership roles vanished. Invitations dried up. Their once central place in the community dissolved into a quiet exile. The documentary captures this slow unraveling with tenderness and honesty. Katie asks in one scene, “Do we stay and fight, or do we go? But where do you go where there’s stability and safety?” It’s a question that echoes through the entire film, one that queer families across the Midwest wrestle with daily. Do you remain in the place that raised you, hoping to make it safer for your children, or do you leave, surrendering a piece of your roots for the chance to breathe freely? The Chiaramontes eventually chose to relocate to the East Coast, seeking space to live out both their queerness and their faith without fear.
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Watching their story unfold, it becomes clear that the film is not really about politics, even though laws and cultural battles haunt its edges. Instead, it’s about the extraordinary ordinariness of LGBTQ+ families, homework at the kitchen table, kids squabbling in the backseat, the kind of daily rituals that reveal how similar, and how deeply human, queer families are. We Live Here: The Midwest insists that we look past headlines and see lives in motion, families in love, people trying, with all their flaws and courage, to live authentically.
For those who wanted to step further inside Nia’s world after the credits rolled, her memoir I Hardly Knew Me: Following Love, Faith, and Skittles to a Transgender Awakening (2025) offers an unfiltered continuation of the story. Where the documentary captures snapshots of her family’s journey, the book cracks open the inner life behind it all, the shame and silence of an evangelical upbringing, the long-buried dysphoria, the slow dawning realization that authenticity wasn’t just possible but necessary. It is a story about gender, yes, but also about faith, resilience, and the wild gamble of staying true to yourself even when it threatens to cost everything you thought was secure.
When I spoke with Nia in our interview for
Heroines of My Life, she explained why memoir became her chosen form of storytelling. “I know when I came out, other people’s stories, especially in memoir form, really helped me to think about and see myself in their journeys. I definitely want to pass that along to others,” she said. That desire, to turn her own experience into a lantern for others navigating the dark, threads through every page of her writing. Her story doesn’t just reclaim a narrative often stolen by gossip and misunderstanding; it transforms it into an act of generosity.
What makes Nia and Katie’s story so compelling is not that it is extraordinary, but that it is achingly ordinary, even while extraordinary things happen within it. They are raising children, laughing at each other’s quirks, and navigating bills and school schedules like anyone else. Yet their love is also a quiet act of revolution. They chose not to fracture under the pressure of transition, but to deepen, to grow together, to let their love evolve rather than calcify. “Love is my cornerstone,” Nia told me. “Through my transition, I learned how to love myself, which in turn allows me to give that love to others.”
In the current climate, where anti-LGBTQ legislation spreads across Midwestern states and beyond, We Live Here: The Midwest feels like both a warning and a hymn. It reminds us that queer families are not abstractions, not talking points, but living, breathing communities with children who deserve safety and joy. And paired with Nia’s memoir, the story resonates even more deeply: the documentary shows the stakes in the public square, while the memoir reveals the private reckoning of a woman who finally refused to live in hiding.
Together, they insist on the dignity of living authentically, even when the cost is high. They remind us that to love openly, to raise children honestly, to live one’s faith expansively, is itself an act of courage. And they suggest that perhaps the Midwest is not just a place on the map, but a metaphor for the space in all of us where love and fear collide, and where the choice to live truthfully can change everything.
Image credits: watch.plex.tv
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