How Illinois’ rural queer community could be affected by District 17’s race.
This story is published in partnership with the Queer News Network, a collaboration between 11 LGBTQ+ newsrooms to cover down ballot elections across 10 states. Read more about us here.
This story was published with the Illinois Eagle.
Benito Goff works as a youth programming coordinator at an LGBTQ+ center in Carbondale. It’s the same center he first attended nine years ago, at 16 years old.
Now in his twenties and living in Franklin County, he was born and raised in Marion in Williamson County, a rural town of less than 17,000 people that’s just 17 miles from where he works, and described the difference between the two towns as “night and day in terms of politics and being supportive of marginalized folks.”
As a lifelong southern Illinois resident, he’s familiar with how divided small towns can be on polarizing concepts, like queer rights. Illinois’ largest congressional districts comprise a mix of rural, urban and suburban populations—and understanding the intricacies of Illinois’ rural communities and how they intersect with small towns emerging as queer safe havens is a big key to the race for many local politicians.
That’s especially the case for incumbent Democratic Representative Eric Sorensen, who made history by becoming the first openly gay person Illinois ever elected to Congress after his first electoral win in 2022.
He won by 4 percentage points against now-retired Cheri Bustos and is running for re-election for Illinois’ 17th Congressional District against former judge Republican Joseph McGraw.
Sorensen’s district covers a whopping 120 miles, and the area is described on his congressional website as “anchored by Rockford to the North and Bloomington-Normal to the South and includes Peoria and the Illinois side of the Quad Cities region, comprising of Rock Island, Moline, and East Moline.”
The two candidates hold different views on key legislation that could affect the queer community. Twenty-six states — many of which are in the midwest — have passed policies that ban gender-affirming care for minors, which worries rural Illinois residents like Goff on how queer people will continue to find support and healthcare, especially in areas that aren’t as progressive as major cities.
“Rural Illinois is tough, especially if you’re queer,” Goff said. In his hometown, he said, “The people of Marion call Carbondale mini Chicago because it’s that liberal.” Still, he said, “it’s very mind boggling that people have this stereotype because it’s maybe a little bit more liberal, but not much.”
One key piece of legislation that Goff hopes for includes how gender identity and sexual health is taught in schools — and in many cases, whether it’s taught at all.
Sexual education in Illinois is optional for districts to provide, according to the state’s Board of Education, but schools that opt-in are required to follow national sex education standards.
Advocacy groups like the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois and Rainbow Cafe have been pushing to mandate the Keeping Youth Safe and Healthy Act (KYSHA), a set of laws that include sexual education specific for LGBTQ+ people, that passed in 2021, but was not made mandatory for schools to teach.
Although Rep. Sorensen has been vocal with his support for LGBTQ+ community centers by touring clinics like The Project of the Quad Cities, Goff is concerned that without mandating comprehensive sexual education in schools, the majority of children who need this information may need to seek it out on their own at outside clinics and community centers.
Goff, who is also a youth coordinator for several high school Gay Straight Alliance after-school clubs, said that many of the students he speaks with don’t see a law passing to protect or educate them.
“I've had dozens of students say that they've been told in sex-ed by their own teachers that ‘gay people are going to hell,’ or if you have gay sex, you get AIDS and die,” he said. “That's not a thing that should happen, but it does happen.”
District 17, which Rep. Sorensen and McGraw are competing for, similarly includes a mix of rural and traditionally conservative neighborhoods. That’s a big reason why the district is historically challenging to win — and is considered one of the more competitive elections in the race for control of Congress.
Of the 435 seats in the House, the majority are considered “safe seats” for one party or the other, according to leading political handicapping websites like Cook Political Report and Sabato’s Crystal Ball. Those sites list 84% of the total House seats in the country as safe, and only 69 seats as “competitive,” or susceptible to flip parties. District 17 is the only seat considered competitive in Illinois.
In an interview with WCPT on October 14, Sorensen explained the race for his seat “was one of the tightest races that we had in 2022 in the entire upper Midwest,” and that some of the biggest names in the Republican Party have been ramping up efforts to flip the district red.
On October 20, U.S House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and U.S Representative Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) visited Peoria in fundraising efforts for Sorenson’s opponent, who has also received funding from the National Republican Congressional Committee and was named to the party’s Young Guns program, which mentors GOP candidates.
The state’s Republican party, for its part, seems to be targeting the Rep. Sorensen through anti-gay advertisements and misleading op-eds on his stance on police.
Still, Rep. Sorensen is loaded in cash. As of October 16, he ended the quarter with $1.8 million in cash on hand, more than four-and-a-half times to McGraw’s $385,000.
In terms of endorsements, Rep. Sorensen’s largest single financial contributor to his campaign is the pro-Israel American Israel Public Affairs Comittee, or AIPAC, according to data from OpenSecrets.org.
The Illinois Farm Bureau also endorsed the representative at the end of July, following his work to pass a Farm Bill aimed to provide risk management tools to farmers and address interstate commerce concerns for rural communities.
McGraw is endorsed by several prominent Republicans including Steve Scalise (R-La.) and Republican General Assembly Representative John Cabello.
As the race for one of the most contested seats in local elections in the Midwest continues, rural Illinois residents are wondering how the statewide and even national elections will set the tone for their communities.
Goff believes that the queer community would benefit from more visibility in general, especially in rural areas where “you don’t see same sex couples holding hands while they walk down our main strip downtown.”
“It'd be cool to see the city hang rainbow banners during June on our streetlights, like they do for Black History Month, or for Veterans Day,” he proposed, “or for them to put more pride related art like murals or sidewalks or other installations. Or even for those on the city council and mayor to take a more active role in pride fests.”