I left San Francisco for Colorado Springs. It changed how I see democracy​

Having spent half my life in the most liberal city in the U.S. and half my life in one of the most conservative, I’ve learned an important lesson: how Americans talk to each other is as important as what they say. The San Francisco Bay Area afforded me an incredible college education and a successful 20-year career as a documentary filmmaker. Yet, as the country has grown more polarized, San Francisco’s history as a safe harbor for immigrants, queer people and other outsiders can sometimes feel like an echo chamber. Don’t get me wrong: finding my tribe as a young gay man and a filmmaker in California allowed me to finally say the quiet things out loud, something I could never do growing up in a town famous for its right-wing, anti-gay fundamentalism. Yet, ten years ago, I left San Francisco and returned to my hometown of Colorado Springs. And nothing has quite been the same. What I assumed would be a year spent caring for my father after his ALS diagnosis led to teaching documentary film classes and, ultimately, founding a tuition-free film academy, the Youth Documentary Academy, for young people in our region, much like the training academies I’d seen that exist mostly on the east and west coasts. My father had always made the case for living in southern Colorado. A staunch Democrat, a leader in his teachers’ union and a historian of civil rights, he had no desire to move to a more progressive region where many more folks shared his values. He loved the Pikes Peak region, as had his parents and grandparents before him. Perhaps my dad enjoyed being an irritant to the establishment—a perpetual David-versus-Goliath figure—or perhaps he understood something I did not: that living in a place alongside people who don’t share your social and political perspectives isn’t always a bad thing. In fact, it can be quite an American thing. In the last decade, we’ve witnessed an alarming breakdown in civic engagement. The borders between red and blue America h