In late 2023, Hulu released a powerful documentary, We Live Here: The Midwest, spotlighting LGBTQ+ families navigating life in America's heartland. Among the featured voices were Lake Drive author Nia Chiaramonte and her wife Katie, whose striking story of enduring love, gender transition, and spiritual will helps us all move forward to be our authentic selves.

Life in the Crosshairs: We Live Here: The Midwest

Directed by Melinda Maerker and executive produced by Welcome to Chechnya filmmaker David France, We Live Here: The Midwest profiles five LGBTQ+ families living in conservative Midwestern states like Iowa, Nebraska, Ohio, and Minnesota. Each story is a window into the tension between love and belonging, safety and faith, resilience and resistance. The documentary doesn’t flinch from hard truths: rising anti-LGBTQ legislation, cultural backlash, and the difficult question so many queer families face—do we stay and fight, or do we leave?

“We’re not just issues, we’re people,” Nia says in the film. Her wife Katie adds poignantly, “Do we stay and fight, or do we go? But where do you go where there’s stability and safety?”

Through scenes of everyday life—parenting, churchgoing, community activism—the film reveals both the beauty and heartbreak of trying to live authentically in places that don’t always know how to hold complexity. For the Chiaramontes, who were both raised in evangelical culture in Des Moines, Iowa, the conflict between their deep faith and institutional exclusion is a defining theme.

Nia and Katie’s Story: A Love That Evolves

Nia and Katie met in junior high at a Christian school and later married, building a family with five children. Their early years were grounded in shared faith, ministry, and church leadership. But when Nia came out as a transgender woman in 2018, everything shifted. Though their church didn’t reject them outright, they quickly sensed they were no longer welcome in leadership. “It was like being slowly pushed out,” Nia recalls in interviews.

The couple eventually relocated to the East Coast, seeking space to live out their love and spirituality without fear or constraint. The documentary captures this move with tenderness and grit, showing the cost of choosing authenticity—and the depth of love it requires.

I Hardly Knew Me: The Memoir That Goes Deeper

For those who watched and wanted more—who wondered what it truly means to transition within the confines of faith and family—Nia’s 2025 memoir I Hardly Knew Me: Following Love, Faith, and Skittles to a Transgender Awakening offers the deeper, fuller story. While We Live Here offers a vital glimpse into the Chiaramontes' life, I Hardly Knew Me is Nia’s invitation into her inner world. With searing honesty and lyrical prose, she recounts her journey through gender dysphoria, evangelical expectations, the slow unearthing of her true self, and the intimate negotiations of her marriage and motherhood.

Why This Story Matters Now

Together, the documentary and memoir tell a fuller story—one that many LGBTQ+ people, especially those with religious backgrounds, will recognize as their own. In the Chiaramontes, we see a couple who chose to stay together through truth-telling, who redefined faith on their own terms, and who are raising children with radical honesty and love.

Where the film illuminates the stakes of living authentically in the public eye, the memoir offers a soul-deep reckoning with self-knowledge, spirituality, and liberation. Nia’s voice is not simply reactive to cultural debates—it is prophetic, poetic, and fiercely grounded in love.