BRATTLEBORO — HB Lozito recalls living in a big city out West when memories began to bubble of a small-town childhood back East.
Lozito appreciated the freedom that the San Francisco Bay Area offered someone who uses the word “queer” with pride and “they” as a singular pronoun. But the concrete metropolis didn’t have the more grounded moments of the thirty-something’s birthplace in Maine.
“I had been living in a very large population of LGBTQ people, but it also felt important to be somewhere rural,” Lozito recounted recently. “I wanted to have both of those things, together.”
Vermont – the first state in the nation to adopt same-sex civil unions, in 2000, and full marriage rights by a legislative vote, in 2009 – seemed to be the answer. Yet a move to Brattleboro a decade ago initially sparked a question.
“I was saying to myself, ‘I know there are queer people here, but…
