No need for euphemisms—I’m blown away by Small Town Gay Bar. Maybe I was expecting something sort of whimsical or “inspiring,” but Ingram has crafted an ode to what we really mean when we call ourselves a “gay community.” Looking at two bars in Mississippi—one that’s about to be sold and one that’s about to reopen—the film shows us how, for people who live in rural areas, the local gay bar is the only place where people can go to be themselves and find other people with whom they have any kind of kinship.

And in addition to introducing us to the drag queens and butch dykes you might expect to see in a documentary with this title, Ingram takes his camera into the belly of the beast, interviewing religious hatemongers Fred Phelps (who gets just enough screen time to become wholly ridiculous, not that he wasn’t already) and Tim Wildmon. In perhaps the film’s funniest sequence, Wildmon—whose father Donald founded the American Family Association, where Wildmon fils also toils—professes a live-and-let-live philosophy about gays while the film’s queer interviewees remember how Donald Wildmon and other AFA members would write down license plate numbers of cars that visited gay bars, then would read those numbers on the radio the next day. Ultimately, Small Town Gay Bar is a powerful portrait of gay men and lesbians who refuse to decamp for gay meccas like New York, San Francisco, or even Dallas: They choose to stay and fight—to lead the lives they want to lead in the place they’ve always known as home.