Decades ago, in tiny Bendena just north of Atchison, there was a girl named Stacy Lentz, and not much else.

In the town of a handful of families — “population 110, if you count the dogs, cats and sheep” — everything was the same, by virtue of there being nothing else for variety. A Christian, conservative community, literally in the middle of a cornfield.

But Lentz was different, even if she didn’t quite know it yet.

She knew she loved football and baseball and played them every chance she got. She was as popular as she could be in a class of 15 at the since-closed Midway High School, and she was the student council president. She loved to hang out with the guys, even if she didn’t want to date them.

“I realized pretty early on that I was ‘different,’ but I never really came out and expressed that,” Lentz said.

Lentz was gay, but that was too different at the time. Those kinds of words — gay, lesbian, LGBTQ — just weren’t in the community’s terminology, and Lentz wasn’t really even sure what “being gay” meant.

When she got to Kansas State University, Lentz more fully realized that she liked girls, but she still didn’t know if she could be open about that yet. There were no Gay Straight Alliances, clubs, support groups or anything like that at the time, although she found friendship and support in the Alpha Chi Omega sorority.

It was Stacy Lentz, as she understood herself, and the rest of the world.

“I definitely struggled more,” she said. “I was very active in my sorority, but I just kept my head down, and it wasn’t until I moved to D.C. where I was able to come out. That’s when I really understood I was different, that I could understand myself, and come out.”

More:How momentum took Dan Cnossen from Afghanistan battlefield to Paralympics

Now, after decades as an advocate for LGBTQ rights, Lentz will be the featured speaker at the first ever statewide Pride Kansas festival this weekend at the Kansas Statehouse.

Lentz, who co-owns the Stonewall Inn where the gay rights movement is widely considered to have began, has been a fierce advocate for the LGBTQ movement, helping lead efforts to recognize the site as the first U.S. National Monument dedicated to LGBTQ rights and history in 2016.

In the years since, she’s often returned to Kansas to visit family, but this weekend will mark her first time in Kansas as a speaker, as an advocate.

As Stacy Lentz, as she’s always known herself to be.

Even though she realized her family and friends would likely accept her, it took Lentz into her 20s to come to terms with her sexual identity.

“It wasn’t that the people I knew wouldn’t accept me,” she said. “It was more probably my own internalized homophobia that stopped me from coming out initially, then also realizing what happened to people who did.”

Lentz still remembers hearing of Brandon Teena, a trans man who was raped and murdered in her mother’s hometown of Humboldt, Nebraska, in 1993. Lentz had moved to D.C. by then, but it was after Teena’s murder that she realized it wasn’t enough for her to be out as a lesbian.

She would have to fight.

“It was a major turning point for me,” she said. “I had to make sure that it would be alright for not just me to be LGBTQ in D.C. and then New York, but in places like Humboldt and like where I grew up, because I’m sure there are plenty of LGBTQ people in Kansas, and they deserve to be affirmed and safe.”

Coming out to her parents was difficult, Lentz said. They were devout Methodists — the kind that would forgive, but not condone, Lentz’ sexuality, at least at first.

“It was a lot of the ‘We love you, but the world won’t’ — the normal kind of stuff that parents at that time thought,” Lentz said. “Years later, they’re very proud of what I’ve done and how I’ve kept the fight up for LGBTQ civil rights and making a difference in places where it’s still stigmatized and people didn’t feel safe being out and open.”

More:Laura Kelly, Derek Schmidt vie for Kansas' ‘middle-of-the-road’ voters. Here's what analysis shows.

Between various positions as a marketer, salesperson and later owner of her own corporate recruiting firm in New York, Lentz found plenty of opportunities to serve as an gay rights advocate, especially in what she called New York’s nascent, but thriving, mainstream LGTBQ scene. She was about 25 years old when she walked into her first gay bar, Henrietta Hudson in Manhattan’s West Village neighborhood.

“I walked in and thought, ‘This is my community, and this is my chosen family,’” she said. “These people were just like me, and it was just such a cool experience to finally find that community and safe space, to be around others like us, and allies.”

In 2006, when the Stonewall Inn went up for sale, Lentz knew she had an opportunity to act to save a landmark site in gay civil rights history. It had been the site of riots in 1969, in which members of the gay community protested against a police raid against the gay tavern.

Clashes with responding police turned violent, and most historians and activists now consider the Stonewall riots to have sparked the modern, mainstream gay rights movement. Gay pride parades around the nation have been held near the anniversary of the riots each year.

Through efforts by Kurt Kelly, the manager of a different gay bar in Manhattan, Lentz and several other investors bought the run-down bar to revitalize it and preserve it as the historic landmark it was. Thanks to Kelly and Lentz’ efforts, the bar ultimately earned its place on the National Register of Historic Places in 2018.

“From then on, I kind of took over the marketing, and my job was to put it back on the map,” Lentz said. “A lot of people, when we bought it, didn’t know what had happened there in 1969, and younger generations didn’t know or didn’t care. For me, it was about giving back to the community.”

With the bar under her co-ownership, Lentz began weekly community fundraising nights, which she later formalized into the Stonewall Gives Back Initiative in 2017. Since then, the organization has donated tens of thousands of dollars to initiatives to create student scholarships and safe spaces for LGBTQ youth.

Even if she struggled to find a place for herself as a gay teenager in Kansas, Lentz credits her small-town upbringing with giving her a work ethic and empathy that have served her well in her travels around the world.

For years, it’s nagged at her that she hadn’t come back to the state to speak. She’d spoken at pride events all around the world, and even done a TED Talk on how LGBTQ communities can help save small towns, but she had never done so in Kansas.

“I think I’ve always wanted to do it, but I didn’t do it early on, because my parents still lived there and were active in their church, and we didn’t know how that older generation would be accepting of that,” Lentz said. “I didn’t want to upset their lives.”

Her parents have since moved out of state, and Lentz sees an opportunity to help push the gay rights movement forward in Kansas now.

Progress for LGBTQ rights, Lentz says, has been difficult to measure, since every leap forward has been met with several steps back.

Less than a decade after the Stonewall riots kicked off major advocacy, the AIDS epidemic took its toll on the gay community. Later, as some states made progress toward marriage equality for same-sex couples, other states enacted bans that wouldn’t be overturned until the Obergefell v. Hodges U.S. Supreme Court ruling in 2015.

More:Where do things stand in the Kansas governor's race? Our politics podcast breaks things down.

Lately, the biggest challenges to LGBTQ people have also been at the state level, where state legislatures have proposed and enacted bans harming transgender, nonbinary and gender-nonconforming youth.

“As we keep this fight alive, we’ve always faced obstacles, and as we’ve made progress, we keep seeing pushback,” Lentz said.

For Paige Taylor and Megan Thornbrugh, sorority sisters of Lentz’ from K-State, it’s an honor to see her return as an LGBTQ leader. They’ll be by her side as she takes her platform, as a voice for Kansas’ lesbian, gay, binary and transgender youth.

“I think that she really wasn’t allowed to be herself for a long time in a small-town setting. It was just hard to be herself,” Taylor said. “But once she moved, she didn’t look back, and it’s been awesome to see her be who she is. She’s just been the biggest advocate since then.”

“It never surprised me how much Stacy has done,” Thornbrugh said. “We always knew she’d do big things. Her drive, her intelligence — I’ve never been friends with anyone that driven and confident. She’s a bulldozer.”

It’s allies like Taylor and Thornbrugh that Lentz will discuss in her speech, and how allies play a substantial role in both pushing for LGTBQ rights and making non-heterosexual people feel affirmed in every space, big or small.

More:What does Gov. Laura Kelly think of a Kansas transgender athlete ban? New ad muddies waters.

Some small part of Lentz still thinks back to her teenage self, seemingly alone in the middle of a vast cornfield.

That teenager could have never imagined a statewide celebration, for and of people like her.

“It shows progress is alive and well in Kansas,” Lentz said. “It shows that we can get the community out and give them a space safe to celebrate and be affirmed, as well as bring out all of our allies.”

Rafael Garcia is an education reporter for the Topeka Capital-Journal. He can be reached at rgarcia@cjonline.com or by phone at ‪785-289-5325‬. Follow him on Twitter at @byRafaelGarcia.