Like remnants of Jim Crow-era racism, the hostility toward gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people depicted in Dallas Buyer’s Club can of course still be found in the contemporary South, but it’s no longer unquestioned. Contrary to what one might expect, today Texans and southerners are evenly divided on the issue of same-sex marriage. Forty-eight percent of Texans favor allowing gay and lesbian couples to marry legally, compared to 49 percent who oppose. Support for same-sex marriage among Texans has doubled during the last 10 years, up from 24 percent a decade ago according to a 2003 poll from Pew Research Center. And despite Texans’ pride in being “like a whole other country,” Texas is no outlier among southern states. In the South overall, support for same-sex marriage has similarly risen from 22 percent in 2003 to 48 percent in 2013.

Given recent history, these shifts are stunning. Just months after the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court struck down its ban on same-sex marriage, voters in many southern states reacted to this Yankee court action by overwhelmingly passing bans in their own states. In August 2004, Missouri was the first state after the Massachusetts ruling to vote on a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage. At the time, I was teaching at Missouri State University and remember vividly that, among my Springfield neighbors, community leaders, and even among my students at a large state university, few were willing to voice opposition to the ban. It passed with 71 percent of the vote. Three months later, the 2004 national elections saw a sweep of 11 states passing constitutional bans against same-sex marriage, and the following year the Texas constitutional ban passed with the approval of 76 percent of the voters.

What explains the rising swell of support for same-sex marriage in the South? There are at least three factors driving this rising tide across Dixieland.

First, it is difficult to overstate the effect of the generation gap. A decade ago, when most of these same-sex marriage bans were passed across the South, the vast majority of today’s Millennials were neither counted in public-opinion surveys of adults nor eligible to vote. Their attitudes strongly diverge from their parents and grandparents. Nationwide, nearly seven in 10 (69 percent) Americans ages 18 to 33 favor same-sex marriage, compared to just 37 percent of Americans ages 68 and older. This generation gap is evident in virtually every subgroup in America, including among southerners. Today, nearly two thirds of southern Millennials (65 percent) support same-sex marriage, compared to just 28 percent of southerners in the Silent Generation.

Second, and perhaps not surprisingly given the value southerners place on hospitality, there is a growing “friends and family effect” at work in southerners’ changing attitudes. Despite the generally conservative cultural climate, more gay and lesbian southerners are coming out to those who are close to them. Nearly two thirds of southerners (64 percent) today say they have a close friend or family member who is gay or lesbian, a factor that strongly influences support for same-sex marriage. Within that group, 56 percent favor allowing gay and lesbian couples to marry legally; among southerners with no gay or lesbian close friends or family members, only 32 percent favor same-sex marriage. These more intimate social connections have moved the debate from the abstract to the personal, to one about the rightness of denying legal recognition for the relationships and commitments of close LGBT friends and family members. For many, if this has not come to seem unjust, it has at least come to feel impolite, a judgment that retains considerable power in the South.