June 5, 2019
[quote]I was the kid that, I did, I had lots of friends that were girls. I, since I loved musical theater, I would listen to cast recordings at home. And I, my parents had figured out that I loved dressing up as a woman in in like, female clothing, and performing these musicals that I would listen to. And they built me a costume closet. And so I would like build sets in my room, and then just perform these musicals. And the my favorite part about it was not really there performing part, it was like the backstage part. So like getting ready, putting on makeup, putting on clothing.
[quote]But then when I would go to school, like I didn't know that I had to conform to this different type of, of being a male and being masculine. And to fit in like for survival. I didn't know that. So I was the same person that showed up to school as I was at home. And pretty quickly, I learned that it was not safe for me to be that person. But I didn't know how to be anyone else. So I experienced years of bullying and physical violence, simply for being who I was. And at that point, all the way from preschool to high school, I had not come out, I didn't know that I was gay. I just knew that I was exploring, like gender and gender norms. And like, I don't even think I knew that, I was just being me.
[quote]And so when I did come out, which was at around the the end of high school. Now, the end of high school, for me, was my junior year, because my parents took me out of school, because my mental health was like, at the bottom of the bottom. luckily, I was never suicidal. It's like, I couldn't get out of bed. We had a home instructor come to the house to try to teach me. Before that I was in a program for troubled youth. And it was a program where I was in, like, basically a cubicle, a personal cubicle all day. I had no interaction with the other kids in the room. Just the teacher would come and stand over the cubicle, and we'd go over what I was working on. And, to me, I wasn't troubled. I was, I was troubled because of other people's reactions to me. And at that age, I didn't, I wasn't strong enough to say, "Fuck you. This is me!" And and if you don't like it, who cares!
[quote]But I carried around a lot of trauma from my earlier years. And because of that, the first part of the gay community that I found was the bar scene. So at like, 17, I would go into New York City with some friends of mine, and we would go to Splash, a bar in New York City, we'd go to G Lounge, Gym Bar, you know, all the gay bars that I, a lot of them are not there anymore. And we would party and be promiscuous. And then I found drugs, then I found alcohol. And then I found a, lots of, you know, sex that wasn't always healthy for me. And I got wrapped up in that world from about 17 to about 30. And there was, you know, meth addiction, coke, alcoholism, and unhealthy sex practices, just, you know, not always using protection and, and just multiple partners that I didn't know. And there's nothing wrong with that. I'm not stigmatizing that at all. It's just at around 30, I decided this is not the person I want to be. I want to find a part of our community that is more than this. So when I moved to Houston, about six years in, is when I decided to get sober. And I said, I was still doing musical theater and I reached a point where I couldn't remember lyrics anymore. Because I had done so many musicals that they were all just kind of running together. And I remember doing a, the opening number of "Galveston! the Musical." And we were workshopping, and in previews for this show, so things were changing every day. So my lyrics kept changing. And I remember being on stage doing the opening number and completely singing the wrong lyrics. And then, you know, the backup dancers had a lyric queue. So they came out and it was like the wrong time. And I just said, you know what, I can't do this anymore.