I’ve had great success at finding a really amazing queer family, but within that I’ve learned to come to terms with the relative narrowness of my own experience and to respect other people more. I only know how to do me, but you know what? I love it. Tight jeans, big hair, and a mild obsession with Tonya Harding. The challenge I think is approaching this diverse community of queens and queers with enough compassion and respect to leave room for everyone to feel totally accepted.

Gay life in Portland is lively but small. I think after spending the last ten years here and being recently single, you realize how incestuous it can feel. For dating, that is. The community is fantastic. There are so many radical and wild people doing amazing performance art and throwing these really avant-garde parties and it’s mixed. Boys and girls. The lesbians and the gays in Portland get along really well and collaborate a lot. I think that’s rare to find in a lot of other cities and it lends itself to creating some really amazing artistic experiences.

When I was a little boy I was very effeminate. Before I even knew I was gay, people would call me a faggot and laugh at me and push me down. That stuck with me for a while and it made me feel ashamed to come out and really embrace myself. When I was a junior in high school though, I spent a year as an exchange student in Brazil. Being taken out of my own element like that really helped me grow. I came back thinking “You know what? Fuck this, I’m gay and I don’t care what you people think”. So I started coming out to people when I was 17. I told most of my family when I was 18, and they were all really cool about it. Actually I’ve never had a bad reaction to coming out to anyone, even as I continue to do so with new people I meet. Maybe part of that is living on the west coast, but people are always fine with it.