Oral History Program Ember Burton Interviewed by Kyle Jackson and Ian Orme 31May-19 July 2022 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Ember Burton Interviewed by Kyle Jackson and Ian Orme 31 May-19 July 2022 Copyright © 2023 by Weber State University, Stewart Library Mission Statement The Oral History Program of the Stewart Library was created to preserve the institutional history of Weber State University and the Davis, Ogden and Weber County communities. By conducting carefully researched, recorded, and transcribed interviews, the Oral History Program creates archival oral histories intended for the widest possible use. Interviews are conducted with the goal of eliciting from each participant a full and accurate account of events. The interviews are transcribed, edited for accuracy and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewees (as available), who are encouraged to augment or correct their spoken words. The reviewed and corrected transcripts are indexed, printed, and bound with photographs and illustrative materials as available. The working files, original recording, and archival copies are housed in the University Archives. Project Description Queering the Archives oral history project is a series of oral histories from the LGBTQ+ communities of Weber, Davis and Morgan Counties of Northern Utah. Each interview is a life interview, documenting the interviewee’s unique experiences growing up queer. ____________________________________ Oral history is a method of collecting historical information through recorded interviews between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historical record. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account. It reflects personal opinion offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable. ____________________________________ Rights Management This work is the property of the Weber State University, Stewart Library Oral History Program. It may be used freely by individuals for research, teaching and personal use as long as this statement of availability is included in the text. It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: Burton, Ember, an oral history by Kyle Jackson and Ian Orme, 31 May-19 July 2022, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, Special Collections & University Archives (SCUA), Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. iii Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Ember Burton conducted over three sessions from May 31-July 19, 2022 by Kyle Jackson and Ian Orme. Ember discusses her struggles with mental health, her wife’s transition, and her work in an inclusive Scouts troop. Also present for the final interview on July 19 is Faith Christiansen. KJ: Today is Tuesday, May 31, 2022. We are currently in the Stewart Library. It is approximately 12:15 PM, and we are here interviewing Ember Burton for the LGBTQ Queering the Archives Project. I am Kyle Jackson interviewing, and Ian Orme is on the camera and will also be helping ask questions. Before we begin, I just want to introduce myself in terms of how I identify. I am a man, I use he/him pronouns, and I just identify as queer in terms of my sexuality. IO: I am a cis man, he/him, and I'm gay. KJ: If you're comfortable sharing, what are your pronouns and your identity? EB: I am a cis woman. As far as pronouns go, I just kind of use all the above. No, I don't have a preference. I don't care. I've had kids I work with say, “Yes, sir,” and “Yes, ma'am,” and I'm kind of like, “All right, awesome.” I guess I just give off that demeanor. I just kind of started like, “All right, cool, all pronouns, then.” I am also pansexual. KJ: All right. Let’s start off with when and where were you born? EB: I was born February 10th, 1990, in San Lorenzo, California. KJ: Is that where you grew up? EB: No. It was just me, my mother and my father until my father finished his doctorate chiropractic degree. After that, we moved to Utah. I was told it was to be closer to my grandparents; they were getting older. KJ: Where in your timeline was that? How old were you when you moved? 1 EB: Oh, I don't know, probably two? I was little, not old enough to remember. So for as long as I can remember, I've lived in Utah. KJ: You mentioned your family dynamic briefly, but after you moved, did you have any siblings or has it always just been you? EB: Oh, yeah, I have three younger siblings, three boys. The oldest boy, he came fast. He's 15 months younger than me. Before we moved here, my mother was already having him, so we grew up really close. After him, I have two younger brothers who are also 15 months apart. I do have an older brother. He's a half-brother, but a brother's a brother. Siblings are siblings. He is my father's son from a previous marriage. I want to say he's 12 years older than me, but I could be wrong. When I was 15 is when we really started to kind of communicate more. He's not always been there. He lived with his mother. So in total, I have four siblings. I'm probably the only one who's gay of the three. Wait, I'm not the only one. Myself and the oldest boy, we're both gay. The other two are cis, straight. KJ: That's interesting. Growing up in Utah, what area of Utah was it? EB: It was always the Davis County area. Before my grandparents passed away, we visited Bountiful, Salt Lake, Ogden quite often. KJ: Growing up in this area, what was that like for you? Do you have any favorite memories of childhood? EB: The main thing I looked forward to, growing up, was the changes in weather. I had this sense, I was like, “Oh, it's going to rain”, and it would rain, or “Oh, I think it's going to be really warm today,” and it would be really hot. KJ: Let's talk a little bit about your schooling experience. Elementary school, junior high. Did you have any favorite friends or favorite classes that really stuck out to you? EB: For elementary school, junior high and high school, I stayed mostly in the Kaysville area. After my parents separated, my mother and my brothers, we kind of moved 2 around and spread a little bit. But as far as elementary school and junior high, I've stayed in Davis County. I went to Columbia Elementary, and honestly, my memories of Columbia Elementary involve me being a little shit. I was not the greatest student, but not the greatest in the way that made the teachers laugh. When I was in fifth grade, we were allowed to bring our own music. Around that time, it was Britney Spears. I had just watched Charlie's Angels, and one of the tracks from Charlie's Angels was “I Like Big Butts.” I brought that to my fifth-grade class, played the song. Imagine little 10-year-old Ember dancing to [sings] “I like big butts and I cannot lie.” Now my fifth-grade teacher has a story he tells everyone, he goes, “I had this student come in. They brought a CD. They were so excited to play it, and the first thing I heard was ‘I like big butts.’” At the time, I was like, “Oh, my gosh, this is the best song ever. I love this song. The beat is amazing.” Now, as an adult, I can understand why they all think it was hilarious. I'm actually the reason why he doesn't let students bring CDs anymore. The Charlie's Angels soundtrack was very suggestive, but I loved it! It was dance music, and I love to dance. KJ: That's fair. Was there ever a point in elementary school or junior high where you started to notice that you might be different? EB: I have known since day one. My mother absolutely loved to dress me up and curl my hair. I should have brought a picture, I forgot. I had Shirley Temple curls my entire life up until about fourth or fifth grade, when I stopped letting her do it. She’d sit there and pull my hair and curl it and I'm like, “Mom, stop!” I was sleeping in those sponge curlers pretty much every single day for my entire life. I have stickstraight hair, but my mother so badly wanted the curly hair, the makeup, the nails, and I absolutely hated it. I let that kind of stuff happen, growing up, for picture day and all that. I loved the idea of doing it because it was time spent with Mom. One of the fondest memories I have with her is when we'd sit there and she'd curl my hair. 3 I'd be watching “Anne of Green Gables” on the television while she sat there and curled my hair. It was always after she'd shower and I'd shower, and she smelled like Chanel No. 5, her favorite perfume, and vanilla. She'd just sit and, “stop moving.” The next day I’d wake up, she would floof it, and I'd have a big ‘fro going to school. I'd always come home covered in dirt. I never really fit in with the other girls at school. I've always known that I identify as female, I just didn't really like the female dynamic. I just didn't fit that. I love pink. Growing up, pink was always my favorite color. Hot pink, whatever shade of pink, as long as it wasn't close to orange. That was my limit there. Like I said, I’d do my nails, do my makeup; I’d do my brother's makeup, do my brother's nails. I'd torture him with it. He loved it. I just never really felt like the other girls growing up. Where other girls started getting more into gabbing and hanging out and going out to the mall and going shopping, I wanted to go and play sports. I wanted to play softball and football and soccer. My mother put me in ballet. I did love ballet. I'm not gonna lie, it was one of my favorite things to do. It's expressing myself through dance. That was my favorite part of it. Looking at videos, I have a lot of anger in that expression. But I preferred to ride my bike, go out and skateboard, go scrape my knees. My mother was always like, “No, don't do that, you'll cause scars.” I'm like “Bitch, what? Bring the scars! I'm going to coat myself!” It was so funny. I’d come home with a new scrape on my knee and I’m all proud of it, like, “Mom, look at this!” She'd go, “Honey, what did you do?” and she'd clean it up and try to make it look as pretty as possible. But I’d just go get it dirty again anyway. I’d torment the ducks, I’d torment the dog. This was like early elementary– kindergarten, first grade. My brother and I, every time we came home, my mother had to keep an eye on her 4 garden. Every time we came home, I'd sit and pull out the carrots and sit there and eat them straight out of the garden. She goes, “You guys would come home, and I would be looking for you, and I would never have to look far. Just look out in the garden. You'd be sitting there just chewing on a carrot.” She didn't have to worry about the ducks ruining the garden, it was her oldest child. So I've always known. KJ: In terms of feeling like you didn't fit in with the other girls when they started showing more interest in gossip, was that junior high time? EB: That actually was probably about fourth grade, at least for me personally. When I was growing up, the area I grew up in was very male/female. You're born a male, you're a male; you're born a female, you're female. Blue/pink, sparkly/not sparkly, sports/no sports. It was very strict. As far as that stuff goes, my friends were always accepting of it like, “Okay, let's go play dodgeball.” We’d go out, play tetherball, and hit each other in the face with it just for fun. About third, fourth grade, I started being called a tomboy. That was the first time I was introduced to the label ‘tomboy.’ I was just kind of like, “What does that mean?” I went home and asked my parents about it. “What's a tomboy?” They’d go, “Oh, well, that's kind of… Who called you that?” “My friends.” “Oh, well, it's probably because you have three younger brothers.” I'm like, “Yeah sure, totally.” That's leading into like my entire life growing up. I felt like, “Maybe I'm just that way, maybe I’m more masculine leaning because I have three younger brothers. Male stuff is what I've known my entire life.” Bullshit. Looking back, I proved myself wrong on that one because I would coat my own brother in makeup. After the label ‘tomboy’ was introduced, I started exploring, liking other girls. I've always kind of known. I'd say it was about eight years old, so second grade. I 5 had started noticing, like, “Oh, Britney Spears is really cute. Britney Spears is making me feel a little funny.” My mother stopped letting me watch Britney Spears because of her “I'm a slave for you” concert. It was live, and she was practically naked. She was wearing see-through everything with the snake. I was sitting there like “Woah.” I'd say, “But Mom!” I was upset about not being able to see Britney Spears practically naked on live TV, more than I should have been. More than more than the rest of my friends. I had a friend. She went to a Backstreet Boys concert, and she brought back a VCR of the concert because I couldn't go with her. She was like, “Oh, I got this for you.” I'm like, “Oh, awesome.” Watching them dance, I was just kind of like “meh.” But watching Britney Spears and watching the Cheetah Girls and watching the Disney Channel girl bands on television, I was very much into that. Like, “I wanna watch that.” While the rest of my friends were like “Oooh, Backstreet Boys,” I was like “Can I have Britney Spears?” They all brushed it off. They were just kind of like, “Oh, you just like her. You want to look like her, you want to be like her.” That's kind of where I attributed my attraction to women: “Oh, I must like them because I want to be like that,” which created a very unhealthy body image. No, I was more into them versus the boy bands because I wanted to be with them. So I've always known. My first experience was with my best friend. At the time, I was nine years old, so after that I was like, “Whoa, wait a second.” I tell people I lost my virginity to my current wife when I was eighteen. I lost that virginity when I was nine. That was around the time that I kind of was like, “I like boys too, though.” I really, really, really liked the neighborhood boy, obsessively. This is a really embarrassing story, and oh my God, I can't believe I'm saying this on camera. I stole one of my mother's 6 diamond rings and went around the school and said that he gave it to me. I was like, “We're totally together and engaged.” I was such an idiot in sixth grade, a freakin’ idiot. At like, nine, ten, eleven, I had two girl best friends who would always fight over me. They were like, “No, she's my best friend. You can't have her.” “She's my best friend. You can't have her.” I'm like, “Why can't I have both?” Little did I know that would lead to me being polyamorous, because I've always had more than one. I've always been open to them being like, “Well, I want her.” “No, I want her.” I'm like, “But both! More love and more cuddles. Come, come, come. I'll give you both love.” God, I was kind of a dumbass with those two. I wanted to hang out with both. One of them I had an experience with; one of them I didn't. We always hung out. We were always really close. The dumb thing was like, I let my mother and society tell me what I should and shouldn't do, how I should or shouldn't be get in the way. The friendships ended because none of us understood what was going on. None of us understood how we felt about each other. The moment one of our parents heard about the one and about me, we never had sleepovers anymore. Imagine going from constantly being with your best friends, always doing everything together, hanging out at school, hanging out at home and just loving each other. Going from that to, “We can't be friends anymore,” all of us. It started with one telling me, “I can't be friends with you anymore. I'm not allowed to. My mom said I can’t be friends with you.” My response? “That's stupid.” It didn't hurt me in the way you think it should. The other friend, I had to tell her, “My mom said no,” but we'd secretly hang out anyway. I would find ways around it. I was that kid. I was like, “All right, my mom's 7 not home. I'll meet you there,” at ten years old. I was conniving, trying to meet somebody. No wonder my parents were like, “You were a little shit.” I get mad at my own child for doing the same damn thing that I did. I'm like, “Wait, no. I did that.” My oldest child is a player, and I'm like, “You know? I did that, too.” I snuck out of the house. My parents didn't know where I was, but I knew where my oldest of all the time. Mama’s smart. It wasn't till about junior year that I started really exploring. I always kind of let others label me, like, “You're bisexual.” “Yeah, whatever you want to call it.” Junior year of high school, I started exploring labels. There was this girl I was dating, and four other guys I was seeing. Five at a time. They all knew about each other. Sitting at lunch in the lunchroom together, I'd be sitting on one of their laps, or they'd be sitting on my lap, and the other one was sitting across from me, talking like normal. Then I’d go and sit on the other one's lap, and we’d talk like normal. To my friends, I was the girl equivalent of a player, except I wouldn't play with them. I was like, “I love everyone. Come sit on my lap. Come, babies.” Depending on the day, either it was just kind of like, “I wanna sit on your lap. Give me attention,” or [beckons] “Come, come.” Other days, I was just like, “I'm here.” I was the mom of the group. Well, [laughs] the mommy. I've always kind of been flexible with labels. I've never really taken on labels. There was a time where I started—I really shouldn't have—playing one label over another, and it just caused a spiral. I've never, in my entire life, taken on anything. I've always been flexible and always just liked who I liked and didn't give a shit about opinions. It wasn't until junior year when I started taking on the bisexual label, because I felt like I needed to fit into that bisexual label. That's when it really 8 started. The monogamy of it started to kick in, and I had to pick one. After that, my relationship started being really, really rocky. I started dating this guy in ninth grade. He and I were together for the summer of junior year, and he was the guy I should have been with. That's how he was. We were close friends. We liked to play Yu-Gi-Oh together. We had this YuGi-Oh club in junior high school. We'd go and hang out together, and I played with him. We were close, we were friends, and honestly, we should have stayed friends instead of dating. We worked out as better friends. That whole group, we worked out as better friends. Two of them understood why I was just kind of like, “But I love everyone!” and the rest of them were like, “Why though? Stay with one, aren't you ever going to get married and have kids?” “Well yeah, but not right now. Eventually I want to have kids and find the one, but not right now.” I've always been flexible. I've always known. Outside societal standards, that's when it started to cloud over like a shadow. I grew up LDS where ‘A man should be with a woman,’ and ‘Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife.’ I’m like, but “I'm not though.” “No cheating. Dating more than one is cheating.” That, I would say, is where those opinions came from. I don't have those opinions now. From junior high, seventeen, until about twenty-seven—I’m thirty-two now. For about ten years, I forced myself to fit into the ‘one person only, one side only’ label. KJ: You're answering a lot of my questions before I can ask them, which is very impressive. It makes my job easier. Ian, do you have any questions? IO: You said with your boyfriend in high school that ‘you should have been with him.’ Was that your own expectation of yourself? Was that put upon you by societal expectations? 9 EB: I felt pressured to fit in a certain way, to be a certain way, growing up LDS. At the time, I wanted to be Molly Mormon. I feel sick saying that now. No offense, I'm sorry if you are. I went through some therapy for that as part of a support group for eight weeks, “Thriving After Mormonism. I'm glad I did. I didn't know I needed that until I did. I started dating him because we liked each other and I was like, “Oh, he's cute,” and he is. I have never looked at somebody's physical appearance and facial features and been like, “Ew.” I've always looked at somebody and was like, “I like you! Nothing about you is wrong.” They’re like, “But this, this, and this.” “Where?” “But I don't like this about myself. I'm a nerd.” “Where?” He and I started dating because I was hot, I guess. I've always been kind of hot, but it wasn't ‘til about senior year that my wife says that I really came into my looks. She was just like, “I was floored.” I've always thought I was pretty attractive, and I've always had little gifts, in certain areas growing up, and ballet helps with that. I had a lot of guys and girls just being like, “Oh, hi, you have stuff, you've grown.” Then they want to start dating. It's like, “All right, cool, whatever, let's give it a shot.” That's what happened between him and I. “Do you want to date?” “Sure.” End of discussion. He was one of those poor guys. Imagine the nerdy kid going up to the hot girl in school, being like “Do you wanna date?” The hot girl is like, “Sure.” I don't see it, but apparently, I made his day. I stayed in that relationship because societal standards said I should, said I needed 10 to start picking one, which was not fair because I was 14, are you kidding me? But living in Kaysville and being LDS, you're married and having kids by the time you're 18, so I had four years. They were like, “Come on, you got four years, let's go.” Meanwhile, I’m like, “But I'm little.” Knowing then what I know now, I don't regret dating him, but I would have ended the relationship sooner and just stayed friends. Things didn't end on a good note. He was possessive, and I didn't see it. Others saw it, and were like, “You really are going to stay with him? You guys are still dating?” But I would also explore other options while I was with him. We’d break up for a week and I’d date someone else the day after. That's how a lot of my relationships went. I had 19 boyfriends, starting about seventh grade. In total, 19 boyfriends, four girlfriends. I liked a new guy every week, but my relationships were always superficial. With him, it was different. With everyone else, it was always like, we’d break up and the next day someone else would be like, “Hey, wanna start dating?” “Sure, yeah, why not.” I’d go home and cry about it for an hour and be like, “Eh, I'm good.” I’d scream about it, yell about it, throw things, be angry, and my brother would be right there with me. He’d be like, “Yeah, screw him! How dare he?” He'd be right there boosting my confidence, and be like, “You’re a bad bitch.” My brother, oh, my God. I knew for a long time. He came out of the closet when he was 14. I was 15. He came out to me, but I knew. He's very femme, and I love it. I've always loved it. He's always been the type that's like, “Honey, you don't deserve that.” He'd bring me ice cream, he'd bring the food. He'd be the one being like, “Let's go get Chinese food.” Chinese food is my comfort. To this day, if I have something really bad happen to me, it's Chinese food and I call up my brother, be like, “Help me feel better.” 11 He'd be like “Bitch, why? You know you don't need me.” “I know, but I want to need you.” But I wanted to fit into this expectation because I wanted to be the good Mormon girl. I wanted to be what everyone else thought I should be. It wasn't right for me. Mentally, that affected me a lot. I ended up struggling with eating disorders and trying to fit into a label that was stupid to try to fit into, but still valid. I was a kid, and I was being treated like an adult. I was about 12 years old when I had to start raising my brothers. Parents separated. I was about 10. Made it official, and I was like 12. I didn't want to have anything to do with my dad. I was pissed at him and, I mean, understandable. I was righteously angry. That's kind of how my anger works now. It's always righteous anger, like, “I am mad at you. You will know that I am mad at you because this is wrong. Fuck you for thinking that way.” I'm a little bit better at telling people that, educating about it. Still saying, “Fuck you for having that opinion, but let me let me tell you why.” I've always been an advocate for my brother. We call each other twins. He's the oldest boy. He's the one who struggled in junior high, high school. Labels like ‘faggot’— [looks into the camera] and I don't like that word. It’s not okay to use. Ever—and ‘sissy boy.’ He got picked on by my dad and by my mother. Nobody dared touch him in school, though. No one dared, and if they did, I found out about it. They were fucked. I have a lot of friends, and if a hot chick tells you, “Go fuck that kid up,” you're going to do it. So I’d use that to my advantage. I knew that I could manipulate, and I used it in a good way. I use my powers for good. My two youngest brothers, I kind of became their stand-in mom. Our mother was neglectful. This is kind of where things get hard. There was a lot of neglect. She was an undiagnosed narcissist and had borderline personality disorder— 12 undiagnosed. She used a lot. She's alcoholic, and a lot of times, she would mix alcohol with Xanax and Zoloft. I avoid those. I am on medication now, promise, and I'm very good about taking my meds. As a psych major, kind of have to be. Some days I am bad about taking my meds, though. I'll slip up and I'll take it at like three in the morning. I'll be like, “Did I take my depression today? Fuck, I didn't,” at like three in the morning. “Okay. Taking it now. We're good.” The next day, like, “Why am I having an insomniac episode?” A lot of that also came from having to be the mom. There were nights where I was up all night, I wouldn't even go to bed. At six in the morning, I'd be going to school. It was a constant cycle because I had to cook and clean. I wasn't expected to, I didn't have to, but I did it because no one else would. My brother, was struggling with his own things. He had his own struggles, and he was dealing with his own issues. For him, I was there as his twin who knew literally everything and everyone. He would support me, and I would support him when we needed it. There was kind of an unspoken understanding about our mother because he and I knew what happened with her. It hurt a lot more. What she turned into—my two youngest brothers, that's all they knew. Unfortunately, M and I knew a different mom, and the betrayal that we both felt and lived with until the day we moved out hurt a lot more than losing her. It hurt more than having to step up and help out some more. There's no excuse for it. She had a troubled childhood, and my dad wasn't the greatest either. They were both narcissistic, neglectful, abusive assholes and alcoholics. But the difference is, at least my dad tried to change. At least my dad made an effort before he died. With my dad, I was 15. Compared to what I went through with my mother, having him buy a beer from the local Valley Market up in Eden and smoking a cigarette in the car with the window cracked, that was nothing. 13 Some look at that and they're like, “Oh my gosh, it's horrible.” Drunk Mom’s passed out on the bed at home, and that was an escape for me. I started gaining a relationship with him, and he gave me a reason to stick around. I started hurting myself as a way to escape mentally. Visiting him gave me a reason to stay. Eventually, when I met my wife, she became my reason to stay. We've known each other since ninth grade and she knows my story, she knows the trauma. She’s witnessed a lot of it. It wasn't ‘til senior year that she started witnessing a lot of it. What she saw within a year compared to what I had for a lifetime. She helped me get out. She and I have been together for years. I met her male. Our children are ours. I met A in ninth grade, junior high. We went to the same junior high school since seventh grade. I went to North Davis and so did she. I did live in Clearfield for a little bit before moving back to Kaysville, but we didn't even know. We both moved back to Kaysville and went to Kaysville Junior High at the same time too. We kind of knew about each other, and she knew about me. She knew that I existed. She's so cute, she's like, “Who is that?' I want to get to know her. Who is that?” About ninth grade, my best friend at the time, we were very, very close. A was trying to date her. They were together all the time, they were attached at the hip, basically. I was just kind of like, “Oh, okay, whatever.” I didn't touch my best friend’s people at all, unless I got the sense that they didn't really care much. I would be like, “All right. Nope. You want to date that person? I'm not touching it,” because I heard some bad stories, and I didn't want to go down that route. My friends were very valuable to me. Even given the life I grew up with, my friends meant a lot to me, and I didn't want to lose any of them. My best friend at the time, we’ll call her Kathy, we had seminary together. Vaguely, it was a long time ago, I remember walking out of the school, and all of a 14 sudden, I noticed a very tall, very cute person standing next to my best friend. I was like, “Who’s that? Hello.” I didn’t express that physically. I was very casual about it. Kathy introduced us. We gave each other hugs like, “Oh my gosh,” literally going from one period to the next period. We had 10 minutes before, and we’d walk together to the next class period, arm-in-arm. We sat behind each other and talked all the time. She and I were really close and I kinda sorta had a crush on her at the time. I knew she was off-limits because she was not into that at all, did not want to date a girl. I was like, “Okay, I can respect that.” I did try it once, and she's like, “No. Not into that at all.” I was like, “All right, we'll just stay friends.” Then I would just be like “You cute,” lift you up because I do that. I got away with it because if you have a girl best friend and she knows you're gay, but she's not, and you tell her that she's cute, she's going to believe you. I kind of feel like she kept me around for that. Anyways, we're on our way to seminary, and Kathy’s standing next to A. I go to give her a hug and say hi. She's like, “Hey, this is so-and-so.” I was like, “Okay, hi.” At the time, it threw me off because A was totally not like everyone else where they're immediately blown away by me. She just sat there like, “Sup.” I haven't told her this, so she'll see it later, but I'll admit, it made me mad. I was like, “Excuse me, excuse me?!” I was brushed off, like, “Whatever, hi. Nice to meet you.” She and I went with my friend, and at seminary, we all went our separate ways. I went to seminary and A was stuck in my head because she was the only one who didn't immediately want to cling to me. I didn't hear or see anything ever after that, and it made me mad, so I upped my game. We’d kind of run into each other in the hallway every once in a while, and I would go, “Hey.” I'd watch her and wait for her to see me. I’d go [waves] and I walk away. I was an ass! Oh my God. I would stand in the hall, pretending I'm doing 15 something else or hanging out in my locker, knowing a person was coming towards me. They’d go, “Hey Emily.” I'd go 'Hmm? Oh, hi.” Or I wouldn't say anything. “Hey Emily.” Pretend I didn't hear them. “Emily!” “Oh hi! How are you? Oh my God, I haven't seen you in forever!” and give them a big hug and everything. KJ: Playing hard to get. EB: I was way good at that game and I knew it. I’d let them sit next to me in class. I’d be like, “I forgot my pencil,” or, “Do you have a piece of paper I could borrow?'” “Yeah, take mine!” Just like, [grabs]. I wouldn't go, “Thank you so much. You're so sweet.” I'd give them nothing, and that was only if I wanted to date the person. I knew how to play the game. With A, I started wearing my tighter clothing to school because I knew from Kathy what she wore. Her clothes were a little low-cut and a little tighter fitting. “I wonder if that's why. Hmm.” I knew that A was going after Kathy at the time anyway, and Kathy knew it. So I looked at Kathy's clothing and decided, I do have some that I usually save for the days when I'm really feeling myself, so I wore those more often. That's when A noticed me. I did this on purpose. I wore one of my favorite half-top shirts with a tank top underneath. At the time, that was the style. I knew that the half-shirt was very tight on my boobs. You could actually see how big they were then. The tank top I wore was very figure-fitting, and the jeans at the time were lowrise. I had a thong peeking up, but I was modest. I made sure to pull the tank top down whenever the thong peeked out. 16 A noticed me that day. She tells me now, “The day you wore your pink and white outfit…” White makes things look bigger, and I knew that. The pink tank top was what was underneath, and the jeans were her favorite jeans. I had a pair of jeans that I wore all the time, and those were her favorites. I knew those jeans hugged my butt in just the right way. They flared out just the right way. I knew what I was doing. She goes, “The day you wore that, you looked so hot.” I go, “Really?” I'm still just like, “Oh, thank you.” You know my secret now, babe. I did it on purpose. I wore my hair in a high pony. You could just barely see the back of my neck. I had just enough mascara, not too much. That's the day she noticed me. I walked right into the school. I knew. I watched her. I kept track of it. I knew where she was going to eat. I knew where she had stayed, where she hung out at the beginning of school. I made sure I was on time to school. I made sure she saw me when I walked in those doors and walked past. I walked in the door, wind blowing. I had heels that made me feel so good about myself. I walked like I felt good about myself, model-walk. I just ignored her. Walked pass, didn't look at her. Didn't give her a second thought. Ignored her. I went to my first class and she was like, “I saw you. Oh my God, gorgeous.” From then on, she was trying to date me. She kind of escaped my mind for a little while there because I was also going through a hard time with the guy I was dating at the time. This was a guy I had dated for like four years. She still says, “I was waiting for you to break up with him. Every single time you guys broke up, I was like, “Here's my chance,” but you had someone new.” I had started dating one of the skater dudes because I didn't really care. This was the first time he and I broke up, and I wanted to get over him. I was like, “I'm done. That was annoying. That was exhausting. That hurt. I'm gonna get you back.” So I started dating the opposite of him on purpose. I was like, “Yeah, no, 17 I'm not jealous.” I was very conniving and mean. He was an asshole, the skater dude. Unfortunately, I didn't know that my friend Kathy also wanted to date him. I was like, “Friend rules don't apply there. You didn't tell me.” It created a rift there a little bit, but we still talked. Ninth grade Lagoon day came around. I don't remember what I wore, but I remember it was cute, and I knew it was going to be hot outside. That was a constant thing. My brothers and I, before our mother, went to Lagoon all the time. I knew how hot it was going to be. It's scorching, so I wore a tank top, whatever was the coolest thing. During the day, it was cold, so I had borrowed a jacket from the guy I was dating at the time, I think. I don’t actually know where it came from. It was a black jacket, hoodie-type thing. I took it like, “Oh hey, cool. I'm gonna wear this now.” Kathy, the guy she was going after—the guy I was dating—and myself, we get off the bus. A was there, kind of trailing after Kathy because she was still trying to date her. She tells me she noticed me at the time. “Notice me, Senpai.” She didn't really do much; she hung out at the arcade while my friends and I went on rides. I didn't want to carry my jacket around everywhere, and A goes, “I have a locker you could use.” I'm like, “Okay, cool. Thanks.” I gave her the jacket, didn't give her a second thought because I wanted to be respectful. I wanted her to notice me and be floored like everyone else is because I was so irritated she wasn't. But there was also the limit where Kathy also was interested, and I was like, “Oh, there's a line.” I did give A my jacket to put on the locker, and I knew that it would give us a chance to meet again. But unfortunately, I forgot. I was so fucking tired. I wanted to get home. I was like, “Oh, this is annoying.” The guy I was dating at the time was ignoring me, and Kathy was ignoring me, and I was bored. I was like, “I'm done.” 18 A was like, “Well, I’ll give you a turn at the arcade.” I absolutely would have at the time. Don't give me shit about that. You're not allowed to give me shit about that because if I wasn't trying to impress Kathy and my other friends, I totally would have dropped everything and be like, “Okay, let's go to the arcade. It's nice and cool in there. It's dark, it's fun, whatever.” I forgot about the jacket, and school gets out the next day, and it's yearbook signing. Someone else somewhere actually flipped the script on me. Someone else gave me back the jacket. She didn't. She had the guy who I was dating—who I actually broke up with—drop off the jacket, and I was like, “Bitch, you didn't!” I was so mad. I was like, “Thank you, I guess. Why didn't she give it back to me? What the fuck? Rude!” The guy, who was my ex then, was like, “Hey, so-and-so gave it to me. Told me to give it to you.” He thought the jacket was mine. She thought the jacket was mine. I didn't know who the hell it belonged to, and I guess A thought the jacket was his. I was like, “Okay, cool. It's mine now, I guess, but bitch, why don't you drop it off yourself?” It totally would have been a moment of “Thank you.” Yeah, I know it's fucking petty as hell, but I still think about that now. It was ninth grade, probably fifteen years ago. I’m thirty-two now, and I'm still totally like, “You should have dropped it off ‘cause I totally would have been like ‘thanks.’” Fast forward, we get into 10th grade and then we really started hanging out. I was like, “Fuck it, fuck all this.” I sat next to her at lunch. The long-term boyfriend, he and I got back together, but it was really casual. I treated it like it was really casual. He treated it like, “I'm going to marry her,” where I was just kind of like, “Ehhhh. I'm just going to keep up appearances because I don't want to be lonely. I don't like not having someone to date, not being in a relationship with someone.” It 19 sounds mean that I kept him around, but he was a sweetheart. I liked hanging out with all of our friends, so I kept him around. He was funny. He made me laugh. I sound so mean. I sound like one of those popular girls that everybody hates. I really do. I'm sitting here like, “Ew. Listen to myself, ew.” We went to classic skating and hung out and went snowboarding with friends and threw each other in the snow. They loved carrying me and throwing me in the snow. It's obvious why. I was fun to carry and throw, and I also bounced in certain places. One of the innocent friends in the group started it, the very innocent one. Childlike, “This is fun!” The rest of them kept it going. Things happened. I was the throwing one. KJ: I hate to interrupt, but the camera’s flashing. We are going to pause here and reschedule so the camera does not die. Thank you for your willingness to share today, and I look forward to speaking with you and continuing this interview. EB: You know what? Me too. Part 2- June 14, 2022 KJ: We are back in the Stewart Library with Ember Burton, continuing her interview for the Queering the Archives project. It is Tuesday, June 14 and it is about 12:15 in the afternoon. Same people are present. I'm starting with the introduction, but then I'm going to be handing the bulk of the interviewing over to Ian. [To Ember] When we left off, we had just finished up with high school and you meeting A. It was 10th grade, after you broke up with your long-term boyfriend, and were hanging out with A at lunch. You wanted us to remind you about the story about how your dog poops. With that, I'm going to hand it over to you, whenever you're ready. EB: Okay, let’s see. A and I were at lunch; it was her, her friend at the time, and myself. We were all sitting together at one of the lunch tables, and we were talking about our dogs, and she mentioned her dog. I was like, “Oh, I have dogs.” Oh my Lord. So I got up and I was like, “Oh my gosh, my dog's the cutest thing.” I was talking about 20 other things about my dogs, but A mentioned that the moment she knew that I was the one was because I got up and kicked my back legs. I was like, “My dog poops like this!” She tells me that that was the moment when she was like, “I want that one because she's weird.” She thought it was strange. The moment when I did it, she was just like, “What the hell is up with this girl?” At the time, I was just like, “Oh, look. It's a cute thing that the dog does.” After that, we just kind of talked more about our animals. I talked about how I also had a bird. From then on, we really connected and we hung out at lunch pretty much every day. So fast forward a few months later, I had to move, which was unfortunate because I had gained this relationship, I was gaining my footing in high school. I was like, “Oh, I got this. I've got high school good.” Not so much. Didn't last long. It started with me moving to a different school. I had to go to the school for ‘mentally unstable teenagers’ because I had multiple attempts of suicide and I was cutting myself and I wasn't mentally okay. Given my family situation, it's kind of understandable at the time. Eventually, my mother and doctors and therapists transferred me. It was supposed to be temporary, and then I could just go back to school when they deemed that I was ‘okay enough’. I'm not going to talk much about the school because it's one of those very… you do not talk about it, locations, nothing about it. Basically, it's just for kids who are mentally unstable, who are atrisk teenagers—high-school specifically. I was there for about three, four months, and I could not contact my friends at all. No connection, no communication, nothing. It was pretty much just outpatient. I went to that school, went home. I had no access to a phone, access to nothing. Pretty much the same rules as when you go to a mental institution, but it was 21 outpatient. It allowed for students to continue in school so that they don't miss out on too much. It was a long-term solution. During that time, a lot of my friends were really concerned. They thought I had actually, like, left, and they were trying to contact me. They were trying to figure out where I was. They were coming to my house to try to make sure I was alive still. As I mentioned previously, I'm a little shit. I did have one friend who would come to visit when my mother wasn't home. He would come say hi, and I'd let him know I’m okay. He came into my house, he was like, “Oh my God, thank God you're alive.” I was like, “Yeah, sorry. I disappeared.” I told him I was still in school, but I was just being homeschooled, because I couldn't tell them exactly where it was. I trusted that he would go and let everyone else know, like, “They're still alive. It's okay.” We'll call him James. James was supposed to let everybody know that I'm okay and let everybody know that I'll be coming to school soon, but I don't know when. The way James was, he was very spacey, so I don't blame him for not mentioning it to more than just one person. The person he mentioned it to was my ex. This guy and I were dating at the time, but I refer to him as my ex. He mentioned it to him, and then the guy I was dating didn't tell anybody else. I was like, “Why?” I asked around, like, “I told James and I told the guy I was dating. Did they not tell you guys?” No. They were the only ones who knew. IO: They just didn't spread the word. EB: No, they didn't spread the word. I don't know, maybe they wanted to protect me. Maybe they kind of knew it was a weird situation. They knew my family situation, so they were concerned that some things may have happened that I wasn't supposed to tell them. Maybe I wasn’t supposed to tell them that I'm still around. They come up with weird stuff all the time. Absolutely adore them; these two together were like, 22 oh my Lord. You imagine TV shows with the two nerdy guys getting into crap and coming up with these weird random stories about people they don't know, and it was them. A lot of the stories were hilarious. I absolutely loved them. Just this one, I really hope they didn't come up with a story like that. I'd never heard anything if they did. But anyway, they didn't let anybody know, so for three or four months, I was considered nobody. The ones who knew me really well and were close with me were concerned, like, “What the hell's going on? Where is she?” Eventually I did return back to school, and that was like the tail end of 10th grade. They were like, “Okay, you're good. Couple options. 10th grade is almost over. You can either go back for the last day or you can just go back for 11th grade.” I chose to not transfer my credits back to school to attend classes there, but they transferred credits over so I could have the credits. I just went there the last day when everybody was saying hi to each other. I missed quite a few people, like the little handful of close friends I had back then. We all were hanging out and we went to a bunch of different friends' houses that day, from one house to another. It was an adventure. IO: I know you didn't want to get too deep into the other school, but just generally, was that more of a positive experience or a negative experience? EB: As far as junior high and high school? IO: Just overall, going to the other school you said was for the ‘mentally unstable.’ EB: Oh, that one. IO: Yes, if you are comfortable talking about it. EB: It was okay. I went there in like 2005, when mental illness was still kind of… when it was still the time when teenagers were being teenagers, not really actually unstable. I actually shouldn't have been released when I was. If they didn't 23 physically see cuts every day, or if they didn't see anything physically wrong; if they saw that I was laughing and happy, they were like, “Oh, there's nothing wrong with her.” As far as schooling goes, it was very helpful. The social aspect of it, I didn't really care much for it. I don't even know anybody anymore from there. I'm sure there are people who recognize me or I recognize them, but we just pretend it didn't happen. I will say, though, that school helped me get over one of my bigger phobias. I used to be deathly afraid of sharks. Looking at an image of a shark, especially if they're [opens mouth], would cause heart palpitations and I would start sweating. It was a phobia reaction. So we had to write an essay and we were assigned certain things. They didn't tell anybody what this was about, and now that I'm in the psychology world, I'm like, “I know what the hell they did, fuckers.” Everybody had a specific topic, and I was assigned sharks. I had written an essay about sharks. It didn't matter what kind, just pick one and write something about it. I was like, “Oh, no. No, no, no, no, no, no, no.” That's what was going through my head. I was like “Please don't be sharks, please don't be sharks, please don't be sharks. Fuck!” We were allowed to use their computers there, and yes, I had to, otherwise, I'd fail the assignment. I absolutely had to get on there, do my research on it, so I just avoided pictures. I didn't look at them. I chose tiger sharks, and I did not look at the pictures. I was like, “No picture.” Picture showed up, I'd scroll fast. They made it easy on us, like, “Okay, you can use Wikipedia. We don't care.” They weren't specific, just research. It helped me learn more about sharks. As I was learning about my phobia, it helped me to learn more about them and gain an understanding. The fear was still kind of there, but now it's gotten to the point where—and it's like three or four years in the making, I can look at a picture of a shark or think about sharks, “Oh, puppy!” 24 I think great white sharks were like my biggest fear. Oh my gosh, Jaws was so scary. That was considered scary for me. Other scary movies, pssh, whatever. Michael Myers, whatever. Jason, pssh, whatever. Scream, I don't really care. It's totally fine. Ghost, or even Ring. “Oh my gosh, The Ring is so scary, it's psychological horror, man!” I'm like, “She's just a dumb bitch.” The girl, the main character who watches the video and lives seven days trying to figure out this girl's story. I'm like, “You're just a dumb bitch.” Jaws, I would absolutely avoid. The first time I watched it, I was screaming, I was jumping. I was like, “No, no no, no, no.” Fast forward like three-ish years ago, my best friend was living with us at the time and made me watch 47 Meters Down. There's a shark involved. I was jumping. That was scary because you didn't know where the shark was coming from, but you knew it was coming. There was no [mimicking Jaws theme] duh-na, duh-na. It was just… the shark’s there. I was like, “Ah!” and I'd grab my wife. “No, no, no. I'm not ready for this kind of movie. I'm not ready for this yet.” That school and my best friend together helped me get over my fear of sharks in the worst way possible, but it worked. The experience at that school… Yes, it helped me get over the phobia; no, I do not care for it. Yes, it helped me school-wise, but that's it. The administrators there, there was one who I felt was really caring. Whenever she found the sweatbands on my wrists, or if I wore long sleeves on a hot day, she would be like, “All right, let's see it.” I'd show her. She goes, “Okay, what was going through your head?” She did as much as she knew at the time. But there was another one there who was like… we were all sitting at a big table. We were talking about things, and I mentioned the cutting. She's like, “What do you think your kids will think of them?” Back then that was considered okay; now 25 it is not. Now my kids have seen them and I'm literally just like, “Yeah, that happened. It happens.” In a way, I'm just like, “Screw you, I proved you wrong.” It helped me connect with the kids, with my own kids and other kids who are struggling. It's like, “There's someone who's actually experiencing how I feel right now. Cool.” They cling to me. I'm like, “Okay, cool stuff. Don't touch me. You can cling, just don't touch.” Anyway, that was before junior year. Junior year, I didn't go to the same high school that I was in before. It was basically like I disappeared the summer of 10th grade and then didn't come back until senior year to that same high school with all my friends. We were still communicating with each other as best we could, but I lived all the way in Park City. We moved around a lot, and at the time I went to Park City High School for junior year. We moved over the summer. We had moved to four, maybe five different locations. We lived in a couple safe houses, and before that, we moved in with my uncle. After we moved in with my uncle was Logan, and then after my uncle was Park City. We drove from Kaysville all the way up to Logan, straight shot. We lived in our car for a little bit too. We had lost our place of living and lived in the car for a couple of months. Didn’t last very long, but our main living area was our car. We live in an apartment for maybe a week, back to the car. That was mostly from—not too far into that, but mostly from my mother's habits, that we didn't last very long in places. It didn't help that my brother, at the same time, about 10th grade… I had known for years that he's gay, and my parents were both really suspicious. He got picked on a lot by both my parents, but my mother was really good at gaslighting him into believing that she never did it. She didn't corner him against the wall, slap him a million times. I witnessed every single one. Any time she picked on him, I was 26 right there. He would just kind of walk away, he would come to my room and we would talk. He wouldn't talk about what happened, we would just talk. After he officially came out, it was hard for me to come out. IO: Timeline-wise, was this during your 10th grade or his 10th grade? EB: His 10th grade. IO: How old would you have been at that time? EB: I would have been about. 16-17; he would have been about 14-15. His birthday's in May, so he’s later in the school year. He got bullied a lot by both of our parents. When I was in seventh grade, he was in sixth grade. We lived in an apartment in Clearfield, and my mother kicked him out of the house on a snowy day in just his underwear. I don't remember what happened, I don't know what was going on, I just remember my dad coming to get everyone. Not me; I had gone to a friend's house. My dad, it was his weekend, I guess. He came to get my two youngest brothers and then my essential twin, and I came home and nobody was home except for my mother. She was just kind of happy. That day was weird for me because she was happy. Even thinking about thinking back on it now, I'm like, “What the hell? You literally just kicked your own son out of the house for no discernible reason.” They're not in the house. “Oh, where is everyone?” “Oh, your dad came to get them.” “Okay.” Then she took me out to the mall and went shopping, and she spent about $1,000. That was her habit for a long time. If something happened with one of my brothers, she would take me out shopping, spent thousands of dollars on me. Anyway, coming out myself, I kept it to maybe two people. IO: When was this? 27 EB: When I came out? IO: Yeah. EB: Officially, the first friend I told I was in 10th grade, about 15, but they were the only one who knew. That was it. I wasn't telling anyone else because just before that, with my mother being suspicious of my brother, was another cornering and hitting. I just kept my identity, sexuality, everything to myself and took on an identity that my mother enjoyed. What kid wouldn't, with a monster like that at home? IO: So, I think we were talking about junior year. EB: Junior year, that brother officially came out and was out proud about it and he was like, “Hell yeah.” I'm like, “Yes, please join me.” I don't know if it was because I had been a little bit more open about it or if it was because of the group of friends we were with, but he and I were both in Park City High. We were both in the Anime Club. The first day we went to Anime Club, my friends were like, “Come with us to Anime Club!” I was like, “Sure, I guess.'” I knew about it, but at most, I watched Inuyasha, which I mean, I absolutely love Inuyasha. Sesshōmaru, [fans self with hand] daddy. IO: I haven't seen that one. EB: Oh, my Lord, you need to. It absolutely catered to my 14, 15-year-old brain. Looking back at it now, I kind of understand why I liked Sesshōmaru so much. He's very femme, like, oh my Lord. We went to this anime club and the first day they were watching Death Note, the live action version. This was before the current Death Note, before the remake and everything. The teacher had a copy of it from Japan. We sat and we watched it and I was like, “What is this!?” My friend’s over there just drawing, and another one's just kind of leaning over, looking at me, like “Enjoying it?” 28 I absolutely adored those two. They helped me so much. They were both proud LGBTQ. One of them would always ask, “Why are you hiding it? What the hell?” I was like, “Yeah, I'm bisexual.” She goes, “And you didn't tell me?” I was like, “Well, no, because I don't want to.” She's like, “Is your brother gay?” I go, “Yes, but don't tell anybody I said anything.” They waited ‘til he came out to them, but they were like [squeals]. It was just the best day ever. For me, coming out to them was nice because other than the one friend I had in 10th grade, these two were like that. Coming out to them, it was a relief because it was so welcoming. They were just like, “Yay!” Somebody was actually happy about it. I kind of encouraged my brother to come out to them, and I used my gay friend. I was like, “You know, he's gay.” He goes, “Yeah, but I don't like him that way.” I'm like, “No, no, no, it's okay. I meant you could be friends, connect.” He was like, “But I don't want to date him.” I'm like, “You don't have to date him. Just tell him.” What better way to come out to somebody who is similar in sexuality or gender identity or whatever that you are. Eventually he did, and we were all sitting together at lunch. I show up with my lunch tray and they're all cheering and happy and they're all over him. I go, “Did you tell them?” He was like, “I did.” I was like, “Without me?!” I was mad but I was happy. I was like, “I'm glad he came out,” but I was fake mad, you know? Anyway, we were all the same, and it 29 was just a normal lunch day, all four of us together and other people knew. That school was almost like a fresh start for me because nobody knew me, nobody knew my past, nobody knew anything. IO: This was in Park City? EB: Park City High. Nobody was even close enough. Nobody could go to Kaysville and figure out who the hell I was, who the hell my dad was, and talk to the police department. Nobody could do that, so I was like, I'm going to practice here. I'm going to tell everybody; I'm going to live my truth here, so I did. I had dated four guys at once; I told you guys about that. That was when I was really like, “All right, let's play.” This was after coming out, being like, “I'm bisexual.” My brother is out as gay. I don't have to keep an eye on him in school. He gets a fresh start, too. We could both do our thing, but also still hang out together. He was in 10th grade, trying to get his footing in high school. I'm glad he had a more positive experience getting his footing in high school, as far as coming out of the closet, because after that, the first thing he told his friends, “I'm gay.” For me, it's kind of weird looking back at it now. For me, I'm still hesitant about it. It's like, “Are you going to be okay with it? Am I going to lose you as a friend? I don't want to lose this person.” I care less now. I'm like, “All right, if you're not supportive of the LGBTQ community, get the fuck out of my life.” That's pretty much how it is now. My brother is not at all hesitant. He's just like, “Yeah, I'm gay and fuck you if you don't agree with it,” and way more confident about it. I absolutely wish I could be like that. Junior year of high school, I watched him just flourish and bloom. He started giving back some of his confidence. Ever since then, I have wished that I had just the guts to be like, “Yeah, no, I'm this and you're going to like it and you're going to agree with it. Don't care if you have a problem with it.” 30 So, we hung out and that was the first time I had gone to a prom. I went to the homecoming dance. Senior year was when I went to prom. That was my first experience. I did go with a guy, but it was a guy that my friends at the time were like, “He’s one of the never-seen kind of people.” I feel like nobody noticed him at all. Nobody knew about him. Nobody ever said yes to him, like, ever. So my friends, knowing how I am, were like, “Hey, here's the deal. We know you haven't been to homecoming yet, and we have this kid who's been told no by, we swear, over a hundred girls.” I was like, “Oh my god.” They go, “We're going to introduce you. Will you go to homecoming with him? He's going to ask.” I was like, “Okay, cool.” He asked and I was like, “Yeah, sure, I want to go to homecoming.” I probably made his day, and for me, I was just kind of like, “Cool.” We went and we danced and partied. We had fun. Being myself was exhilarating for once. I wore a halter type dress. It was green mermaid style. I didn't really care. I was like, “It's a dress. I'd rather wear a suit and tie, or a t-shirt and a skirt, but I'll wear a dress.” I wore tennis shoes with the dress and I kind of curled my hair, put it up in a little half bun, and we showed up. My friends are like, “Oh, you look cute,” just trying to be nice. Then I pulled up the skirt, show my shoes, and they go, “That's better. That's the girl we know.” I go, “Do you think I want to wear heels? Really, to dance? No, thank you.” We did group pictures with his friends and then group pictures with my friends. I do have some pictures from there, and he tried to pick me up in one of the pictures. It was one of these holds [holds arms up bridal-carrying style]. You could 31 tell on his face he was like, [groans] in the picture but he's trying to hold it together and smile. I felt bad. I was like, “Put me down. I'm hurting you.” “No. We're doing this.” “Okay, fine.” After that, it was just normal high school time, but I wasn't there for very long. I was only there for about three months, maybe two months. It was like one term, not even a full semester. Before we moved back to Kaysville, there was some teasing there, and at the time being heavily LDS and being made fun of for that, it was… I don't know, it didn't really hit me hard if I was teased for being bisexual. That was more just kind of like, “Okay, cool, whatever. I don't care.” More so than if I was walking down the hallway and somebody blurted out, “Mormon polygamists.” That was the only teasing I got in that school. IO: And this was in Park City? I'm surprised. EB: It wasn't as heavily LDS as it is now. IO: Interesting. EB: Yeah. Nobody in high school. They didn't even have enough in my high school at the time to have a seminary building. Not enough at all, but I mean, it's still a classroom in that school. As far as I know, most of the time they were not religious. I knew a few Buddhists, there were some Catholics, Christians, but not a lot of LDS individuals. Now, oh yeah. If there were, they weren't very loud about it. Park City was my first experience seeing a big city, seeing alcohol readily available in restaurants. That's one of the things they offer, having to advertise that, “Hey, we have a bar,” and are just comfortable with it. I’d see people in halter tops walking around. Halter top, long jeans, or I'd see people walking in bathing suits when it was warmer. It was less conservative than the environment I grew up in. It was kind of a culture shock, but I loved it. I was like, 32 “Oh, my gosh. So many people here are just themselves.” Kind of inspired me to dress up how I wanted to dress. Less conservative, less long sleeves and more tank tops. I got in trouble a lot. When it was time for us to move again, I did complain to my mother that I was getting picked on. She had kind of decided, “Well, there's a place in Kaysville I know about.” She wanted to move back down there, I guess, because that's the environment we lived in. Everybody knew us. Right back to the little bubble, and I was okay with that at the time. Now thinking back on it, I'm like, “There's a reason to leave your childhood home.” Everyone still thinks and sees you as a little toddler and not an adult. You know the ins and outs of that town, and sometimes it's good, sometimes it's bad. But everyone leaves eventually. Those who stay are insane. Anyway, we moved back to Kaysville. It was the summer of junior year. Obviously, I had to break up with all the people that I was dating, but they were fine with it. They were just kind of like, “It's okay. People move all the time, and you've explained your situation a little bit.” That was also the first time, outside of A in sophomore year, that I had been open about being abused and our living situation and the environment I grew up in and all that. So they were just like, “Oh, it's okay. If we see you, then we see you. If we don't, then we don't. We'll miss you.” Basically, that was how all the guys reacted. The girls were… oh boy, it was a lot harder. I cried. They cried. Everyone cried. It was a blubbering mess. I waited until the day after I broke up with the guys I was dating to break up with the girls I was dating. It was mentally draining. They knew what was going to happen because they had heard through the grapevine that I was moving. All of us were a blubbering mess. The friends I had—I had gained like four or five close friends, like close, close. Not just, “Yeah, I'll call you a friend. Sure. Why not? We don't really do anything together.” No. Like friends. We 33 did everything together. We went everywhere together. They took me places I didn't even know existed. That was the first time I tried sushi. It was hard moving from Park City, but at the same time, I also knew I really, really, really missed the people I had known since eighth or ninth grade, and I wanted to go back and see them again and visit some more. I dunno, I kind of missed the place I grew up in. Summer of junior year was when I officially broke up with the good old Mormon boy. He's nerdy; he's cute, though. He called and was like, “Hey, do you think you can give us another chance?” I was like, “No.” Because of my experience in Park City, I was able to be like, “This is what it feels like to say no, what it feels like to be sincere and independent.” I had a taste of independence and I wanted more. So I told him no, but we could still be friends, you know the drill. We were still friends for a little while, until I started dating A. Apparently before I started dating A, there was a rumor going around that she and I were already dating. I broke up with the guy because he texted me that he cheated on me. Now, all he did was take a girl out on a date. That's all he did, but he's like, “I cheated on you, I'm so sorry. I need to confess that I cheated.” At the time, he felt really bad, but it hurt that he didn't ask. Just let me know ahead of time, like, “Hey, we haven't seen each other since 10th grade. Is it cool if I take this girl out.” I'd have been fine, like, “Eh, whatever, go for it.” But because he didn't say anything, that's why it hurt. I was like, “Oh, okay. Well, I don't want to marry you anymore.” This is the kind of guy that, in my head, I remember going through a future with him. If he didn't tell me about this until after the fact, what is our future going to be like? So I was like, “Yeah, no, nope.” 34 For me, it's kind of both a fault and a good thing—when my brain and my body decide I'm done with someone, I'm done. There is no more connection there. Nothing. There's no future romantic interest, no attractiveness factor. If I thought they were attractive, not anymore. I think I've explained it before, but my romantic involvement with someone is based heavily on an emotional connection first. As that emotional connection grows, the more attractive they seem to me, the more I'm like, “Cute!” There is the rare occasion that someone will be attractive first, but that's usually upon first impressions of their personality. That's kind of how it was with A. I met her, I was attracted to her; the attraction was there a little bit. The more we got to know each other, the more it grew. After this guy and I broke up summer of junior year, I started senior year. I saw A walk out the door with her hands in her pockets. She's like, “Hey, I don't know if you remember me…” I didn't give her a chance. I ran for her and I jumped. It was a big hug-spin moment. I was so happy to see her. I was like, “Oh, my God.” I was floored when I saw her. I did not do that to people. Yes, I had a longer relationship with A, I had known her for a really long time, but we didn't hang out much outside of school. It was just at school. I don't know what came over me. I saw her and just jumped for her, and whatever happened, happened. I found out later, the little shit, that she had had back surgery that same summer. She was still in recovery, and I fucking jumped her. Oh, my God. She's like, “I wasn't going to tell you. You were so happy to see me. What was I supposed to do? I was like, ‘I'm going to do this. I’m so happy that she's so happy to see me. I'm so happy to see her. This is a happy moment. I'm not going to say anything, so I'll just suffer later.’” 35 I was like “But I totally hurt you!” “Yeah, no.” We were pretty much dating before we officially started dating. We went through the first day of senior year, and went through classes and everything. We did say hi to each other in between classes. If we had a class together or a class close by, she would walk me to the class. Oh my God, it was the best day I've ever had in my life. I can't explain it. It’s probably just love, but out of all the days throughout my life in high school, like, that was the best. That trumped coming out to my friends, not even kidding. When school was over, we were hanging out in the commons area and we were talking. Time just kind of flashed by and we didn't even know what time it was and didn't care. She'll be mad that I told you this; she held her hand like this [holds hands flat, palms together], and I just put my hand down and compared my hand to hers or something like that. She does a little [slowly laces fingers together] slow close and my heart fucking fluttered like crazy. I was like, “Is this really happening? Oh, my God.” Apparently, A felt the same, but it’s not what it looked like. To me, it looked like she knew exactly what she was doing. She was totally chill. She was just like, “I’m fine, I know what I'm doing. I'm good.” She was stoic the entire time. Meanwhile, I'm sitting there like, “Nobody has ever given me that reaction before. I do that to everyone else. Huh?” To this day, my heart flutters when she and I do this today. September 4th, 2007, at about 4:45 PM, we started dating. IO: Down to the minute! EB: Down to the minute, yep. She was like, “Oh, I really need to get home.” She drove her own car so she didn't have to meet her mom at the school. Turns out her mom was my brother's teacher. She works at one of the junior high schools in Kaysville, 36 and she taught my two youngest brothers, so she already kind of knew our life situation. She kind of knew who I was and who my mother was before she even met me. I was just like, “Okay.” I found that out later. Anyway, after this all happens, she gives me a ride home. I’m just sitting in my room, like, “What just happened?” I'm trying to process what just happened, and it's like, “Okay, stuff like that's happened before, where my friends were just playing around. So was this a game? Were we playing around? Was it a joke? What's going on here?” We never officially said, “Let’s go out.” We just held hands—didn’t kiss. Heart fluttering, heart in my stomach, going down a roller coaster like, “Holy fuck.” Afterward, I'm like “What do I do?” I had her number, she had mine, so I texted her. “So are we dating now?” Can you imagine it? It's not like the touch screen, it didn't go that fast. It was like a flip phone [mimes pressing buttons to reach a specific letter] H-I-J-K-L. I typed that as fast as my fingers could type on a phone. She tells me that she was at the mall with her mom getting shirts and she gets the text. She says she got the text message and she was like, “What? I thought we already were.” She was very casually just like, “I guess so, yeah, if you want to.” I was like, “Yeah, I kinda do.” She was like, “K, cool.” I was like, “K.” KJ: And now you're married [laughs]. EB: Yeah, now we're married. Pretty much. That first day, pure awkwardness like that never happened to me before. I had never, ever been like [shyly] “Do you like me?” Ever! Our relationship, once we started dating, it was like we had been dating for years. It progressed really fast and we were having sex within a week. No, not sex. 37 That one took a lot longer, actually, because I have a lot of trauma with sexual intimacy. She was very respectful of that and was very patient with me. I really wanted to, but I didn't want to lose her. Even then, I felt like if I lost her, it would shatter my world. It was actually within a week we were making out. We’d skipped seminary and go out to her truck. My wife was assigned male at birth, and eventually we did have sex. I was like, “I'm ready now,” and after that, it was every day. I ended up getting pregnant. We knew we wanted to have kids together; we wanted a child and I wanted to get pregnant. We both were kind of trying not to, but we weren’t trying to prevent it. We were just kind of like, “If it happens, it happens, but let's not try to make it happen.” It was almost a full year. It was seven or eight months continuously; the equivalent of a married couple going for a year and then getting pregnant after that year. It was over the span of a few months and still, nothing. Nothing was happening and I didn't even really think of what could have been—if there was anything, you know. I do have endometriosis and PCOS; that kind of explains the infertility a little bit. When it happened, we were at her parents’ house for her birthday. Seven weeks later is when we found out. At first, I didn't even know. High school graduation happened. She went on vacation with her family. I spent that whole time just thinking, “When is she going to call me?” Then I just decided, “I'm not going to get clingy about her being gone. I really don't want to make her feel guilty about being on vacation with her family,” so I just put the phone away. My family and I went to Lagoon one day, going on the rides. This would have been around the time that it was bubbling in there. Going on the rides, I couldn't do it. Normally I absolutely love going on roller coaster rides, depending on the ride. I hate Wild Mouse. Cannot do it. The thought of when it jerks over close to the edge—literally, you could go off the edge, but if you don't, “Ha, sike!” I'm terrified of 38 heights, but I love rollercoasters, conundrum. Going on those rides, even just the simple spinny ones, I was like, “Oh my God, I hate this. I can't do this.” She called me while I was on one of the rides. Being in Alaska, there's hardly any reception anywhere, so when she called, I did my best to answer. I was like, “This is the only time she's going to be able to call me. It’s the only time she'll have reception. I can't get pictures. She can't get pictures. Holy fuck. I'm currently on a roller coaster ride, and there's music playing.” I'm on the phone with her, and there’s loud music. It's that spinny elephant one that we went on, over by Wild Mouse. I'm trying to talk to her. She's trying to talk to me, and she's like, “What the hell is that noise?” I'm like, “I'm on a rollercoaster ride.” “Why are you on a rollercoaster? What are you doing?” I'm like, “We're at Lagoon.” “Why did you answer the phone?” It was so bad. She was a little upset. She was just like, “I'm just going to call you back later.” I'm like, “No, don't, ‘cause it will be like an hour.” At the time, I was like a fucking dog. An hour felt like a year. When she came back, I was like, “Oh my God, I'm so excited.” After that, since we were active, we did things, and she went home. That night, I got a urinary tract infection. When I get infections, they progress really fast. When we went to the hospital they said it was 99% blood. They were like, “You're lucky you came in now.” I'm like, “This is just a day. I noticed symptoms for a day but it's already this bad.” They asked, “Is there a chance you could be pregnant?” I was like, “No, I don't think so. We're active, but I haven't had any signs.” 39 They're like, “Okay, we'll do a pregnancy test just in case.” The test said negative, so they put me on antibiotics to flush it out of my system. It was about a week later and the symptoms were still there, and they were still really bad, so I had to go on another round of antibiotics. Went to our general practitioner, and my mother had gone with me at the time. The doctor asked the same question. “Is there any chance you could be pregnant?” I was like, “Well, yeah, I'm active.” She didn't give me a chance to answer. She goes, “No, not my daughter.” I looked her dead in the eye and I went, “Yeah, we are. There is a chance I could be pregnant.” I looked at the doctor and I was like, “My wife and I are active.” She looks at me and she's like, “How could you?” She was so pissed. “My child…” She blew up. “Being pregnant before marriage.You're supposed to be a virgin." Yeah, no. There is some sexual trauma there with her. She never did anything; she never touched me, but she knew a little too much about me. So anything sexualrelated, talking to my mother about has always been uncomfortable, more so than the normal teenager talking to their parent about that stuff. My oldest is getting to the point now where they're starting to be like, “Ew, no,” but before it was like, “Mom, this is happening. What's going on?” K being casual about themself—my daughter—with the fact that they're so casual about anything sexual identity-related or parts they’re born with, obviously comes from me. I'm just like, “Yeah, I have boobs.” It doesn't register with me, honestly. The only time it ever registered was if I was talking about it with my mother, obviously, so telling her that A and I are active and that there is a chance I could be pregnant was a big deal for me. Went on some antibiotics anyway, did a pregnancy test, still said negative. I was like, “What the?” Thinking on it now, I'm like, it was probably too early to tell. 40 Who knows? Before this point I had had two negative pregnancy tests, so obviously I was like, “No, I'm not pregnant. No way.” Round of antibiotics finished, and after that was done, I was throwing up like crazy. I could not keep anything down. I was so sick. A came and picked me up. A’s mom came with us the first time I got an infection. My mother was too drunk to get up to care. What she told me was, “Oh, you're probably just on your period. You're fine.” “Yeah, but there's blood when I pee, Mom.” She's like, “It's just your period.” It was so hard to get her up, and I knew she was drunk. There was nothing I could do, but still, I was freaking out. It was kind of a traumatic moment for me because I was like, “What the hell is going on? I'm dying.” That first time, A’s mom and A came to pick me up, took me to the hospital. When I was throwing up, it was just A. I was throwing up, feeling sick. We were on the phone together, just talking, and there was this full feeling in my stomach. “What the hell's going on?” I thought maybe I had ate something with milk in it, and it was not agreeing with my stomach. Who knows? I had a few things that could trigger an upset stomach, and I was going through all the stuff I had eaten. I was like, “Okay, I didn't have any ice cream, I didn't have any cheese. I don't know. What the hell, why am I so sick?” I was telling A this too. Before that, we had eaten at her parents’ house, so I was like “What was in whatever we ate?” She's like, “Nothing in that could make you sick, so this is weird.” I tried drinking some ginger ale and the full feeling was still there, but it kind of helped a little bit. I went to burp and I was like, “Oh, God.” I told A, “I'm going to throw up,” and she didn't hang up the phone at all. She was on the phone with me while I was throwing up in the toilet and saying, “I’m so sorry [retches].” 41 She's like, “Babe, it's okay.” “No, it's not,” while I'm throwing up and apologizing for throwing up while she was on the phone, as if it was an inconvenience to her. She was like, “We're going to go get you a pregnancy test, like, tomorrow.” I'm still throwing up as she's saying this, and then I'm like, “Oh, I’m finished throwing up.” Cleaned myself off. She asked if I felt better, and I did, after I threw up. I was like, “Yeah, I do. The full feeling is gone.” It was so weird for me because I don't feel sick. I don't have the flu. Normally, back then, I’d throw up if I had a really bad cold, but I'd know if I was going to react like that because I'd also have a fever. I'd be shaking. I didn't, at all, so I was like, “What the fuck is going on?” On the phone, she told me, “Go to bed, get some rest. We'll go in the morning.” We went to Planned Parenthood. Her mom told her about Planned Parenthood before we went and got the positive pregnancy test. Mom knew what was going on with me. She knew before A told her we were active. Her dad didn't know. We had gone to take the test, and we were sitting in the room waiting, and the nurse came in with some paperwork to help us figure out our options. When she came in and said it was positive, A literally screamed. She was like, “Whoa!” The nurse person was like, “I guess she's happy.” A was just like, “We're pregnant, we're pregnant!” She was elated. The nurse lady was like, “Oh, okay. Well, let's get you some options for that then.” She gave us adoption paperwork, and she also told us about Baby Your Baby. It's a program that helps. That's actually like Planned Parenthood's first response, is to tell people who want to keep the child about Baby Your Baby, because it provides formula, it provides insurance, it provides a way you can pay for things when you're a teenage mom or low income or whatever. It helps you get a 42 hold of food stamps, helps you get a hold of Medicaid; all sorts of different options. Adoption agencies, if you want. It also helps you get a hold of other abortion aids, where you can get a safe and healthy abortion if you choose to do so. Obviously, at the time, when she gave us all the paperwork, we were like, “Okay, we want to keep the baby.” She goes, “Okay, here's Baby Your Baby. Here's the phone number, call them and they will get you everything you need.” I was like, “Oh, okay.” That's my experience with Planned Parenthood. It's not go in, bam—abortion. Everyone knows this, but whatever. After leaving, I call my brother up and I go, “Hey, happy birthday. You're an uncle.” it was his birthday when we found out, or close to it, at least. I told my dad, and this time, my dad knew already. I started visitation when I was 15 because my mother had told so many lies. I started to figure out her lies, so I was like, “No, I'm going to see my dad.” Coming out to my dad was a lot easier than coming out to my mom. I said, “Papa, I'm bisexual.” He goes, “Okay.” He was just chill about it. I go, “Why are you so okay? You're not going to say anything about it?” He goes, “Well, being bisexual means at least you can marry a guy.” I was like, “Oh, okay.” That's still kind of… you know, but at the time, with the kind of responses I had been getting with parental figures, that was the best. That was a relief. I was like, “Cool. My dad's not going to hate me forever.” When I told him about it, he already knew about A and I because I was so open with him. He was like, “I'm going to be a grandpa!” I'm like, "Yeah, you are going to be a grandpa.” 43 He's like, “I'd never thought you'd have kids yet. Are you going to get married?” I'm like, “I don't know. I just found out I was pregnant, Papa, I don't know what I'm going to do right now.” He was asking me all sorts of questions, like, “Do you ever plan to get married? Are you going to have more? What's your plan? You got to have your house. Where are you going to live?” I'm like, “Papa, I'm just barely 18. I have no fucking clue what I'm going to do, Papa. All I know is this phone number. We went to Planned Parenthood.” He goes, “Oh, good.” My dad was born in 1948, and telling him we went to Planned Parenthood–“Oh, good.” He had a better response than my mother did. Then I told him, “All I have is the phone number for Baby Your Baby. I don't even know what it is.” He goes, “Oh, yeah. They didn't tell you?” I'm like, “Well, they kind of did,” but I was still like, “I'm pregnant?” I'm still focusing on how I’ve been a super skinny teenager in ballet for the majority of my life. That was a horror for me. I was like, “Oh, no, I'm getting fat.” It's horrible, I know. He explained Baby Your Baby. He was excited for me and he told my stepmom and she was excited she was going to be a grandma. She was so cute. She was like, “Am I going to be Grandma?” I go, “Of course you're going to be Grandma. What are you thinking? You're Grandma. You're Mom to me, you’re Grandma to my kids. She goes, “Thank you.” Being stepmom to us as older kids, she was so worried about us taking her in as a mom. 44 I'm like, “You're the best mom we've had so far. We haven't had a mom our entire life.” Fast forward a little bit, my oldest is born. She was supposed to have a twin. The first ultrasound, I didn't tell anybody this, but the doctor could see little K, this little alien-looking thing. This was the first appointment, like eight weeks or so. There was a little bit of something there that just looked like a blob, and I was like, “Oh, what is that?” She pauses for a second. At first we thought maybe it was placenta or some sort of dot. Sometimes you see that on ultrasounds. There's that one little blob and there's an extra one somewhere. But she took a closer look at it, and she's like, “No, that is an underdeveloped fetus,” or zygote, or whatever you want to call it. I go, “Oh.” She mentioned it's probably not going to last long. “Okay.” It was attached to K, not in the same sack, so they probably would have been non-identical, but you could tell. I didn't say anything to anybody. That was actually the second ultrasound because A was there for the first. There was an ultrasound about a week later. The first ultrasound was six weeks after we found out, so eight weeks. Doctor told me that it wasn't going to last because of the size and because it's not measuring; it was literally like just a dot. Looking at it, you could tell there was something with K, but the other one looked like it was probably about two weeks developed, which is still just a clump of cells. She gave it about a week and she said, “Okay, let me know if there's anything,” looking for symptoms of a miscarriage or partial miscarriage. Nothing. I didn't feel anything. Sometimes if it's just a clump of cells, it's just not really developed at all, there won't be a partial miscarriage. It'll just die. Sometimes either 45 the twin will absorb it or it'll just become part of the placenta or part of the amniotic fluid sac. Or it'll just float around in there and you'll see a little black thing come out when you give birth to a child, a little extra. It's more when they're further developed. If I was going to have a partial miscarriage with K, then I would have felt things. She was eight weeks at the time. Time passed, by the time I had gone to my next appointment, it wasn't there anymore. Doctor did some tests—you know, that little long tube-y, the very painful long one. Those with a vagina, they know what I'm talking about—and scanned and bloodwork, everything. The pregnancy hormone was a little higher than it should have been for ten weeks at the time when we decided to run the tests. The next appointment, they were back to normal. They were back to what they should have been for one. Because of that, the doctor was just like, “All right, well, we'll just keep an eye on you for the next little bit.” But I had a healthy pregnancy, totally fine. My oldest was born and I named them K. We were going to name them E but that is now the twin’s name. Eventually, my wife and I kind of talked about her and gave the twin the name and decided that the child was probably going to be female. Given the history in my family, twins are the same gender. When K came out, we were like, Oh, it looks like a K. Even when she was born, she was so fucking strong, she was already lifting her head by herself. It was wobbly, but it was still looking around. I had gotten up to go to the bathroom and A had K on her shoulder and K lifted her head and leaned over to figure out what that noise was in the bathroom, trying to find Mom. “Mom went in there, where is she?” The nurse came at the same time and she's like, “I have never seen an infant do that. They don't do that. They don't lift on their own, it's insane.” I was like, “Oh, she's a strong kid.” Very strong baby. 46 When K was ten months old, we found out I was pregnant with J, our second. Before he was born, we didn't want to have another kid yet. We wanted to wait at least a couple of years; wait for two years, see how you feel and wait a little longer, because we knew we wanted another one, we just didn't want it fast. Like with my parents—15 months apart, no, thank you. We had been trying to prevent it, but I'm allergic to condoms. I have a really bad reaction to most birth controls, even non-hormonal. My body outright rejected the Mirena IUD. I had some pretty terrible symptoms that my doctor was like, “If we keep this in you, you're going to be infertile,” so that came out. So we went with some non-latex condoms—tried at least—and one of them broke. LR: [Entering room] Could we just pause for a minute? [Recording stops for a break] [Recording begins again] EB: After my youngest was born, my wife came out to me about a couple of years later. She was about 21. She came out to me as transgender. Having two kids in diapers, it was very stressful for the both of us, and neither of us were ready to be parents, like at all. Nobody ever is. We had been fighting a lot, and at the time I didn't have the greatest reaction. I asked her, “Okay, when do you want me to leave?” Yeah, I know. I'm an absolutely horrible human being, scum of the earth. We had been fighting, and she comes out to me as transgender, and my first response is, “When do you want me to leave?” What the fuck. I still kick myself to this day for ever saying that. But I know nothing about them, nothing at all. Transgender individuals did not exist in my world. All I knew was gay, straight, bisexual, lesbian. That's all that existed as far as I knew. Little did I know. After she came out to me, immediately, she's like, “No, I don't want you to leave.” 47 I was like, “Oh, fuck.” We talked it through. “I'm sorry. I thought it was another pull to try to push me away.” She tends to do that and I do too. That journey was fun. The entire time, I painted her nails, I would help her do her makeup. I was like, “Okay, I've got makeup, I've got nail polish. What do you want to do? Where do you want to start?” She wanted this really pretty purplypinkish nail polish that was sparkly as fuck, like shine-in-the-sunlight-and-you-goblind sparkly. She loves sparkles and pink; dies for those. So we went out and got that nail polish, and I painted her nails the super fucking sparkly pinky-purple color, and made them look as perfect as possible. I had training from hair school and nail tech and all that, so I was like, “Pristine perfection. You're going to be gorgeous.” The whole time I was helping her, I was so angry with myself because of the response I had. I advocate for my brother so much. I advocate for LGBTQ individuals so much. In my world, in my mind, everyone deserves love. Everyone deserves a home. Everyone deserves somewhere they can call home. Everyone else deserves an advocate and someone there who's like, “I got you.” That means the absolute world to have that. It sends chills down my spine. I'm like, “Why can't I be the same for A?” It was because I didn't understand. So I asked her and we talked about it. I did my own research. Eventually, when she was finally able to get in to see a transgender specialist, I talked to her, I asked her questions. I was like 20, 21, 22 at the time. I had learned the best way to figure out what's up is to ask. I'm advocating for her with my family and they were not comfortable with her at all whatsoever. There were a bunch of rumors in the family that she was abusing me, that she was manipulating me and this is just another tactic. They didn't like her at all. My dad liked her. No one else did. That had to do with my mother spreading rumors because she absolutely hated the fact that I left. She wanted me to stay home. She wanted me to raise my kids in her home. She wanted A and I to move 48 into her home and raise our family there. Yeah, no, I was like, “Ew.” So my family asked me questions as much as they could muster. They didn't really get it. Coming out to her family was way easier. She started with her parents. She and I are very, very privileged to have A’s parents, especially with the fact that when she came out to her parents, her dad had to walk away. We were like, “Okay, maybe he'll have a poor response.” No, he was mad at himself for not figuring it out sooner. I was just like, “I want your parents. I wish they were my parents, but I don't at the same time, ‘cause then we would be siblings and that would be weird.” Her mom, though, was totally just like, “Okay.” I said, “What the fuck?” I told my parents about A and my mother does this fake, “Oh, yay, I love her,” but she keeps slipping up and using deadname and pronouns. My dad doesn't acknowledge it. He tried a few times, but he was like, “Whatever, I'm old.” “Yeah, sure. You don't get away with it. You don't get away with dead naming my wife, thank you very much. Fuck off with that bullshit.” I slap myself for accidentally using the wrong pronouns now. I did it once recently, and then, I immediately was like, “I'm gonna wash my mouth out with soap. I'm doing this, Fuck it, fucking hell.” After my wife came out as transgender and is living her truth, I was like, “Oh, okay. I might be pansexual, actually.” I had discovered what the pansexual identity is. I know bisexual individuals can also be in a relationship with transgender individuals, but with me, someone's sexual identity doesn't matter. I don't see what they're presenting and immediately think, “Oh, they're cute.” I see certain clothing they're wearing, like, “Those are cute clothes,” I say hi, and after the ‘hi’ and I want to gain a further relationship with them, then I'll pursue. It's hard to explain. It's just based really, really heavily on personality. If I do not like someone's personality, 49 there's nothing there. Nothing can be built. Nothing can be made. Can't be friends, and no relationship at all. No tingling going on down there. There's literally nothing. I'm not kidding when I say that. When I'm not attracted to somebody—and I mean, I have a lot of different friends, but tinglies won't happen with friends. Those are a very separate category. When I want to be friends with someone, that's still based on personality, but no tingles; minus the tingle. A was like, “I thought you preferred guys, at least that's what you told me.” I was like, “No, I've always told you that you're the exception.” I preferred women, but I said that she was the exception. Little did I know that I was reading her soul. After we got married, we were still connected there. But after she came out to me as transgender, I felt like this whole new door was open. I was like, “Okay, now I get to know the real you.” I've known her forever, but I really get to know her. KJ: First off, when did you get married? EB: We got married in 2008. KJ: Okay. EB: July 17. KJ: When did she come out to you? Like 2012-ish? EB: We were both born in 1990, so… math. KJ: No, you're good. EB: I’d be 21, it would have been about 2011. She didn't come out to the rest of her family, though, until about 2014, 2015. KJ: Right. Now that I know whereabout we're stopping, I'm going to stop the camera. Part 3- July 19, 2022 IO: This is Ian Orme interviewing Ember Burton. It is Tuesday, July 19th at 12:00. We are at the Weber State Stewart Library. [Points to himself] Ian Orme; he/him. 50 EB: Ember Burton; she/they. IO: We are also here with Faith. Faith, can you introduce yourself? FC: Hi, I'm Faith Christiansen. I'm on the camera today, and my pronouns are she/her. IO: Perfect. Let's get started. We left off last week on the transition of your wife and she is a trans woman. I think we had gotten most of the way through the story. Starting off, is there anything else that you would like to tell us about? Let's just hit the big points, since we're not sure exactly where we left off. EB: That's okay. Since the start of her journey, in my personal experience, I do feel it has brought us closer together. At first it was definitely an adjustment. It's a change in lifestyle, basically. You're going by different pronouns, different name. There are more doctor's appointments involved. When you already have two little kids and extra doctor's appointments, it can be exhausting. But I went with her and have gone with her to every single appointment, to be there as emotional/moral support. At first, when she asked me to go with her the first time, I was very nervous. I didn't know what to expect. It was during a time when transgender care doctors weren't widely available in Utah. There was literally just one, and she's in Salt Lake somewhere. It's pay out of pocket, no insurance. That doctor was great. A, it was her first introduction to hormones and her feeling was a little off. She was like, “Well, I kind of wish there was another.” So me and my tippy-typeyness [mimics typing on keyboard], I asked around to see if there was anyone else. She did her own research, and we ended up landing on somebody in… I don't remember the city. It's further away from Salt Lake. She does practice through the clinic that we already have doctors with, so it made it easier with insurance. We didn't have to pay out-of-pocket for things anymore. That doctor, her name's Dr. Erica Sullivan. She is absolutely amazing. I adore her. She's so caring. She listens, and a lot of doctors are getting so much better at that. It used to be so hard to find a 51 doctor that would just say, “I'm here and I care,” given somebody who experiences a world that not many understand because they're not in that world. Having a doctor say, “I'm here and I care,” is a big deal. A has stuck with her for about three or four years, but it’s probably longer. Time kind of flies. Navigating that with the kids; our son was the one who came up with calling her Mum. I guess he had heard it. A and I watch YouTube videos, and at the time, a lot of the YouTube videos we watched were YouTubers from Ireland or YouTubers from England, and you'd hear them say ‘Mum’ or ‘Mummy’. I guess the little tiny, less than a year-old baby was like, “Mum!” Our oldest would have been about two at the time when A came out and she's like, “Okay, Mum. You’re Mum.” I was like, “Okay, awesome.” One of my wife's aunts got us some books. One of them is called My New Mommy. I don't remember the author; I'm sorry. I would have brought it in, but it is so well-read that it has bite marks all over. My oldest has had that book since they were 2, and they're 13 now. It's falling apart. Its pages are just… [mimics falling apart]. It is very well-loved. K loved that book and was very sad when we had to let it go because it was severely damaged to the point where it could not be salvaged. I would glue that thing back together. I’d write in parts where the wording is scribbled out a little bit. I erase where the pencil is; gone over the pictures. You know how kids are. The other book she got us is called Families are Like Ice Cream Flavors. That one we read to our son. That one is his absolute favorite book. My New Mommy was her way of introducing the idea of a child's experience of a parent transitioning in a simple way. Families are Like Ice Cream Flavors; our youngest was not even a year old yet, where he would understand more the diversity of families, “You're going to have two moms,” because we knew that he would. He 52 says he's always known Mum as Mum. K remembers her Mum before she came out. We were like, “Okay, J gets that one, K gets that one.” They both switched back and forth, though; read the books to each other. We read the books to them every bedtime, every story time, they would bring those books out. “Let's read this, Mom, let's read this.” A would read My New Mommy to our oldest, and I would read Families are Like Ice Cream Flavors to our youngest. That's the experience with the kids. They've always just accepted her. They've taken that through schooling and everything. There have been kids, they've come home and said, “Mom, this kid was like, ‘You have two moms? That is so cool. I wish I had two moms.’” This is the cutest thing. There were some kids who were like, “How does that work? You must be adopted.” “No, I'm not adopted.” K, being a teenager now. “You've got to be adopted.” “I'm not.” Then K comes home and is like, “Hey, am I okay to explain this?” K understands the sensitivity of bringing up a topic with strangers, people we don't know. They also understand the fact that education is the best way to get others to understand, as long as A’s comfortable. If she's not comfortable, then we don't. We're like, “Okay, that's fine. We won't say anything.” That's kind of been our life for the last… Oh, my goodness. I'm probably going to be wrong here—ten years, maybe? Our 14th wedding anniversary was a couple days ago on the 17th. IO: Congrats. EB: Thank you. We've been together for a long time, so it's probably more like… It's been our life for 12, 13 years because she came out pretty early on in our marriage. K was around two. It's been completely amazing. 53 The kids, we always wanted to have them involved in extracurricular activities, but the finances weren't always there. Putting a kid in soccer, just gear can be incredibly expensive. I was in ballet and that put my parents out $6,000 a year. Granted, I was in a dance academy, so a dance school is more expensive than a regular dance studio, I guess. I've always been in academies. IO: It sounds like it would cost more. FC: They are because you're paying for the curriculum. EB: Yep. We had what my dance teacher would call summer intensives. If we signed up for that, that was an extra $600. You're not just paying for classes, you're also paying for the performances and the costumes and a whole list of things. We're like, “Okay, what the heck do we put the kids in? ‘Cause we don't have that kind of money.” We were just asking around; at this point we weren't really actively looking. K started Kindergarten, and that was around the time that we were like, “Okay, let's get them involved in something outside of school or home. It's healthy for kids.” Some kids want to do it, some kids don't, and our kids did. They kept asking. By the time K was in first grade, eight years old, I want to say, there was a Girl Scout program that their school started. I had already been involved with the PTA in the school, running the bookstore thing that they'd have twice a year. I was already involved in that, so I was in the know. I was like, “Okay, please put my child in this.” It didn't cost anything. The school was funding it. The school was offering to be a charter for that Girl Scout program. The principal's daughter was the Scoutmaster for the Girl Scout program. K liked it, but didn't. J wanted to be involved in it and couldn't at the time. Now you totally can. Both of them can do either Boy Scouts or Girl Scouts. FC: Because it's just Scouts now. 54 EB: Pretty much, yeah, it's just Scouts. At the time, we were kind of like, “Oh, sorry, bud.” He was in kindergarten, first grade. “Can I join, can I come? I want to come too.” “No.” It was so hard to tell him no because you don't want to explain to a kid who has never seen any difference, and has lived in this environment where there is no difference. The only difference is really what you were assigned at birth. That's it. Even then, sometimes that changes too, the environment they both grew up in. Neither of them understood why the other couldn't just join it. IO: Yeah, it's arbitrary. EB: Exactly. My mother-in-law was there. Teachers talk, and word got out that we had been looking for something that both the kids could do together, whether one of them was tagging along or they were doing it together. She came to us and was like, “Hey, one of my teacher friends reached out to me. Do you know this person?” I was like, “Oh, yeah, I do. What's up?” “She reached out to me about the Boy Scout program.” At the time it was still Boy Scouts. “Do you think J would want to do that?” K was good with staying in Girl Scouts, J wanted to do Boy Scouts, we're cool. K was still doing Girl Scouts through their school, and J was doing Boy Scouts through this non-denominational Boy Scout troop. At the time it was in Roy—and we are no longer affiliated with the charter. There were some things that went down, so I'm not going to mention the name. We are now affiliated with the Utah Military Academy, so a lot of things have changed. J was in that for a while; K was there as a Tagalong. At the time they called them Tagalongs. Younger siblings would basically sit in a corner and color and doodle, and the older kids would sit and help the younger kids doodle until they were old enough to be Tigers. Tigers, I think, are 55 about five years old, in kindergarten. Tigers didn't used to be a thing. It used to be that you started as a Wolf or a Bear or something like that. IO: I think it was Wolf. I want to say you also had to be eight. EB: Yes, yes. So when we found out that J could join at 5 we were like, “Oh, great! Of course.” So yeah, K was a Tagalong. Fast forward to about 2016, 17. We had the benefit of having somebody from the main office, the council, being in our troop, so we found out early about girls being able to join the BSA—it was just going to be Scouts. We reached out to K about it before we could even say anything. K was like, “I want to join. I want to be a Scout. I want to get my Eagle. I want to be the first girl in the family to get my Eagle.” I was like, “Okay, slow your roll. You're only ten. You got like eight more years, kid.” Of course, my wife and I were like, “Yeah,” and we reached out to my in-laws because they're kind of sponsoring our kids. They help us pay for the fees, because why wouldn't your grandparents spoil their grandkids? After the official announcement, they wanted to move. We had tons of girls, so many. There was one whose mom ended up being Scoutmaster later. She went to her mom and showed her the news, sent her a text of the newsletter, and said, “Mom, me!” The issue with letting the girls join was that we had to have enough to officially have them in each troop. We didn't quite have enough for them to join the troop Scouts. We had enough to join the Cubs, plenty, but not quite enough who were eager. A lot of the families had girls who were Tagalongs, who just existed. Their role was just like, “I'll just wait ‘till we're done.” Once that one was released and things got started there, they ended up having an event. One girl after another, they were like, “Really, girls can join?” 56 “Yeah, you can be a Boy Scout, come on in.” That was hearsay on my end, so that's as much as I know there. I know where I was; I was in the Cub area at the time. The Cubs had so many boys and girls that we had two Den Leaders. Assistant Scoutmasters are Den Leaders. We had two Den Leaders for the whole patrol because there was just a large group of them, just like the Bears. J was a Wolf when K joined. It was really fast after the kids joined. He was still seven, almost eight. We held him back a little bit knowing that he was moving really fast. We knew that if we moved him up really fast with the late birthday that he had, he wouldn't have been able to join the troop. He would have had to wait another year in the Webelos after he had already learned or earned everything. We were like, “Okay, let's just slow down on him a little bit. That's totally fine.” We grouped together the kids who would have been in the same situation as him, so they were all in their own little patrol so that they wouldn't be left behind. The other kids moved up; they were still keeping pace with everyone, just a little bit slower. While we had the troop going on over here, in this area [gestures with hands], we had the Dens going on over in this area, K and probably eight other girls. There were so many. I have a video of all of them running around in circles, so many that I lose the number. They wanted to move up as many of the ten-year-olds as possible, so K and these other kids went from being a Bear to a Webelos within a month. They were like, “Okay, you at least need to earn your Bobcat to be able to earn anything else. Your age is Bear, so there's important stuff in Bear that you need to learn before you're a Webelos. You can mark off Webelos stuff while you're a Bear.” It’s faster. It wasn't cheating, I promise it wasn't at all. It was bending the rules without bending the rules. It was like reading between the lines, finding what we can do. There's a lot more regulations now, so when they became Webelos they were there for a while. 57 All of those kids, there were a couple who were still like J, late birthday, so they stayed behind in the Dens for a little bit longer. K and a few other girls earned their Arrow of Light and walked. Somebody made this Rainbow Bridge, and they walked the bridge. I'm just sitting there filming, crying. I'm like, [mimics bawling], “Look at my big girl!” Soon after going into the troop, K came out as they/them, non-binary. They were about 12, and we kind of already knew. When K came out to their other friends first, their friends were like, “Well, we knew, obviously.” K’s like, “Well, why is it so easy for you to say they/them and so hard for them?” They're like, “Well, because you've always been that way to us. You've always been kind of a middle ground. ‘What you can do, I can do too.’” I'm sitting there like, “Oh, feminism. I really hope that feminism does not bite me in the ass one day.” So far with K, it's just been, “I can do that too.” Keeping up with literally everyone. Not showboating, just keeping up anyway. After they came out as they/them, it was an adjustment for us because for eleven years, they were comfortable as she/her. We were like, “Okay, it'll be an adjustment.” They understood that. They were just like, “Okay, I know it's going to be an adjustment, but I'm going to correct you every time, right?” I'm like, “I know. Please do. If I ever use the wrong name or wrong pronouns, tell me. Call me out on it.” K’s like, “Okay, I will.” Yeah, I'm eating my words. Any slip-up K’s like, “Excuse me?” I'm like, “Oh, crap. I'm sorry.” I very rarely slip up. IO: Seems like they taught you. 58 EB: Oh, yes, they did. I see it mostly with a lot of their friends. If their friends are hanging out in the house and one of them slips up and says, “Oh yeah, she did this,” K will give a little death glare. There's a slight moment. You'd miss it if you weren't looking. I'd be over there like, “You're going to get in trouble later.” I’ll look at the friend and be nice and be like, [whispers] “They/them,” and the friend will be like, “Oh, crap.” FC: Do you think feminism has a lot to do with how they're able to stand up for themself and be comfortable with themself? “Oh, these are my pronouns.” EB: Absolutely, yeah. I've always been the type growing up where—during the generation my parents were in, women were the cooks and men were the workers. They mowed the lawn and women planted flowers and looked pretty. FC: Nuclear family. EB: Yeah, and I hated that. I was like, “This is stupid, this sucks, I hate this. I love planting, but I want to mow the lawn, Goddamn it.” I looked at my dad one day, I was just this little eight-year-old. “Papa, let me drive the lawnmower.” He goes “Okay, okay.” Little eight-year-old driving this lawnmower around the lawn. I'd get in trouble sometimes because he knew that I was doing it, but my mother didn't know. We had an attachment in the back of the lawnmower for twigs or dirt, like a wagon, and we'd have neighbor kids driving the wagon while I was driving the lawnmower. My oldest does the same thing. Sometimes I catch myself when I'm getting upset with K for doing the exact same thing I did when I was their age. I'm like, “Okay, wait. I did the same thing, but please don't. I know it's dumb, I thought it was dumb too. That's just the way it is.” 59 K is the type who will give you an absolute dirty look. They desperately needed to go to the bathroom, and the women's restroom was being cleaned out and we couldn't make it to the front of the store. An older gentleman was standing outside of the bathroom glaring at K, and K immediately is like, “What? I had to pee.” “Well, there is a bathroom in the front.” “I wasn't going to make it. I would have pissed my pants.” “You can wait.” I was like, “Go off kid.” He's looking at me and I'm like, “What do you want me to do about it? They had to pee.” “Well, there's a bathroom in the front of the store.” “They had to pee, they're a kid. There's no one else in there.” “Well, I was in there.” “Looks to me like you're done.” FC: You're standing outside. EB: Apparently, when my oldest went into the restroom, he was washing his hands and leaving. He made the choice to stand outside of the bathroom just to tell a fucking 13-year-old, excuse my language, that they can't use the bathroom when they need to go. You know how small a 13-year-old’s bladder is? Every hour, “Mom, I have to pee.” I would like to say that I raised them to be that way, but I don't want to take credit. Honestly, I'm just proud of them for being true to themself, being authentically themself and not giving a fuck. No child is an extension of their parents. Every child is an individual, and no parent has a right to say that their child is the exact same as them. The environment that K was raised in and the ideals we have in the home, and also the fact that A and I will tell each other off if we don't like 60 something—K has definitely seen that and been like, “I like that.” Their confidence is what I wish I had at their age. Imagine a parent looking up to their child. I’m not afraid to admit it. I look up to my oldest, I really do. That attitude has carried with them in Scouting. It took them a couple of years with their first class. Meanwhile, J’s still in the Den right now. He moved up to Webelos Arrow of Light, and before I joined, K was already on the path to getting their Tenderfoot, second class, first class, all within like a year or two. There's a reason they are very, very strict about the time limits now, “You have to be this for six months,” because they had so many kids from so many troops moving up to Eagle. “What did you learn?” [Shrugs]. That's where we're like, “Okay, they need to at least learn something,” mostly because parents were marking their kids off on stuff when it should be the Scoutmaster. It's supposed to be between the Scoutmaster and the child because Scouts are for the kids. When they're in the Den, it's okay to be there a little bit more as a parent and check things off and wait for approval and be like, “They did this at home,” and let their cub master know. Well, once they become a Scout, part of the Troop, Adventure, or Ship—our troop has all of those. We have the Cubs, we have a Troop, the Boys and Girls Troop; Venture combines the two and Ship combines two. It was parents marking kids off. It was like, “Okay parents, go away. They've got it from here.” Eventually, probably after a year or two, I was still working at the time. Once things started to calm down at work, and they bugged me enough—They'll pull you in, trust me. Oh, my Lord. Scouts is like the Mafia. You never get out ‘cause you know too much, to quote my troop. I approached one of the fellow committee 61 members at the time; I was just a committee member. I went with K to their first campout like three campouts ago. Their first campout was mid-Covid time, so we were like, “Okay, how are we going to handle this?” We wore masks outside of the campsite, but we didn't require it inside because we were around each other so much anyway. If you were comfortable wearing a mask around everyone else, fine, but there was no pressure because it was still kind of tender. IO: How did scouting work during the pandemic? EB: We mostly did it virtually over Zoom until the summertime. Summertime we would then meet at a park in person, never inside an enclosed space. We were all wearing masks. We kept social distancing, kept masks on. If anybody was sick, they were sent home. Not only was K adjusting to virtual schooling, they were also adjusting to virtual scouting and at the same time going to camp, trying to navigate all this and figure out what was going to happen. During camp they enforced the mask rule. They did require masks any time you were inside a building. If you had to be in a group, they were very, very strict that if you guys were not wearing masks, you were either sent home or sent back to your campsite. I didn't hear of any kids being sent away from the campsite. It could have happened but I would have heard about it. That year, I went as a parent because for K’s first campout, they were 11, so a parent has to go and camp with them. At the time, the rule was that parents could tent with their own child. Now that's not okay, because youth protection training has figured out that it’s too much of a risk because sexual abuse can happen in the home, and if it happens in the home, it's going to happen at camp if parents and children are sharing tents, or siblings. FC: Is your regulation just to separate, or is it by three people? 62 EB: So if a youth has their own tent, they can tent by themselves. If they are okay with tenting with someone, or if they need to because they don't have their own tent, it's by three. Two if there's just not enough or if one of them's going to be nearby, they just prefer to be in their own tent. They're always within the same age range, within a year. FC: Especially because 18 can't be with youth. EB: Exactly. We heavily enforce that in our troop. 16-year-olds cannot buddy up with youth, with 13-year-olds or 14-year-olds. The buddy system has to be with someone your own age. FC: I know some camps separate by gender too. Is that the same? EB: Our troop, this last camp, what we did—there was a creek in the middle. Generally, what we do is we have girls on one side, leaders in the middle, and boys on the other. FC: That way, if anyone walks across, you'll hear. EB: Exactly. The Scoutmasters are always there. We also usually have a leadership tent, one big tent so they can keep all their stuff, but it has separate rooms. Any of the kids in the leadership patrol who may be not within the same range can still separate. They still have their own areas, it zips up and everything. They do not change in front of each other. They are separated. They don't tent together unless they're in the same age range and they want to share the same tent. Might be a little crowded, but they can. We're thinking about doing away with the leadership tent. That's too much of a risk. It's kind-of sort-of safe, but less safe. It might not be okay with certain members of the council if they saw it. We're like, “Actually, no, they can unzip and meet in the middle and [laces fingers together]. Yeah, I don't think so.” So we're pulling away from that to encourage them that they may be in 63 leadership patrol, but they're still part of the troop. We're trying to encourage that and not be like, “We're like we're like adult leaders now,” uppity. FC: With genders being separate, I know that they can have their own tent and that's really helpful. Has their coming out changed their scouting experience? You can’t completely speak for them, but what you've seen. EB: Last year we had two. Both my daughter and another one of my many, many adopted children had actually come out around the same time. That campout last year, they were not comfortable with what they were going to do. I wasn't happy about this and neither were some of the other parents. I have a tendency to open my big mouth. I really see where my child gets it now. What they were going to do initially was have them tent together away from everyone else because they were gay and other girls might not be comfortable with that. I was like, “Separate but equal, huh?” IO: Yeah, that's not inclusive. EB: They were like, “Okay.” I'm like, “Hey, they don't want to tent together. They don't want to tent with anyone else.” FC: Just have their own tents. EB: Exactly. “Can we give them their own tents?” “I mean, I guess. But then we're going to have other kids wanting their own tents.” FC: So the other kids get their own tents. EB: Yeah, so the other kids get to tent on their own. We have a buddy system. Outside of the tent, buddy up. To quote one of my other scout leaders, “Excuses are like armpits: they stink.” I very much was like, “This sounds like a massive excuse.” Eventually, they gave in. I still wasn't happy, but they got their own tents still 64 separate from everyone else. They were allowed to be closer to a couple of the other leaders to avoid bullying and singling them out. FC: Has there been hard push back from the community or the scouts themselves? Have they been welcoming? EB: No. They were not happy. I wasn't the only one who wasn't happy about them being separated. They weren't either at all. There was one day where my child needed to go to the restroom, and that specific camp just barely started regulating the restrooms. Women's restrooms still had one stall, men's restroom had a stall and three urinals. Imagine the lines. You had to hit the bathrooms right before break time, otherwise you'd be waiting there for 30 minutes doing the potty dance. My oldest was like, “I really need to pee, but right now I'm cramping really bad.” I'm like, “Okay.” I went to the other side, checked the men's; nobody was there. I was like, “Okay, I'm going to stand guard and you can go.” Before they could go in, another leader was like, [raises voice] “Whoa, whoa whoa.” I looked at him and was like, “Excuse me, what did you just do to a scout? Yeah. You literally just broke youth protection right there by yelling at the scout. What do you think the council is going to think about this?” I went straight to the Scoutmaster and she took it straight to the council. FC: Is it more of a leader problem? EB: Yeah. Kids are totally fine. Leaders are still kind of… old-fashioned ideals. FC: The generational difference is there. IO: Was this still on their first campout? EB: This was the second campout. The first campout, they were kind of exploring it. They weren’t out, they were like, “It's okay if they slip up.” The second campout was like, “No, they/them and a new name.” The first camp, it was K, second camp was N 65 [new name], the third campout was K [original name]. They were kind of like, “Okay, I'm gonna explore the new name thing.” We're like, “Okay, fine.” They were very strict about it. IO: Where were you in this? You said in the first camp you were a parent. What point did you enter into leadership? EB: Leadership, I joined after K’s first campout. I was my usual goofball self and the kids were absolutely eating it up. I talked to more leaders about it. I was like, “Hey, do you have room for a helper? I can help maybe just over summer camp,” because I'm still working at the time. She's like, “The kids love you. Yes, do it.” I went to the girls troop and I go, “Ladies, I have an announcement.” Then they sang the “Announcements, announcements, announcements. We're all going to die. Announcements, announcements, announcements.” They started that whole thing. It's adorable. I told them I'm going to be coming again next year, and they were like, “Yeah!” They were all screaming, celebrating. They were so happy about it. I decided, “Yeah, I'm going to be a leader.” By the second campout I was officially an assistant Scoutmaster. I had stopped working and started going to school, so I was like, “Okay, I have a little bit more free time, so I'll be an assistant Scoutmaster or merit badge counselor and help out more in scouting.” I absolutely love doing it. If it could pay you, that would be my permanent job, not even kidding. The transition there, from the first campout when I announced the first time that I was going to be an assistant Scoutmaster. I was going to meetings as an assistant Scoutmaster, getting training finished up. I was a Webelos Arrow of Light leader before that. Wolf, Bear leader, and then Webelos Arrow of Light leader, moved up with my son. By the time my son 66 was old enough, earned his Arrow of Light and joined the troop when he was like ten. He earned it fast. When he was 10, so back in about 2020, was when I officially joined. Unofficially it was like 2018, 2019. I was kind of doing both at the same time. By the second campout, they all got to know me and understood the meaning behind a certain nickname I have gained: ‘Trouble’. IO: Trouble is your nickname? EB: It was my nickname everywhere. Even my dad called me Trouble because I stir up trouble. Not in a bad way. I create chaos where there are problems that are being ignored. I poke at them and I'm like, “That's bad. That's a problem that shouldn't be happening.” I poke and prod and talk about it until it gets fixed. I just kind of naturally do it. I poked and prodded about K and this other child being singled out and treated like they were different. I get that the other leaders were trying to help give them an environment where they weren't part of the boys’ troop or the girls’ troop, but they were just their own thing. Okay, but that's not how it works. You let them choose which one. You have a gender marker? That doesn't fucking matter. Like I said, I don't create problems, I find the problem. When I went to the Scoutmaster about this other leader confronting and yelling at a child at the bathroom about going to the bathroom, it didn't matter which one. The council up at the camp eventually was like, “Okay, if they buddy together, they can use the bathroom at the council office. But they can't talk about it. They can't say anything, you don't see anything, but they can be up there.” IO: It is a compromise. It's not the best. EB: But it was something. They were like, “Okay, boys’ bathroom is still a problem because what if a male leader walked in when the girl was in there?” I was like, “Okay, but we'd have a female leader standing out guard, being like, ‘Hey, give them a minute.’” 67 “Yeah, but they might have a problem with it.” “Would you have a problem with it if a boy entered the women's restroom and used it?” “Yes, we would.” “Okay, so what's your solution? Also, you guys really need to add another stall to the women's restroom.” That was an issue we brought up. That was also the same campout that we were evacuated from because of the fire. IO: Where was the campsite? EB: Tifie, up like somewhere that way. There was a big fire. I don't know if it was reported, but local scout troops had to evacuate the campsite because the fire was moving up the mountain. We were sitting in a high school football field just waiting for news that we could go back to the camp and eat dinner. Oh, my goodness, it was fun up there. IO: You mentioned a third campout. Had things changed for K at that one? EB: Oh, absolutely. At that point, we had new scoutmasters, and these scoutmasters were very much like, “Okay, they’re they/them. Who fucking cares?” Sorry, language again, oh my God. They're like, “Do you guys want to tent by yourselves? Do you want to tent with someone else?” They're like, “Oh, we want to tent someone else.” “Okay, you're 7196. It doesn't matter. That's your troop.” FC: Do you think that these changes need to be written into the curriculum or the new guidelines? EB: Well, I think a lot of these already exist. It's just some people aren't keeping up with them, following them, because of personal opinions. I get it's a generational thing. FC: It's still a sad excuse, though. 68 EB: It's not an excuse. Like I said, excuses are like armpits; they stink. IO: Before we move on, is there anything else you would like to talk about in terms of scouting? EB: With my son being in scouting now, too, this year was his first campout. He is questioning. He does have a boyfriend. I'm like, “Bud, you're 11. That's adorable, but whatever.” He's been trying to fit in by grasping at other people's titles because he wants to figure out their world. He wants to see what's going on in their world. I'm like, “Dude, that's an ally. Like, if you want to identify as an ally, that's okay. You don't have to be transgender, non-binary. You don't have to use this title to support it.” He sees so many people in his scout troop. This environment, it's like a happy garden for roses. The roses are just blooming and sparkling and gorgeous. It's so many different colors, it smells, and looking at it from afar is an absolutely beautiful sight. That's the best way to describe it. It's absolutely amazing. He sees that and wants to fit in. I'm like, “You don't have to have everything figured out right now.” I love the environment both my kids have grown up in. It has created this child that's going to grow up to be an adult that sees so many different identities. I love it. FC: I have one little question about scouting. Do you think that the queer experience in scouting is different in northern Utah than it is in other states? EB: Personally, in our troop, I don't think so, because we don't allow it to be different. We're just like, “It's a thing.” We treat it exactly that. Our Scoutmasters are both women and they're married. It's always been that way. The very first Scoutmasters we had were women, a lesbian couple, married. It was kind of funny. When we were voting in the new Scoutmasters, the kids were the ones who said, “Well, we want a married couple. Can we have two girls again?” I see it in other scout troops. They look at us and are kind of intimidated. This last campout, we had someone tell us that we were intimidating because we just 69 exist. I'm sitting there like. “Okay. I don't want to know why, so I'm not going to ask why. That's your reason and you don't have to tell me; please don't. But do you want scones? You want to come for our campfire? You want to come sing with us? Come join us.” That's what we do every single campout. We just invite other troops over if they're like, “Hey, what are you guys about?” We're like, “Come find out. You want to have some cake? We got some cake. We have an older guy over here who likes to cook cake in a crockpot. We've always got more, so come on in.” I think that's helped, at least with our troop. We are kind of accepted in the community. Our last charter, that I said I wouldn't mention their name, they didn't want to be affiliated with us anymore because of the rumors affiliated with BSA. But they have come out and admitted it was a problem that is being targeted. My personal opinion is that there are certain institutions running the troops that were already breeding grounds for that kind of behavior. They are no longer affiliated with the BSA. With our scouting unit, I think the biggest issue that really needs to change is involvement, not just of girls affiliated with troops who have a lesbian couple running it. Even just within Utah, either a female Scoutmaster or someone who is more open to the idea. I know a lot of young women are not comfortable with being told and mansplained how things work when they already learned it in Cub Scouts, or if they didn't learn it in Cub Scouts, they learned it growing up. “Well, I'm gonna teach you how to do it now.” “Oh. Cool.” You're going to get girls to leave if that happens. They're not really cool with it. You're going to get their brothers leaving, too, and their parents leaving, looking for somewhere else to go. 70 Joining the scout troop/Boy Scouts of America has been kind of an experience for me as well. I used to be LDS; no longer am. My experience with them is that the LDS church ran it, so it's kind of nervous going in, like, “How is this going to be run? A nondenominational scout troop, and the scout leaders are a lesbian couple. How is that going to work?” I was excited. I'm like, “Yes, please, married lesbian couple. We're married too!” Utah, it's male/female, male/female, male/female. Having two women married, it's like, “What is that? How does that work? Who's the top? Who's the man and who's the woman?” “That's not the point.” FC: Does there have to be a man and a woman? EB: I mean, in some cases. That’s between the couple, though; it shouldn't matter to anyone else. It's nobody else's business. A and I brought our kids into the BSA troop after she had already been out as a woman, and she and I have been living our lives as a lesbian couple. Me exploring my identity as well, which—I’m still getting there. Mind you, exploring my identity didn't start till four years ago. IO: I’d love to talk about that and also the Mama Dragons. Can we take a quick break first? EB: Of course. [Recording ends for a break.] [Recording begins again.] IO: What is your experience with Mama Dragons? EB: I was just perusing Facebook one day and saw Mama Dragons. My mother-in-law is also a member of Mama Dragons, and I thought, “Okay, let's check it out, see how it works.” I haven't been affiliated with Mama Dragons for very long, but so far the experience has been incredibly welcoming. I haven't had an issue to bring up yet. Most of what I've looked into and questioned is then researched and done 12 years 71 ago when I first came out. I've always looked into things myself and done my own research, and reliable articles. Not very many questions on my end, but there are a lot of mothers who get in there and have questions and concerns to bring up about their kids and their baby dragons. It's a positive environment. It's welcoming. I met a Mama Dragon in person at the first event that I met you guys at, in Davis County. She's a member of the LDS Church, and the first thing I did was hug her. That would not be in my mind. Here's someone that's LDS—you're not safe unless I've known her prior. We had a conversation about it. There was a Mama Dragons booth at that same event and I hugged them too. It was just like, “Can I have a mom hug?” “Yes, of course!” I was kind of struggling at the time, and I needed a mom hug. I needed to feel like I was in a space where I was okay to be myself. That's what they make it feel like—not just for me, for others too. IO: That’s their mission statement, basically. EB: Yeah. Being a Mama Dragon myself, a few people have mentioned it or seen a sticker that I have. They are just like, “Oh, you're a safe person.” I think that's part of why I like that. My oldest lets their friends know. A lot of them call me Mom. A lot of them know that if things happen at home and they need a place to stay until they figure something out, my door's open. Nobody has a right to kick out their own child, absolutely no one. Nobody has the right to ostracize their child for existing. I've experienced that; unfortunately, my ‘twin’ brother has also experienced that, as I've mentioned previously in the interview. I don't stand for it. From what I could tell, Mama Dragons feel the same; they would take anyone in, in a heartbeat. 72 IO: That's great. Last little bit about yourself. You mentioned coming into your identity in the last four years. We've heard a lot about your youth, but what's happened recently? EB: It kind of all started when A came out to me. That's one thing about me. I don't out another person without speaking to them first. I have always been the type of person who cares. For a little while, I did become lost and suicidal. I had suicidal thoughts and had a plan. This was five years ago, about a year after my father passed away. When he passed away, everything changed for me. My dad became one of my best friends. He did his best accepting A for who she was, and he was the only one who did. As he got older, a few months before he passed away, that did change. He had a heart attack; a few. I really do think that started to affect his brain. Alzheimer's does run in my family on my dad's side. My grandfather passed away with Alzheimer's, and I started seeing signs in my dad a few years before he died. He was calling me different names. He would confuse me with his sister. Sometimes he'd slip up and call me M, his wife. I treated it just like we do with my grandpa. “I know, Papa, it's okay.” “I meant deadname, I'm sorry.” He used to call me Emmy, Poozie, Bootiepoo, Baby, Baby Girlses, Trouble [laughs.] Stinker, Little Shit, Shithead. He had a lot of names for me. His memory issues got a lot worse a few months before he died. One day, he and I were sitting down and he explained, “You really do look a lot like your Aunt N.” I was like, “I don't see it, but okay.” Treat it like it was normal. “Really? Tell me more.” He and I talked about it. My oldest was sick, and they got really sick one day. My dad had these little shots that he was trying to give them, like an extra vitamin booster. We had the flu 73 or whatever, to help boost your immune system. They weren't the flu shots, they were the extra immunity boosters. So I called him over when the kids had a fever spike, and Tylenol wasn't working. Doctors were like, “Well just give him a lot of rest,” and that was the only answer they could give. It was just a cold, so no antibiotics. I'm like, “Can you come take a look at him, give him an adjustment?” He'd offer, and I’d be like, “Please, Papa.” When a mother has a sick child, it's hard to take care of the other one and also take care of the house. It was exhausting, and having him there, just a phone call away... When I hear the song [sings lyrics] “I'm only one call away, I'll be there to save the day,” I still tear up. That song came out soon after that, and the song was “One Call Away”. That song came out the year he died. I heard it after his funeral. Having him there, just call and he'd come. He'd call and be like, “Hey, I'm five minutes away.” At the time, it's irritating, but when they're gone, you wish you had it again. When he came over to give K that shot, him and A kind of got into a little argument, a fight. My dad would slip up a lot and call her by her deadname and refer to A as my husband. I was like, “Okay, it's a memory.” I would just nicely remind him, “Well Papa, it's A now.” "Oh, right. I'm sorry, I meant A.” He was genuine about it, and he was apologetic about it. The year after, everything changed. Within that same year, I had to drop out of school. I couldn't do it. That was the first time that I was going to Weber, and that was the very first time I had to take a leave through Weber. I should have done it when my mother passed away; I might have passed spring semester, but I didn't because I thought I'd be fine. 74 Five years ago, the year after he died, so many different things happened, and I wanted to leave. I wanted to die. It's happened to me before, and the only thing that kept me around is my kids. This time, not even my kids did, because their life would have been better without me at the time. I had a plan, had everything set up. I was going to ‘go to work,’ but actually drive off the cliff in Eden, close to where my dad was buried. But something just took over, and I went to work anyway. I broke down at the self-checkout; called down one of the HR. She had been working with me for a long time, and she and I grew really close. Called her down, asked for help, and they put me on leave to get the help I needed. I'm thankful for that because that leave made me realize that the job I had was part of my downfall. I couldn't work a job like that and pretend I don't care about people. I completely become something opposite of myself. I went through therapy, medication, and started exploring. I cut off all my hair that same year, right after my dad died. I was rocking a faux hawk for a while. Before it became a faux hawk—I didn't do this on purpose—but I guess the first haircut looked like G-Eazy's hair. I had styled it like that too. I was like, “I like the ‘50s style.” I'd style it back with a comb and everything. Because of [my coworkers] saying that, for Halloween, I had this black bomber vest, and its sleeves looked like… what are those jackets called that you get in high school? FC: Letterman jackets. EB: Letterman, yes. It looked like a letterman jacket. My wife has one. It was lighter; it obviously wasn't an actual one, it just looked like it. Very ‘50s style. Styled my hair back, puffed it up pretty good. Had the cropped jeans, and I stood there with my hands in my pockets at self-checkout the whole time, chewing gum. There was a Jay-Z-like guy dressed up as a 50s rocker dude. He saw me at self-checkout and he's like, “You look like you belong in that era.” 75 I'm like, “I'm glad I'm not in that era, but thank you. I look a lot like my dad, don't I?” He goes, “Yeah, you do.” They took a picture and that picture—I lost it; I don't know what happened. I wish I still had it. Around the same time, a picture of my dad came up and I had my short V-neck, white shirt underneath the black letterman, blue jeans and hair slicked back. The picture I saw looked like my dad. It was like side-by-side twins. He was born in 1948, so it had been ‘67, somewhere around there, but it looked like him. After I started feeling better and getting the help I needed, I felt like I was okay enough to start growing my hair out again. Cutting off all my hair was part of my mourning process. I didn't bury it with him because the rest of my family is just kind of like, “Oh, no, we're LDS.” That was a small part of our culture: honor our father, honor the dead. I grew my hair again, and I got a new job during the time I was growing out my hair again. That job didn't last long. For a while, my life was work. That was all I could manage to do for four years because finding my new normal was too hard to figure out. During that time when I had my hair shorter was when I started thinking. I had also lost a lot of weight and I was like, “I look really, really masculine.” I know it was probably just the hair. I've put on some weight since then and my face has rounded out a bit, but I started questioning whether I was transgender. I was like, “Okay, let's not go too far yet.” I started exploring they/them, and at that time, I was identifying as pansexual, but not they/them; not non-binary. I wasn't out at either job, and I just let them say whatever they wanted because I was exploring they/them, exploring being non-binary, but I didn't really care enough. I tried to be strict and identify with a label. Some are comfortable with 76 labels, some are not. I am not. I'm one of those where it doesn't matter to me. If it matters to you, I will respect that. You want to call me she/her, he/him, they/them, it, thing, gremlin—I don't care. I'm just like, “Okay, I'll be a gremlin.” Eventually that exploration went extreme, identifying strictly as she/her, simply because I had kids; simply because I was pregnant, so I had to be a woman to have this. I have to be female. Then, A began introducing me to the idea of, “Well, no. You’re going from one extreme to almost going to the other extreme.” A was a big supporter. I didn't expect her to be. My thoughts and what's in my mind are my business, so I didn't pressure her to do anything in any way. She was like, “If you identify as male, that's okay. I just want you to know that.” I was like, “Oh okay.” Going from one extreme to this extreme middle-ground has kind of led to my realization that it's just what I've been all along. I don't care. It's not that important to me. What's more important is the soul. That's another part of my realization and exploration: I've come to realize what's important to me in a relationship is someone's personality. In every relationship, the question of sex comes up. I enjoy sex with my wife. If the opportunity was posed with someone else, probably not. I'm not really interested. I don't know right now if that's still holdover from how I was raised, religious-based. I do find other people attractive and the thought has come across my mind. Because I'm still exploring that, there's a twinge of shame when I see an attractive-looking woman or attractive-looking man and I think, “Oh, they're nice-looking.” So as of right now, pronouns: don't care. She/they; don't actually care. As far as relationships and male/female preference: my wife. IO: That's sweet. 77 EB: I think people are beautiful. There are people out there who are like, “Oh, that's a nice butt,” like in high school. I still look at someone and I'm like, “Oh, you're cute,” but I'm not entirely, for sure, put-down positive yet. Still exploring. I think my mental health journey and both of my parents being gone has really helped open up that exploration because I don't have to talk to my parents about it. I know that's terrible to say, but… IO: No, it makes sense. EB: Having abusive, narcissistic parents dead, there's literally nothing they can do. There's literally no pressure there. They can't call me and send me a really long text message of a million things that are just guilt trip after guilt trip. It kind of throws the door open. IO: I think we should move on to a couple wrap-up questions. What would you say to your younger self? It's always a difficult one, I know. EB: Oh, boy. [Pauses to think, then quietly] “I got you.” IO: Similarly, what would you say to someone going through a similar situation to yours? EB: Probably the same thing, honestly. “I got you.” IO: Anything you'd like to add to your story? EB: I've already said so much. For some out there who may still be in the closet, or not in a safe situation to come out, or feel like it's not their time yet, I want to let them know that it does get better. Sometimes it's not the best thing to hear, but little-bylittle, inch-by-inch, day-by-day, second-by-second, keep moving. Keep living. IO: Last one. This is very tentative, but if we keep the project going, would you be interested in being re-interviewed in the future? EB: Of course. Hey, invite the crazy person. 78