Oral History Program Colte Rindlesbach Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 15 July-22 August 2022 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Colte RIndlesbach Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 15 July-22 August 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: Rindlesbach, Colte, an oral history by Lorrie Rands, 15 July-22 August 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 Colte Rindlesbach conducted over three interviews between July 15 and August 12, 2022, with Lorrie Rands in the Stewart Library. Colte talks about growing up in Northern Utah and coming to understand his sexuality. He shares his origins with drag and how he began to perform in drag shows, and the impact that had on his identity. Colte also talks about his mental health and the struggles this added to his life. Also present was Sam Young for part one, Marina Kenner for part two, and Raegan Baird for part three. Trigger warning: This interview has references suicidal ideations and sexual assault. LR: Today is July 15, 2022. We are in the Stewart Library at Weber State University with Colte Rindlesbach doing an oral history interview for the Queering the Archives project here in Special Collections. I'm Lorrie Rands conducting; Sam Young is with us. One of the things I've done with all of these is begin with pronouns and how we fit into the queer community. As my boss calls me, I'm still a baby gay. I'm still learning. CR: I mean, if you're not learning constantly, something's wrong. LR: Exactly. I'm going to start. My pronouns are she/her and I am gay. SY: I use he/him and I am queer. CR: He/they, and I'm gay. LR: Thanks, everybody. So which do you prefer? They or he? SY: Interchangeable. 50/50, either/or. LR: You don't have a preference? CR: No. LR: That will make it easier. 1 CR: That's a relatively new discovery for myself too. Turns out dressing as a woman every now and then does weird things for your gender identity. LR: I can only imagine. I'm kind of excited to hear about that process. Thank you for your willingness to share your story. I'm just going to ask you when and where you were born? CR: Oh, good question. I was born in West Jordan, Utah, in 1999. A little bit after I was born, that's when my parents adopted me. LR: I didn't realize you were adopted. CR: Yeah, I was adopted at birth, but I was technically a ward of the state for six months, and I just learned about that one like a week ago. LR: Interesting. Let me settle into this new discovery. CR: My biological mother actually left a section of her collection of journals because she's made them since she was small enough to start writing. She actually gave me the nine months she was pregnant with me. It's wonderful. Super cool. I'm very lucky that I was able to get that. LR: Have you always known who your birth mother is? CR: Yeah, actually, I spend time with her every now and then. I don't trust anyone else to color my hair, I'm going to be honest. She works as a hairdresser, and she’s always kind of shown up. She's a lot closer to an aunt than a biological mom. LR: That's super interesting. Born in West Jordan, did your adoptive parents pick you up from there? I don't know the process. CR: You're good. If you're okay with that, I'll start with what happened with my biological mom up to when I was birthed. My biological mother was going to college in Kansas. I don't want to give incorrect information, but she was on an indigenous person scholarship for college out there, I believe. She was out there and she made a couple of friends while going to school. She would party and hang out, regular 2 college things. She met C, my biological father. Her and C started dating. They thought each other was super cool. C was an artist. I think he also ran a skateboard shop around the time, too. Right now there's that TikTok trend going around where it's like, “He's a ten, but…” and it was very much one of those situations. He was an artist and he was helping run a skateboard shop and he was really funny and really attractive. He was a 10. My biological mom, they got really close. It's been a while since I read the journals or asked about it—the subject's kind of touchy when I bring it up with my biological mom, understandably. Not quite sure how or when I was conceived, but it was around that time when my biological mom ended up finding out she was pregnant. The first person she called was one of her friends, I think that was an ex-boyfriend. I get a bunch of stories when I talk to her about it. Some of it's more about my biological extended family, and it kind of goes in and out, so the timeline's kind of weird. I usually get a web of stories about my history, not a straight timeline. I know she called her friend, let him know, and then she called her family. From what I understood they weren’t the happiest but pretty supportive, which, honestly, that's great. Not a lot of people get that kind of reaction, so she was super lucky in that sense. When she found out, I believe she came back home to Utah with her pregnancy to have her mother and father help her out. She carried me, but then leading up to my birth, things got kind of complicated between my mom and my biological father. My biological father was a bit of a partier and pretty hippie-ish. To quote my biological mom, “If there's one thing I can't stand, it's a hippie.” I think that's great. I love that so much, because more times than not when she talks about my biological father, she's respectful about it and tries her best not to talk bad about him. She tries to make it very, very clear. She's like, “I don't want it to sound biased, but I want to make sure you get the information about what happened,” which is 3 awesome. But naturally, when you talk about something that was a pivotal point in your life, it's hard to not bring emotion into it. So from what I understand, what happened with C is he wanted to keep me and be a father and all of that. But my biological mom had a couple prerequisites, things that he had to do in order for her to consider, “Sure. Let's do this.” Again, it's been a hot minute since I read the journals and the timeline is a bit skewed. One of them was being able to keep a job for a long enough time and be more stable financially. Another one was to stop drinking. I think the other one was just kind of to be there. I am here now, so not quite all the stipulations were met. I'm not quite sure in what way they weren't met without giving inaccurate information, but the stipulations weren't met. That's when my biological mom decided to put me up for adoption. The consideration lasted through the adoption process a little bit, so that kind of conversation between my biological mother and my biological father was still kind of happening there. I was put up for adoption through the LDS Adoption Agency. I'm not sure if they're still around or not. Theater of the mind, that's when it cuts to my parents. My parents had been together for a little bit. My mom grew up in Eureka, a smaller town in central Utah. It's like on the way to Delta. Super, super small town. My dad, I believe, grew up in Sandy, that kind of area. The way my mom and my dad met was that my dad and his dorm roommate were talking one day. His dorm roommate was from Eureka. They were doing the guy thing and talking about girls and his roommate was like, “I know there is this one really spiritual girl, she's super cool, really sweet; takes care of the people around.” Really talking my mom up. My dad was like, “Really?” His friend was like, “Yeah.” From what I can remember, his roommate gave him a picture of my mom. 4 My dad went, “Cool.” Then he drove to Eureka. I'm not sure how long that time period was before he did, but he drove to my mom's hometown. I believe my mom was a senior at the time, and my dad was in the first year of college, a freshman. So he drove down to Eureka. I think it was band rehearsals, ‘cause my mom was a percussionist. He went to the high school, found my mom, and said, “You're L, right?” My mom went, “Yeah, but who were you?” Then my dad introduced himself, explained the whole thing. He said, “Hey, our mutual friend told me about you, and I just had to meet you.” From there, they just started talking and dating and stuff. I think my mom was 17 or 18 when they started dating. Since he lived in Sandy and it was such a far drive, he would drive down to go see my mom on the start of a weekend, and then he would sleep in his car. They would spend the day together, he would sleep in his car, and then they would spend the next day together. I think at one point, my dad washed his hair in a trough. It's really interesting to see what the extended family dynamic is because my mom is the oldest of seven siblings. I think my dad's the oldest of five. Because they started dating so young and all their other siblings were so young, it's really interesting to see what my parents' dynamics are in these families. With some of my aunts and uncles, it's always been those two. They've always been there, since they were young. So it's fascinating. My mom graduated high school. My dad turned 19. He halted his going to college and he went on his mission. They had been dating and my dad said, “Hey, it's going to be two years. Two years is a long time. Just letting you know, it's cool if you meet someone else. Promise.” 5 My mom was like, “Yeah, no, totally. Absolutely.” I think she went on one date over those two years. I'm not sure what the odds are, but my mom was, from what I understand, one of the few that actually waited the full two years. So they got back, and I think two months after, my dad ended up proposing and they got married. LR: What year was that, do you know? I know I’m asking a lot. CR: I can't, off the top of my head. LR: No worries. CR: My dad was 23 when they ended up adopting me, and then my mom was 21 because they're two years apart. So I'm not quite sure. That's about the time they adopted me. After they got settled in with their relationship and after getting married and stuff, they started looking seriously at having a kid. They tried a couple of times, but my mom wasn't able to fully conceive. She went through a couple rough patches before she found out that her body was just not able to. My parents were like, “Cool. Adoption, right? That's the next option.” That was kind of the decision. They went to the LDS Adoption Agency and then they started looking at kids and families and stuff. My biological mom put in her description of what she was looking for to give her kid a family. It was a couple that was strong in the church, had strong beliefs. Later, I found out that she's very good at being happy for her kids, being happy that they're happy. Her idea and want was that if I was raised in the church, it would give me a checklist of things that I wanted for my beliefs. She believed that it would give me a stable foundation on what to build on when building my own beliefs. It wasn't as much of an issue to me, and I stayed in the church. At least it gave me something to build belief on, which is super interesting. Knowing that that was the mindset, looking back like, "Alright, yeah, okay, cool." Those were kind of the requirements, and then she wanted the family to be stable financially. If 6 there's one thing my dad's always been good at, it's finances. He's phenomenal with that. Wish that was something I picked up from him. So those were kind of a few of the things. During the adoption process, my biological mom didn't communicate with my dad. The more that my biological mother knew my mom and my dad and got to know them, the more my biological mom was like, “That's the home. That's where he needs to go.” My biological father, around the time that I was born, was pretty hesitant to sign his rights away. It took him a minute. I think it was not right up to the last second, but it was pretty close to my birth. Because I have a certain retention percentage of native blood, I was a ward of the state for six months, waiting to see if the Cherokee Nation wanted to adopt me instead of my parents. LR: I didn't realize that was a thing. CR: Yeah. I think there's a law in place right now that any indigenous children that are put up for adoption, the native tribes have first rights to them. There was a law that was placed there to prevent the destruction of the culture, because there was actually a whole problem with missionaries ‘adopting children,’ or taking children from the nations and then raising them in a culture that's not the indigenous one. SY: My grandma had “Indian children,” she called them. They were not her kids. LR: Is your biological mother… I'm going to butcher this. CR: Go for it. LR: What percentage of Cherokee blood, do you know? CR: I think there's a lot of tribes there. I know the two big ones are Caddo and Cherokee. I think that Caddo is the higher percentage. As far I've been told—I haven't quite had the chance to trace it back genealogically. I should ask my mom— I am a direct descendant of Sequoyah in the Cherokee tribe. The one who helped 7 make the written language, from father to son, from father to son, and where I'm at now. LR: That's pretty cool. Was your biological father Indigenous? CR: Yeah, he's from the Cherokee Nation. Again, it's a percentage. LR: Okay, so both of your biological parents. That's pretty cool. CR: It's brought up a lot of weird questions I've had to ask myself about. It kind of stirred into my identity because one of the few questions that kind of came up with my parents and my biological mom when I was growing up was like, “If you want to register him, we'll get the papers and things like that. If he's registered, there's sometimes benefits like tax stuff.” So when I grew up, I was 18, I had to ask myself a couple of hard questions, I was raised in an upper-middle-class white family. If I were to get registered now, would that be taking advantage of a culture I wasn't raised in? Is it me taking away from a culture that I wasn't raised in, but is it part of my heritage? Is it part of my blood? I know nothing about it, and so that's still questions that I can't fully answer. I don't think I would be able to fully answer until I come across an Indigenous person I can ask these questions to because a little bit of it trails off into a space where it's not my right to say. LR: Super interesting. Have you ever met your biological dad? CR: Yesn't. Not in person. I kind of was no-contact, just ‘cause I never really had the chance to. Shortly after my 18th birthday, that would be July 25, 2017, I asked my biological mom, “Hey, I'm thinking about talking to my biological father. Just curious.” She's like, “Well, I have his phone number if you want to talk to him. Give him a call. Now you can.” That was a little difficult for me, mostly it's just because it's weird. I'm not sure if this counts as a paradox or not, but it's somebody who's by definition family but didn't raise you. They know you personally exist, and you 8 personally know they exist, but there's no emotional connection. Do you go off of just a straight blood connection and lead into that, or do you treat them like a stranger and then go from there? That was interesting. I ended up taking the call, but then being a little too nervous to talk. It was just kind of like, “Well, what are you doing now that you graduated from school?” Regular distant relative questions. The call went okay, and shortly after I added him on Facebook, but now on his birthday, I'll send him a message, like, “Happy birthday.” I think at the start of the pandemic, my biological father gave me a video call and said, “Hey, people are getting really sick and some are dropping like flies. I just want to make sure you're safe.” I was like, “This is different. This is weird.” It was really funny because my partner—I'm engaged—was in the car with me when my biological father started the video call. It came out of the blue. We were on our way back home from picking up food. I was like, “What do I do? Do I pick it up? Do I just respond with a message?” He's like, “Obviously you got to pick it up. That's an opportunity that just dropped in your lap.” I was like, “What do you mean?” He's like, “You pick it up. You're not reaching out to them. They're reaching out to you, and you have no reason to not talk to them. They haven't taken money out of your account or sabotaged any relationships. So go for it.” That's kind of why I picked up that phone and had that conversation. LR: I'm going to ponder some questions on that. But while I do, let's move on to your parents. They pick you up and take you where? CR: They took me to our first home in Riverdale. I believe it was one that my dad built himself. We lived there for two years, if I remember correctly, and then we moved to our second home in Riverdale. Five blocks away is another home that my dad built, 9 but there was a little bit more space on the property. That was his first detached garage home. I think I lived there up until my first-grade year. I went to kindergarten there. I made a couple of friends. One of them I got super close with. He was really nice, really sweet. A good best friend for a kindergartener. In that home was around the time that they adopted my little sister as well. It's just me and my sister. I only have one sibling. They adopted my sister from her biological mother, who flew here from Florida, I believe. Gave birth to my sister. I believe she flew back when she was able to. It was very much, “Baby's out, time to transfer the baby, and then done.” Granted, I'm pretty sure that her biological mom did hold the baby and they were able to take a photo of her. I believe my parents gave that photo to my sister and let her have it all growing up. My sister and I were raised knowing that we were adopted as soon as my parents were able to communicate with us. LR: From what you said, you moved from the second Riverdale home in the first grade. Is that when you moved to Layton? CR: That's when I moved to Layton. Actually, a little bit with the kindergarten and preschool in Riverdale—I think that was the first time my mom got an idea that I was queer in some way. One of the moments that my mom told me, “I kind of had an idea,” when I came out was, I asked to marry that kindergarten friend. I was like, “I'm going to marry you.” My mom was like, “I don't know. I don't think two boys can get married,” you know, the regular stuff before a parent knows. I think that's one of the first memories I have, thinking, “Oh, not normal.” I have a few memories from kindergarten. They're like if you were to write on a piece of paper and then have the ink still be wet, smear the ink a little bit. That's kind of what the memories are. I do remember emotions tied with the memories a lot more than just the memories themselves. I think 10 somewhere around that time was kind of when I got an emotional memory of, “Oh, not normal. Don't talk about that.” My brain kind of switched from like, “Don't express that.” Shortly after it was when I started mentioning marrying a little girl that was in my class instead, the way kids do. LR: That kind of leads into the question of, what were you taught about gender roles growing up? CR: That's an interesting question. My mom comes from a super artistic family. I have an aunt that's been in two or three bands. I have a grandpa who played on one of the smaller stages at the Utah Olympics when they were here. A bunch of painters and a bunch of more artistically inclined people, so my mom's idea on gender identity was a lot more flexible. Any time I showed more feminine traits or more emotional traits, my mom was like, “It's fine. You're just an artist. That's what artists do.” I think her one stipulation, one hard-set line and boundary was that I couldn't show more femininity than my mom would show, which is really interesting to grow up with. More or less, I was able to express myself. I could put on fashion shows. My dad didn't talk much about it. My communication with my dad hasn't always been great, but my dad did his best to instill the ‘guy things,’ like being tough when you feel pain. He got semi-frustrated with crying, just the regular dad things to teach. He wanted me to be better with my hands and learn how to build my own things and fix my own stuff. Granted, it never really clicked. It just didn't ever feel natural to me. I know how to do things, it just doesn't click. The ideals and the ideas that I was raised on was a combination of the two. LR: You mentioned your mom's spirituality. I'm assuming that both your parents were raised within the predominant religion here. How did that manifest, being raised in that culture? 11 CR: It manifested in all the ways I feel like it normally does. My dad is very strong-willed, also extremely spiritual. My parents are both part of the LDS faith; they are very predominant in that LDS faith. My dad has never sworn—I think he said he's sworn once, but through sheer willpower he's never sworn, other than that one time because he got in trouble. He used stand-ins, sure, but I don't think I've ever heard him actually full-on curse, purely because it was wrong. It wasn't good to curse. It was something he had to repent for, and so because it was something that you had to repent for, he just didn't do it. Spirituality was in the home all of the time and it was extremely present, always. Feelings were expressed in ways that the feelings were also tied to spirituality. Lessons were always taught with a little bit of spirituality mixed in. My parents were really good about trying to do the family home evenings, which is where you meet up once a week and then talk. It's like homeschool Sunday school. Now that I think about it, like there was a lot, it was a lot to put anyone in. It was a lot of spirituality. Everything was just kind of intertwined with it. My parents did their best to teach both me and my sister everything they could. LR: Okay. So you move to Layton, you've had a couple of experiences where you don't quite remember, but you're realizing you're a little different. Talk about coming to terms and figuring yourself out as you're in elementary school. Tell me your favorite memories. CR: Oh, wow. There was a lot that was happening. I do have quite a few memories still from elementary school. Instead of playing sports and stuff at recess, I would usually play fantasy games using our imagination, like D&D but without dice. Now that I think about it, it was a lot of fun. We would all kind of roleplay the characters we made up at recess and we made our own stories. 12 I think elementary school’s where I started to really pick up on my neurodivergency. I have ADHD and bipolar disorder, fun fact about me. The ADHD really started to show itself in kindergarten a little bit. I was always out of my seat walking around, could never focus, the regular things you would see in childhood ADHD. It got kind of rough in elementary school. My teachers were good, they tried really hard. They were great teachers. I think it because I went to Layton Elementary, I don't think I had a single bad teacher, at least one not that wasn't trying. I think that was around the time that I noticed that I started falling behind because of it. I kind of picked up on that. Times tables were never nearly as fast as other kids, concepts with numbers and math just never clicked. There was nothing that really held my attention long enough. By the time tests and stuff came up, I did okay. I honestly think I did better than most teachers expected me to, with how much I messed around in class. I never did homework, ever. I had so many missing assignments. I think third grade is when I started not going to recess anymore because I had so many missing assignments. The teachers would just keep me in. That was rough, to say the least. Not sure how long elementary school is anymore, but it was like 8 to 3:30, being in the physical class the entire time. I think that there were a couple of times where because of how far behind I was, even with our computer classes, where you could go on to like any game site on free days, I don't think I was allowed to participate in those because I was so far behind on my schoolwork. Anything that was remotely fun, I wasn't able to do. I don't think any teachers really caught it. But looking back on it now, I can't really blame the teachers because there was 29 to 30 other students in every class. It's really hard to pay attention to 30 kids all at once. I started to struggle pretty bad. The only thing that my parents really had to go off of was just my grades and all the missing assignments I had, so that was kind 13 of just. I think that was around the time that my dad started to really crack down, getting closer to the authoritarian vibes in the household. I do know around that time was when I really started to focus more on my relationships with friends and building that safe space away from my parents. Thinking about it now, I'm not sure if that's really young to start doing that or not, but that's kind of when that started developing too. I think it was fourth grade, I started making my closest friends. I had a ton of friends within school and then within the ward, and then I had two of my closest friends. I'm not sure if I want to use names or not. SY: We can change them later. LR: If you want to drop names, that's fine. You can literally put in pseudonyms or just Friend 1, Friend 2. You just talk as you want and we will change it later. CR: Cool. Name dropping helps me tell the story, because it makes it less confusing. One of my closest friends was KB. I adored him so much. Oh, my God, I think he was my legitimate first crush. We met in fourth grade because that's when his family moved up. Around the same time, another family moved in, DM. I hung out with him all the time. He taught me my love for video games through storytelling. I didn't get out a ton before I started making these friends, and so I felt like I was pretty socially awkward as a kid. I just kind of said what was on my mind all the time. I had a hard time reading a room. I still, to this day, have a hard time reading the room sometimes. He kind of taught me how to understand social dynamics. LR: When during this time did you begin to notice that you were different? CR: I kind of really always knew, if I'm going to be honest. It's always just been there. One of the first things I remember telling my mom where I was genuinely trying to connect was like, “I'm different from a lot of other people. I'm meant to do different things.” That was one of the first things I brought up to my mom that I think was a 14 complex thought instead of a little kid trying to talk. Shocked my mom a little bit. But yeah, it's always been there. It's always been in the back of my mind. Looking back on it, with KB, I always felt like I had feelings for him that were very different from everyone else that I was around. As much as a child can, I emotionally clicked with him. He just kind of got me and that was super refreshing. I think it was genuinely one of my first crushes. Granted, all through elementary school, I lied. I'm going to be honest, I had the best strategy for telling other kids who I had a crush on. They would say, "Who do you have a crush on?" I would go, "I don't know. I don't want to say." They would go, "Is it this person?" I would go, "Yeah, absolutely. Yes." I realized that it flattered the other person because they were proud that they knew. Then they would do all the work for me when creating the playground romance, and I wouldn't have to do any of the work because that's great. I wouldn't have to go out of my way to pretend that I liked somebody. If somebody asked me, “Well, who do you like?” I would just go, “I don't know.” They were like, “Are you sure it's not so-and-so?” Then I would go, “You got me. Oh, no.” That was just kind of the pattern that I had any time something dramatic happens, like an emotional love interest. It's not like love because it's very much different, but sixth grade love. Whenever something dramatic was supposed to happen, other people exaggerate crushes and stuff. I think at one point I had a friend who was like “Colte, your crush is roller skating with another dude.” I went, "Oh, no, I am hurt." I've always been kind of really empathetic, really good with my emotions. I knew what emotional hurt was supposed to feel like, or at 15 least look like, and I knew what it truly felt like. More times than not, I convinced myself it's supposed to hurt. LR: I'm curious what you were taught about sexuality growing up, or if you were? CR: This actually is really interesting. Can I be, like, not explicit… As blunt as possible? It was both very direct, but also not direct at all. My mom got her degree in social work, so she was aware of certain signs, like if something's wrong with your child or when your child was a target, that kind of stuff. Because of her degree in counsel work, she was concerned that my sister and I would be targets constantly, because during that degree, you hear nothing but worst-case scenarios. That's exactly what the degree is, so it's kind of hard to not have your brain jump there. So my mom kind of treated clothing and sexuality or that kind of concept as, “I’ll use some of this information to keep my kids safe, to prevent them from being targets,” which, I understand completely. Being a parent is incredibly hard, and wanting the best for them is top priority, but it led to things under the guise of modesty. With the LDS Church, it's a huge thing, under the guise of modesty. My mom wouldn't let us wear tank tops or shorter shorts. It was always around knee length. This happened because my mom was so scared of us being targeted. Interestingly enough, I'm thinking about it now and that’s the mindset of victim-blaming, but I won't go down that road because it's more of my story than anything. It created a weird relationship with my body. In terms of sexuality and stuff, my mom was blunt. My dad didn't talk about it much, but my mom was super blunt. When I asked what sex was for the first time, my mom straight-up told me. She used anatomical terms, she said what it was and then what it leads to, like babies. There was no barrier there. For that, I'm super grateful. The fact that my mom taught me something like that young made things way easier later on down the road. But the biggest thing was just it was always man 16 and woman. Any time there was something on TV, it was the regular reaction of like, “Maybe not.” There were just passive remarks. Hate to bring it into this, but in anime, sometimes when verbal insults are done, they animate it in a sort of way where the text box is sharp and it stabs the person. It wasn't quite that, but it wasn't not that. LR: You say that when there was stuff on TV. You mean in reference to... CR: Anything same-sex. Anything relatively queer, anything that hinted at it. It was just small remarks. Underhanded comments. Passive, more Mormon-y way about it. Backhanded compliments. SY: Like, nice-mean. CR: Yeah. Nice-mean. LR: Okay. That's interesting. CR: It was like, “Wow. Good for them, I guess. If they have to.” It was just some backhanded remarks. I would hear it from my grandma and my grandpa. Every now and then, something big would happen on TV, or political remarks would be made during award shows going, “Love is love.” I think it happened during a sports event or halftime show. My grandparents were like, “Well, why did they have to make it political?” It was always one of those things where it was treated as a politics thing and not as much as a person thing. Around fifth grade is when I really started to really notice it, like, “Oh, this is different. I'm not like these other people.” I remember one day in Sunday school in primary, they were talking about the different kingdoms that you would go to depending on what you do here on earth. I was looking at the board, I was looking at the other kids. I looked around and I was like, “I'm like nothing like these other kids.” So I looked at my Sunday school teacher and I was like, “I'm probably going to be in the middle one, to be honest. I know right now I'm going to that one.” 17 I feel so bad for that Sunday school teacher. She had no clue. I can't remember her name. She was so sweet. I think they were only in the ward for like a year or two, but they were so sweet. They were such a good family. By far my favorite Sunday school teachers, they were kind, they were nice. They took their time and they were patient with every kid in the room, which takes a lot, especially when you're not getting paid to do it. But I looked at the Sunday school teacher and I was like, “Yeah, I don't think I'm going to the top one.” She was weeping. I felt so bad for her. That had to be the hardest thing that she's ever heard in her life, but I knew it. I knew I wasn't like the other kids. Especially trying to compare myself to some of the other Boy Scouts— some of the other Boy Scouts in our ward were incredibly masculine. I spent a lot of my time with the other Boy Scouts, like ZC and the ones that my mom was with. The ones around my age and younger were… more in tune with their emotions would be the best way of putting it. LR: All right. Let's take a quick break because we've actually been doing this for an hour. [Recording pauses for break] [Recording resumes] CR: I think I left off with me making my Sunday school teacher cry. LR: Yes, we did. It's super interesting to me that you’ve kind of always known that you were different. What was your first exposure to queerness, to the queer community? CR: My aunts. I have two. I have one on each side of the family—I have more than a regular family. Granted how big my parents' families are, the statistics are there. My aunt Heidi, I'm not quite sure how she identifies, and I don't want to guess or assume, but right now, she's with her wonderful partner, Sarah. She was the first person on my mom's side of the family to come out. That was an event. My family dynamics with queerness, and my experience with my family, both extended and 18 my close family, is very much a situation of ‘my other family members walked so I could run’. They put in the work and they took a lot of the brunt and a lot of the heat of the initial dynamics that happened in my family. I believe my aunt came out first, and then my parents didn't talk about it cause why would they? I just knew that my aunt had a girlfriend. I think my parents said ‘friend’ at first, but then my aunt was like, “No, girlfriend,” to me. My mom's side of the family, it’s nothing but powerful women. I have an aunt that was almost done with her first degree, or had half of her credits needed for a degree, out of high school. Nothing but powerhouse women, and my aunt is very much one of those people where she didn't change the position of who she was to make others happy. She's always been very much like, “This is who I am. You either will love me or move on. In the end, it's your choice if you want to still see me or not.” Not just super compromising, but also really patient. She did deal with a lot of stuff, but she was super patient and she didn't budge on who she was. But she was also willing to put in the effort to make sure other people were able to understand her, within reason. So that was kind of my first example. My parents were nice enough to let me stay the night and stuff and have my aunt and her girlfriend at the time babysit me. My parents have always been, at least as far as I can remember—when it comes to family, if something bad happens or the family member does something bad, there's just a really firm ideal of, “We're family. We love each other because we're family, so we move forward because of family.” Whether my parents agreed with it or not, it was one of those things where, “We don't agree. We don't think it's good, but we're your family. Because of family obligations, we move forward.” That’s kind of that dynamic that my aunts and I have. LR: How old were you? 19 CR: I'd say seven or eight. SY: So, pretty young. CR: Yeah, seven or eight. Around middle school, my cousin on my dad's side of the family came out as gay. He went through a lot with my dad's side of the family. My dad's side of the family is pretty unnerving. If you've seen my dad and my grandmother talk, it's pretty much an unstoppable force meeting, and I'm kind of an immovable object. Everybody is very confident in who they are and very confident in their ideas, so it's been really interesting to see the ideals of family. We love each other. We're family. The obligation is there, then collides with the unmovable object of your personal morals, beliefs, and ideals. So what moves first? The family obligation, or the morals and the ideals, what they believe to be right and wrong? I had seen a lot of that. Amazingly, my dad's side of the family has been really good about coming out to them. There's still a long way, but I need to give them credit for the efforts they've put in. When my cousin first came out, my grandma cried a lot. It was kind of rough patches for a little bit. I haven't had a chance to ever talk to my cousin a lot about his experience. He grew up in Layton, and he's in LA now making mermaid tails, which is so cool. But yeah, I kind of was introduced to the concept of it at a pretty young age. LR: I'm going to skip to junior high. CR: Oh boy. LR: Yeah. Our favorite time for everyone. CR: This kind of gets dark. LR: Please only share what you're comfortable with. SY: But share anything you do want to share. CR: No, I am an open book. 20 LR: So moving into junior high now. I don't have a specific question, other than, what was that like for you, going through Junior High? CR: Oh, God. I'll start with sixth grade, because at least with seventh grade, a lot of shit happened. To be blunt, a lot of shit happened, and most of it was dark. To kind of set the context for it, I think it was right before seventh grade when they split the wards because Angel Crossing got too big. My two best friends, who were like my rock emotionally, people I super trusted, went to different wards. So when I went to church, which honestly was very uncomfortable for me, I just never felt like I fit in. I know half of me was purposely separating myself from the rest of the scouts, but I also felt like I couldn't connect with any of them. Every now and then, one or two of the other scouts would make a little bit of an effort for me. I just didn't have anything to connect with. I will admit, a lot of them were really pretty. Little queer me was really intimidated because there's all these pretty boys my age. I can't communicate with them. I don't have this connection. I just kind of felt more lonely. Then middle school started and my seventh-grade year was at Fairfield Junior High. This is also around the time that grades started to be looked at a lot more. I fell so far behind and I didn't have an idea of what was going on. My mom didn't have an idea of what was going on. Teachers didn't really know what to do to help me stop me from falling behind. I just was so far behind in middle school in terms of the basics. I couldn't do multiplication fast. My reading level, at the time, I don't think it ever went past the fifth grade. I read super slow and the classes got bigger. Not only did they get bigger, but teachers were teaching more than just that one class, so I fell behind further. Because I didn't really know what was going on, I didn't know what kind of questions to ask to get caught up or to get help. IEPs, Individual Education Plan, I didn't know that was a resource, my mom didn't even know that was a resource. It was rough because I fell behind. My grades got worse, 21 and because my grades got worse, tensions started to build in the home a little bit more. To set up a little bit more context with my family situation around this time too: my dad's always been super athletic or super willpower. Around seventh grade is kind of when my dad got into running. I think he started with a 5k and kind of built up from there, all the way to an Iron Man at one point, but that's way down the line. But he also worked long days. I think he worked 12-hour shifts. He ran his own framing company. More times than not, if he was close to being finished with the home, they would just stay longer and finish building the home. To him, it was just logical and made sense. Before an event happened, he tended to think more logically and more straightforward; there wasn't a lot of emotion behind it. In seventh grade, falling behind and school tensions building because of it, my dad can't understand why I'm struggling so much when I could just do it, because it's that simple. Just do it. I was really starting to notice what specifically was different about me. Boys’ locker rooms are a bitch. I think that what really settled it for me was the seventhgrade locker room where everyone was changing. I would go, “Oh, oh, I get it now.” That's kind of when that started to happen, it wasn't the full, “Oh, okay.” It was an, “Oh,” and then like a little bit more of a pause and then go, “Oh, this is going to be a whole situation.” One of my first thoughts was, “Oh, this is going to be a thing, and not a passing thing. This is a thing for me.” I think seventh grade is when my self-confidence started getting shot too. Middle school’s a terrible idea, the whole concept of it is just awful. I did the thing I normally do when someone asks me who my crush is, but now instead of just going, “Oh we have a crush on each other,” it's more of a, “Oh, ask them out.” That's the follow-up. So somebody was like, “Do you have a crush on this person?” 22 I was like, “Yeah, yeah, of course, sure. Absolutely.” Then they were like, “Go ask them out. Just walk up to her and ask her out.” I did that. The results were not good. I said, “Hey, do you want to go out sometime?” She looked at me and went, “Eww,” and then walked away. SY: Damn, kids are so mean. CR: It was one of those things where it was like, “Oh, that hurt. That's emotional pain.” That was one of the first instances that I've truly felt like, “Ow, okay. Wow, that was an emotional attack. That's what that was.” Then it made things awkward because I wanted to be nice. She later apologized to me and she's like, “But we're friends, right?” SY: Not after you said eww! CR: Me now would have been like, “No, you were rude. That was mean.” I like feeling good about myself, and I can't do that when I have someone around me whose first reaction to me asking you out was “Eww,” with the disgusted face. But middle school me was a goddamn doormat and just wanted to make everyone happy, so I was like, “Yeah, sure,” so we became pretty close friends. Middle school was also the time that I had my first hug that wasn't my parents, at least with a girl. It surprised me just because this girl's name was J. She was super cool, vibrant human being, super nice. Just different. She made me feel welcomed. One of the first things she said to me— I said something nice, I think, and she's like, “Can I hug you? That was super nice.” I was like, “Sure!” She hugged me, and then we kind of started being friends. I also made friends with the girl who… this friendship was a mistake, 100%. Her name was M. She was really talkative. She knew everybody's business. She was able to say and do whatever she wanted, starting drama, and for some reason, 23 people listened to it. Me, not being able to read the room, I said something along the lines of like, “No, I'm not gay. My mom just says I'm an artist, and that's kind of what happens with artists, they get mistaken that way.” She took that and started spreading rumors around middle school. Around that time I also had a bully. Not like a direct bully, but someone who's still kind of targeting me every now and then. The kind of the tensions between me and this bully started in elementary school, I think it was around fifth grade. We used to hang out and spend a lot of time with each other. His aunt was my neighbor. My sister kind of struggled a bit too with other people, but my sister was super mean, for a really long time. Not really mean, but didn't understand how to process things. So that kind of thing happened one day. She—wasn't sure if it was verbally or physically—took it out on this friend, and so this friend started calling my sister ‘devil’ and stuff. So this was back in fifth grade. I think it was in the restroom. He started calling my sister the devil. Like, “She's mean, she's terrible.” I was like, “Hey, you better stop.” He just kind of kept going, and I was like, “No, really. Stop. Last time I'm asking you to stop.” He didn't. He was like, “Yeah, whatever, she is the devil.” I felt something snap in my head. I turned around, and then just out of—it wasn't like pure rage. I'd say it's closer to concentrated rage because I was aware of what was happening. I knew what I was doing—I punched him in the back of the head. I think that's the only physical fight that I have truly been in, and it ended with the one punch. He kind of dropped a little bit, looked back at me, shocked. Then he went to the teacher, naturally, as one should if someone punches you. That kind of created tension between the two of us since then. Didn't get in trouble for that, by the way, because I told the truth. I straight-up said “No, he was insulting my sister, 24 and I told him to stop three times to give him many chances. Then I punched him in the head.” It's kind of hard to argue with that when the other kid is like saying, “No, I didn't do anything. He just punched me.” We both got a warning. So in middle school, we kind of took the emotional and verbal route with the tension that was between us. Which sucks, it really sucks. LR: All this was at Fairfield? CR: Yeah. Seventh grade. What a year to start out junior high. He leaned into that, then the gay thing, because that had started. He, really, truly leaned into it. It was rough. It's kind of weird. The bad headspace started. I had a rough time connecting with people around me. On my DSi, there was a little note app that had an online network thing where you can post your own footnotes and people can comment with a drawing and stuff. It’s called Flipnote Hatena. There were people in chat rooms that other people can chat in, and I would make friends online through these chat rooms on my DSi. They were nice to me. I ended up on the chat room for specifically gay people because I was curious, as one normally is. I started talking with some of the people in the chat room, and that's kind of when things really started to dawn on me, but I didn't want it to. That first seventh grade year was a culmination of not feeling welcome, having tension at home, having tension at school, and then understanding that there's people in these chat rooms that understand. But I can only be on those chat rooms at night, so I stayed up to like three in the morning most nights because it was a comfort thing. Then I would wake up at 6 AM to get ready to go to school. That's when I started falling asleep in classes, I know. But to be honest, at the time, not going on those chat rooms wasn't an option. LR: Was there anyone physically you could talk to? It was all just those chat rooms? 25 CR: Yeah, no. It was a lot of repression, not only sexuality. It's a weird experience, being bullied for being gay and then feeling like you're not gay, but also knowing you're gay at the same time. That's rough. I'm sure there's a German word for it. SY: Because you're 13, you're not a sexual being yet, but you realize it's happening. It's so confusing. I know exactly what you mean. CR: In all honesty, to be blunt, that's kind of like when I started looking at boys in a more promiscuous way. That's kind of when that kind of discovery started happening on the internet. Past seventh grade, past that one year at Fairfield Junior High, it was semiokay. But that one year had gotten so bad that I had helped my dad at one of his rentals, and he needed some help with the swamp cooler on the roof. I got on top of the roof, and my dad went down into the house for some reason. I just kind of stood on the ledge of the house for a lot longer than I wanted to and got honestly pretty close. Crazy close. Eventually, I just stepped away. I don't know why I did. I just kind of took a step back and sat on the house and then went, “It's bad bad.” But I still didn't talk to anybody. I'd repressed a lot of feelings. LR: Okay. I know this is a really shitty place to stop. CR: No, you're good. You're good. SY: The darkest moment of your life. LR: Yeah, we're going to stop. I kind of like the idea of stopping here at the end of your seventh-grade year, to then move on when we start again. Part 2- July 28, 2022 LR: It is July 28, 2022, and we are in the Stewart Library again with Colte Rindlesbach, hopefully finishing his oral history interview for Queering the Archives. I'm Lorrie Rands again, and Marina Kenner is with me today. So when we left off, you were 26 just finishing seventh grade and being transferred. You were going to start going to the North Davis Preparatory Academy. Is that what it was called? CR: Yes. LR: Okay. First off, I know NDPA was one of the first charter schools in Davis County that was successful. Do you know the history of the NDPA? CR: I didn't know the history of the school. What I can say is that I can see why it was successful. It was a really good school. My first year at NDPA was pretty good. A lot better than Fairfield, for sure. The class sizes were smaller; teachers were able to pay a little bit more attention to you. I made closer friends, ones that actually lasted and everything like that. With how small the school was, I was able to get the attention I really needed. That was kind of the main reason my parents switched me over from a larger public school. I was just really lucky that I got the lottery on our first try. Sorry, I'm trying to remember how that first year went. LR: It's okay. I can't remember if you've said it on camera, but you came out to your parents when you were 14. This would have been about the same time? CR: It would have been my ninth-grade year. LR: Okay. So having that first year at NDPA, where you're feeling like you belong, maybe even that you matter, did that help you feel more comfortable coming out, not only to yourself, but to your parents? CR: Well, my coming out story is a fun one. LR: Okay, sarcasm? CR: Oh, yeah. Nah, that eighth-grade year was really good. All the teachers were really good. All of them were really nice, really sweet. You could tell they genuinely cared about their students. Even the physical education teachers genuinely cared about their students and learning, so it made a world of a difference. I also had started making more genuine friendships with people who weren't all LDS, if that makes 27 sense. NDPA is one of my first school experiences where my friend group—most were LDS, sure, we’re in Utah. But I started getting exposed to non-LDS thought processes and not-as-LDS ideals. If there were people who I got close to that were LDS, they weren't super strict about it. It was really relaxed and very much the idea of, “I'm just going to love and care for you because I love and care for you.” My ideals and beliefs were separate from the people I was trying to get to know, which, world of a difference. That's kind of how my eighth-grade year went. I do want to mention that's when I met my language arts teacher Ms. R. She was a fantastic teacher. She genuinely cared about her students. She cared plenty about the curriculum she was supposed to teach, but it was more or less because she had to. We all understood what she had to teach us, we all got it pretty fast, but she put a lot of effort into making sure that we knew how to think for ourselves. One of the things she did was when we first started every school year, she would go, “Okay, cool. What are things that you want to learn about? Here are the things that I have to teach you, but what things in regards to language arts, communicating with other people, or what just existing is?” She didn't use those exact words, but it was things like, “Do you want me to teach you more about the lens of other people's experiences and how to get into the mindset of someone else? How to use what you know about someone else’s experiences to give you an idea of what they feel.” It was a lot of those kinds of concepts and ideas that she tried really hard to teach us. She did a pretty exceptional job, too. It was because of her teaching that I felt like I could actually put an effort into school and do all right. She brought up a couple different things that stuck with me. I wasn't sure if this was my eighth-grade year or my ninth-grade year. I had her as my language arts teacher throughout the two years, but there were two concepts she taught that really stuck with me. The first one was like, “When you're in middle school, you're 28 like goo.” She kind of compared it to butterflies and caterpillars and stuff like that. “When you start out, you're like a caterpillar. You know what you're supposed to do. Your parents tell you what to do, and you learn and develop just from the natural course of existing. But when you get to that middle school age, you're in a chrysalis. You're not entirely who you were, the kid who you were before, and you're not entirely sure of who you're going to be or what you're going to become. You're just goo.” Fun fact, in the transformation stage in the chrysalis, what actually happens is caterpillars completely deconstruct their DNA and then put it back together as a butterfly, so they have all of their genetic information needed for both. They turn into a goo and then go into the butterfly and rearrange the genetic stuff for that. That's what she kind of compared all of her middle school students to. She's like, “You're just goo. Where you go from here, you get to figure out and put yourself together the way you want. But you just need to realize that right now, you're goo. You're not entirely your own person, but you're also not not your own person.” That kind of led into the other things she taught us. She kind of explained, “You're getting to a point where since you're goo, you're going to have ideas and feelings that are not going to be the same as your parents. You are going to come across emotions and things that your parents probably won't want you to feel or won't want you to think that way. If it truly matters to you, you just need to say, ‘Hey, I feel this and I'm experiencing this, and that's what it is.’” She was like my first experience with creating boundaries of like, “No, this is my belief. This is who I am. That's going to be different from what you feel, and that's okay.” Those two things were the big things that stuck with me with that teacher. LR: Are you comfortable sharing your coming-out story? 29 CR: Yeah. Sorry, there's a more detailed version, and then there's a version that I kind of used to gloss over. LR: Share what you're comfortable sharing, and it doesn't matter either. It really doesn't. I want you to be comfortable, so if you'd rather do the glossed-over version, that's fine. CR: You know, it'll probably be good for me. Might be a little hard, but I'll do both. I'll live. So the glossed-over version, I'll kind of go over first. The glossed-over version is, my parents found out through someone else that I had been with someone. I want to clarify that this was a really, really dark time for me. This was ninth grade. Ninth grade is the time that I came out to one of my friends. I knew who I was. I knew why I was different. I finally admitted it to myself, but I could not be that person. I couldn't express it without fear of being in a lot of trouble. I repressed a lot of shit, and when you repress things, it never goes over well. You do things that you're not proud of, things you wouldn't do when you're in the right mind. So my parents found out about one of the things that was happening. They pulled me into their bedroom and said, “Hey, are you experiencing some homosexual feelings?” I said, “Let me stop you there. Yes. I didn't know when I was going to tell you. I knew it was going to be soon.” It kind of sucked because it was in April and I was planning on telling them in July. I was kind of there, but not all the way there to tell them. It just kind of sucked the way they found out, so that night was kind of rough. My mom cried for four-ish hours. At the time, I was still trying to do the whole gay and Mormon thing. It was a little rough. I felt so guilty and so ashamed that I think that night, I prayed for four hours straight. I was begging, I was saying, “I wish I wasn't gay.” I knew it was something I couldn't change. I knew that it was just part of me. But it was just a, “Why?” 30 The next day, I felt kind of better and it kind of got easier a little bit after that. My grandma started spending more time with me. My ninth-grade year ended pretty well. I was asked to give the farewell speech. It was me and the class president and then one other person. That made me feel pretty good. It was my language arts teacher who recommended it. That's the glossed-over version. The more detailed one—I want to verify again that I was repressed. I made a lot of choices that I would never make. Going back, I wouldn't do it. When I was repressed, I didn't have any way of showing it or being truthful. I started finding ways that I could experiment with the feelings I was feeling. It just so happened that at the time, my cousin was experiencing the same feelings as well. He and I experimented together a little bit, and I very much want to clarify, all of it was consensual. I know that with this kind of topic, it raises a lot of concerns and a lot of questions, but all of it was consensual. Wouldn't do it again. Absolutely a mistake. The way that my parents found out was because my cousin was talking with the therapist and was kind of explaining his feelings and how he was feeling those and why he was feeling those. It kind of came up and the therapist does what a good therapist does and goes, “Oh, that's a red flag.” So the therapist calls his mom, his mom calls my parents, and then an investigation is started. I kind of dug my own grave. Obviously, it's not something I talk about a whole lot. I was in a really dark place. I did a lot of really stupid things, and that stupid thing, as any consequence should, took away my ability to have the coming out I wanted. But it was a natural consequence. I did something dumb and I had to feel the repercussions of the dumb thing I did. Thankfully, because I was honest and straightforward with everything that was happening, they investigated it and I explained I wouldn't ever do this again. I really didn't have an outlet. I explained the situation, what was going on in the investigation, and the DCFS agent that was 31 investigating the case, because I was so open, because I was so honest, I was later deemed not a threat to children. I got off really, really easy. So that's kind of my actual coming-out story. Again, I really, really want to clarify, it was a dumb thing. I wouldn't if I could go back. I try my best to live with no regrets. That's the only one I have. It's not coming out sooner and not having to deal with the repression that led me to that point. Granted, I don't want to use the repression as an excuse. I did what I did. LR: What I want to do is to turn it off for a second. [Recording stops for a break] [Recording begins again] LR: Okay, so, NDPA. CR: Shortly after coming out. We can do that. You want to start there? LR: Well, NDPA only goes through the ninth grade. Where did you go after that? CR: Career Path High. It was another charter school. My coming-out happened two weeks before school ended. It was around the time the finals was happening. If you ever want an interesting experience, have yourself be taken out of the closet two weeks before finals. You have the weight of your own world on your shoulders, not knowing what's going to happen, and then the weight of your grades on your shoulders, too. That was real interesting. I'm diagnosed with bipolar disorder and ADHD, just to throw that out there. I truly think that that's when my bipolar disorder stuff started kicking in, when different sides started to show. Didn't really know what it was until a lot later. Over the summer, I spent time with my grandparents. My parents and I kind of stopped talking. It was a lot of ups and downs, so things seemed like they were starting to get a little bit better. But then my mom would tell everybody in my whole ward that I was gay—not tell everybody, but I told all of my family. Then some of her friends in the ward that she trusted enough to tell were just telling everyone that I 32 was gay. That was rough. I didn't even get a coming-out thing. Every chance that I had to be able to share, I didn't get. Needless to say, I didn't talk to my mom much after that for a little bit. She had a habit of when you expressed a concern, she would turn it into her own concern and say, “Well, sure. It's your thing, but it's happening to me.” It's kind of hard to talk and express your emotions when your emotions are turned into not your own. That summer got really rough. I started feeling a little bit as alone as I was in seventh grade. Granted, my grandmother would come over to take me out to lunch and stuff, and she reminded me of how she didn't really care. I could tell she cared a little bit, but she didn't really care who I was. She's still going to love me regardless. Nice thing about that obligatory love, “You may not be happy with you, but I guess I have to love you.” It pays off in some cases. Summer happened, and then I won the lottery of the charter school for Career Path High. Career Path High is a very different school and was structured in a way that it was all online. They had physical teachers in the DATC building, so they had a workroom for the students to take their finals in. They had laptops that they issued to the students. You would take your courses online, come in for finals, or if you were falling off track, it was mandatory that you came into the workroom. It was interesting. At NDPA I had made some friends. It was an interesting experience. I made a friend who introduced me to witchcraft. It more or less resonated and kind of followed me until now. It was really nice because this was the year that I was introduced to a form of spiritual belief that wasn't biblical or came from the Bible in any way. It taught me that there are alternatives that other people believe in. That year also gave me a really good experience with more about the queer community because the friend that taught me witchcraft was pansexual. I had no clue what it 33 was until she introduced me to it. Not only that, but she also really explained they/them pronouns to me. She was the first one to introduce me to that, which I'm extremely grateful for, because I would not be nearly as far ahead now as I would be if it wasn't for her. My eighth-grade year went okay. There was a lot of drama. First experience with the Ouija board, which is real weird. At one point, I thought my home was haunted by a demon because I didn't know what witchcraft was. I'm pretty sure I was having psychosis. That's kind of what ticks me off. Thinking that was around the time that my bipolar disorder started to really present itself. I started experiencing a lot more mood swings, extreme depression to extreme mania, sometimes experiencing things that other people weren't experiencing, like thinking it was a demon in my home knocking down stuff. Not sleeping well and just wandering around the home in a half-hazy daze. I don't think my parents know about that. I did not talk about my mental health a whole lot until high school. Career Path High, the way it’s set up, has the potential to create fiercely independent kids because it is essentially treated like a technical college, because it is. Your electives are your DATC course if you're there long enough, because your courses don't start till 10th grade. You essentially get an hour for lunch, and then as long as you're on the premises, more or less, no one asks questions. They know if you're with Career Path High, you just exist on campus. If you've ever been a young high schooler who's been going to school on a college campus, it's real weird. LR: Both my kids did that, so I understand. They went to NUAMES. Same concept, just a little bit different. MK: My experience with Career Path High was very isolating because of the online classes. For one of my brothers, that was good. For the other one, that was very bad. It's a weird place because of that vibe. 34 CR: It is a weird place. Tenth grade was the year I had my truly official boyfriend. MK: That's exciting. CR: Yeah, it was nice, but it was stressful. I wasn't allowed to date. Thankfully, I had my friends CM, CA, and KA from middle school. They were really, really close friends that I really enjoyed. They helped me kind of figure out and traverse what dating is or what we thought it was. My final year of NDPA, I ended up getting a crush on this boy who's really sweet, played soccer. For some reason, I've truly only fallen for soccer players. It just seems to be a coincidence. He had a nice smile. He was super nice to me. It's just something I never really experience with other boys, because more times than not, other boys… I don't know. He understood a little bit. All my friends told me, “No, I really don't think he's anywhere on that spectrum. I don't think he's queer in any way.” But they supported me and I was like, “I have a huge crush on him.” They were like, “Well, we think you're cool, so I guess you can crush over him. Go for it, I guess.” Halfway through the summer before tenth grade, I found out this boy—his name is BR—found out that BR was dating this girl, OL, from our middle school. During that time, he was dating her, he'd been flirting with me over text. It was very obvious flirting. Young me knows he should have felt bad, but also little gay me was going, “This is the first boy to ever flirt with me back. Holy shit. Holy shit. Holy shit. We should probably do something about that. Holy shit.” I got really excited. Unfortunately for him, this girl OL found out that he had been texting me. Needless to say, they weren't dating shortly after. Lucky for little gay ol’ me, I decided that it was a good time to swoop in. Look at me making more unhealthy decisions. He and I were talking, and then he was like, “I kind of had a crush on you for a bit, too. I've just never been single for long 35 enough while I figured it out to do something about it.” We had that talk, and then he and I went to a party where we got together. We were hanging out and that's when I had my first kiss. I really don't want to consider it my first kiss because it was more like our faces were punching each other. What happened before that first kiss was that my phone had died and I forgot a charger. My uncle, who was living with my family at the time, had driven me to this party, but didn't tell anyone in my family where I was. So my whole family was like, “Where is he?” I finally get a charger for my phone and my phone turns on and there's five missed calls from my mom and two from my dad. Then my friend's phone goes off and she picks it up. I can hear on her phone, my mom yelling and going, “Oh my God, is Colte there?” She said, “Yeah, did you not know he was here?” My friend handed me the phone and I picked it up. It was my mom going, “I'm out front. You need to come outside right now.” She didn't know that this boy was there, so I was like, “I guess he can't walk me out.” I did the thing where I was like, “If I don't kiss him now, I'm going to be too much of a bitch later to kiss him.” I went to kiss him, but I was also in a rush, so I threw my face forward. I'm not sure if he knew what he was doing or not. It was probably a mistake on my end. I threw my face forward and we really just face-bumped, and so I went home. The next real kiss happened at the Halloween party a couple of weeks later. That would be really nice. I'm watching My Neighbor Totoro, and I was just kind of laying in his lap. It was just kind of a weird movie thing where everything just kind of slowed down for a second. That's kind of when I was like, “Oh yeah, for sure. I 100% like men.” It was just one of those things where I knew it, but now that I had experienced it, I was like, “Yup. 100%.” A little bit of me was doubting it, but now I'm not. 36 After that first kiss, that's when that good gay Mormon boy thing fell off because I was like, “Yeah, this isn't going to work. It truly is not going to add up.” After that first kiss, I was tired of feeling guilty because everything felt really clear. I didn't feel guilty during the kiss. After the kiss, a little bit, but leading up to it and the kiss itself, I didn't feel guilty. It felt natural. It felt like all the stuff that I had been taught and expected about my dating just wasn't true. There was no way it could have been true, which is mind-blowing for me to have figured out through just a kiss. So that was my first boyfriend. It kept going on a little bit after my parents found out that I had been dating him. They were really unhappy. They blocked his number on my phone, but they did the parental block thing. I couldn't fix it. We had him in a group chat with my other friends because we always had group chats, texting. We came up with the plan of anytime he sent a text, one of my friends would copy and paste and put a slash in front of it. So I would still see his texts when he texted in the group chat, which was really nice. I'm glad I had friends who were willing to do that for me. He went to NUAMES too, BR. MK: NUAMES or Career Path? CR: NUAMES. LR: That name is so familiar. CR: I can't remember his last name. He went to NUAMES and I went to Career Path. The schools were not meant to be sister schools, but it was a weird situation of, “Since they're both hybrid college schools, we should maybe get along with each other.” You could definitely tell that there was a difference in the student body between the two schools. Career Path High had a vibe of just… I don't know how to say it other than just ‘chaos’. Career Path High students are truly chaotic because you would get either fiercely independent students, or you would get students who 37 are just really good at running amok and getting into trouble. That's kind of the spectrum that you've got. Then there's NUAMES students who, more times than not, weren't. We went to separate high schools, BR and I, and it got difficult not seeing each other as often because of school. Then we found out that Career Path High and NUAMES were having a dance together. He texted me, because we eventually just switched to a messaging app instead of just texting. He sent me a message saying, “Hey, this girl asked me to go to the dance.” I was like, “But it's Valentine's dance, and we should probably go together.” He's like, “Yeah, but I didn't want to say no. I'm not sure if I'm 100% comfortable enough to go to a dance with you and just be with another guy at a dance yet.” Partway through the summer, he knew he liked me. We knew we liked each other, but he didn't know anything else, which I understand. In terms of understanding our own place with our sexuality, it was vastly different places. He ended up going to dance with this girl. That was rough. The other really rough part was seeing him kiss the girl. Bet you weren't expecting that, because I wasn't. That was really rough. That night I went home crying, and then I had to admit to my mom that, “No, we were still dating even though you said no. But also, ow.” That was my first experience with heartbreak. Sucked. It's all good now. I met up with BR at Pride again shortly after I graduated high school, and we sat down. He talked to me like, “Hey, I was kind of a massive dick. I'm sorry. You didn't deserve that.” That was nice. It took a few too many years, but it was nice. That’s my first boyfriend in high school. LR: Was there any other defining moment in high school that kind of helped shape you as comfortable being queer? Or was that kind of a theme throughout? 38 CR: It was kind of a theme throughout high school because after my junior year, I moved to Morgan. Tensions between my dad and I got a little bit more heated, but I think it was just because my independence had been changing. I'm going to be honest, my dad was training so much for either an Ironman or a triathlon. On top of his working schedule, I just never saw him. I did so much growing that by the time he was available to be a parent fully that I was just at the period of being a teenager where you just kind of coast. You can still be a parent, but the core values have already been solidified. LR: Are you still going to Career Path High in Morgan, or did you switch schools? CR: I really truly wanted to stay, but my parents said no, so I went to Morgan High. There were a couple of things that happened before I moved to Morgan that really did help me with experiencing being queer, but also being open. Well, I wasn't super open in one of the stories. Before we moved to Morgan, I had Trek and then I had High Adventure. With Trek, it was all right. It's hiking for four miles a day for three days, so as fun as that can be. What did help me out was there was a boy in my designated family—because on Trek, you dress up as a pioneer. You're given a family, you're given a handcart with all your food and stuff, and you essentially pretend to be a pioneer for three days. In my designated family, there was a boy, and I thought he was really cute. He and I were talking and a little bit of flirting and things like that. We were both so exhausted, we went to take a nap, and then we woke up around the same time. He was like, "Would you ever date a guy?" I was like, “Oh, oh…” He was just comfortable with me. I just answered with, “Yeah, I would.” I didn't explain anything else further. He said, “Yeah, I probably would too. Why not?” That was kind of one of the things that helped me realize, “Oh, I won't know about somebody until I have a 39 conversation.” That was really nice, having that personal experience of just not assuming. The rest of Trek went fine. He and I were pretty good friends for Trek, but I never got his number, so we didn't talk again afterwards. Sucks, but what can you do? Then High Adventure: what I took from that was not every space is a safe space. People you grew up with aren't always people you feel safe with. During High Adventure, it was around the time that Cub Scouts came out and fully said like, “We are fully welcoming of gay boy scouts. We don't see a problem with it.” The scout troop was making jokes about it, saying how the Eagle Scouts was going to turn into the Butterfly Scout, real machismo kind of thinking. That's when I just understood that spaces and people I grew up with, I don't need. They might know you, they might say they support you, but clearly they don't. I mean, they didn't know, but I doubt it would have changed. Then I moved to Morgan right after High Adventure. LR: Now you're back into public school. Were you able to make that transition okay? CR: I don't know. I think the shock of going to a small, country-town high school like Morgan High is so weird. Morgan High has two separate demographics. There are the rich kids, the kids whose parents made a lot of money, and so they moved to Mountain Green. You get the wealthier kids from Mountain Green, and then you get these backwoods redneck country-farming kids, and you put them in the same school together. It's wild. That kind of culture shock shocked me more than going from a charter school to a public school. Around this time, my mental health was still not going great. Kind of blah, should probably add that in there. My mood swings were getting more intense. They were spiking a lot more, and they were getting more frequent. My mood would be 40 more on-the-hour change instead of the day change. Dealing with that in high school, so I didn't feel like I really could deal with much more. I also moved to Morgan with a new boyfriend, who also went to NUAMES. His name was SMC. One of my friends, EL, introduced us. We were doing pretty good for a minute; it was my first relationship after that breakup with BR. He was really sweet, he was smart. I knew he was cute for me at the time. I look at photos now and I go, “Hmm, okay.” Looking back on it now, it was more of a situation of, “I'm gay, he's gay. We're in Utah. There's no other gays in Utah.” There's plenty of other gays in Utah—I didn't know that. “There's no one else. This is my only chance to date.” It was going pretty well for a couple of months, and then it wasn't. So that's kind of where I was at that point in Morgan. The culture shock of going to public school wasn't nearly as bad as dealing with mental health. LR: When were you finally diagnosed with bipolar? Did that happen in high school? CR: It did happen in high school. It was my senior year, so it was a year from then. Junior year went okay. I met up with one of my old friends from NDPA. I knew she moved away, but I didn't know where. Turns out it was Morgan. Met up with her and her boyfriend, made friends with them, and then made friends with the drama department. Most of my time at Morgan High was with the drama department, naturally. I think it was near the end of my junior year when the relationship with SMC kind of started going south. There were a lot of microaggressions. It wasn't good, but I didn't know any better. I hadn't been in any other relationships. I just assumed that's what a relationship was. It was a lot of things, like, “You're not that smart, but it's fine because I love you.” It was a lot of trapping comments. A lot of, “You won't find it anywhere else, so you stay here.” That's kind of when it started there. We got into one really bad fight over the summer. Again, this was all happening without my 41 parents knowing, or at least I thought. SMC was coming up every other weekend. My parents, at some point, were like, “Oh, he's here quite a bit.” During the summer we broke up and then we were like, “We can still be friends.” At that time, I was 16, and so hormones were a thing. Around that time he was like, “Well, I haven't really kissed anyone since we dated, and that kind of sucks.” I was like, “Yeah, there's no one really here for me to be a little bit more intimate with either.” He was like, “We could do the friends-with-benefits thing.” I was like, “I mean, I guess. Sure.” I didn't know how to say no; I was a living doormat at this point. That summer was when I had my first time. It was shortly after the ‘friends-with-benefits remark.’ At this point, the beginning of senior year, I was in a bad headspace. I was in a bad relationship I felt like I couldn't get out of. My mood swings were incredibly unstable; I had a hard time with them for a couple of other reasons. My dad and I clashed heads a lot, so I was at a point where I was like 70% sure I wasn't going to make it to 18. It felt like I was constantly living in a house of cards in my head, and I knew it was a matter of time before they blew over. It was a struggle just to exist. LR: Did your parents get you in to see someone, or did you reach out? CR: Around this time, before I moved to Morgan, I was with the therapist I'd been with for eight years. I had started seeing him when I came out. After coming out, my parents said, “We need to get you a therapist. We need to get you someone to talk to you.” Which, yes, absolutely. That's nice. I appreciate that. I'm glad that that was the decision you made instead of you sending me to camp somewhere. I will take therapy. Granted, they sent me to a therapist they thought would talk to me about not being gay—a conversion therapist. Little did they know, they got me the one 42 LDS therapist who was like, “No, it's your life. You live your life. What you experience is yours and it's valid.” I was very lucky that I got one of those therapists. When I moved to Morgan, the time it took to get to my therapist was a lot longer, so I started missing therapy sessions. I think my parents noticed that I wasn't doing as well. I was secluded in my room more. I stopped coming home before six just because I would hang out with my friends. I eventually started hanging out with the kids and the Nintendo club—it was just a really, really nerdy club. I learned how to play Yu-Gi-Oh; I picked up Yu-Gi-Oh, Pokemon cards, competitive Super Smash Bros. Learning all the specific movements for the joysticks and learning the combos to secure a win, they were real nerds. But yeah, I stopped coming home a lot more. Well, I guess at the beginning of the year, I was still coming home pretty okay. Things started to change a lot after my dad's accident. LR: Did that happen your senior year? CR: Yeah, that happened my senior year. I think it was January, around the time of winter break. I know that much. My dad was helping my grandpa plow all of the driveways and stuff on his property. We don't know what really happened. What we can guess happened was while he was plowing the snow, the tractor caught a rope of a rope swing that was anchored into a tree. He didn't know because the rope was under the snow. The tire kept pulling on the rope until the anchor came free. Wasn't the rope, it was the anchor, so this three-foot metal pole around slingshotted like 30 feet on top of my dad's head. We don't know how long he was outside before we found him. Thankfully, my mom had picked up her phone when my dad called. All he could get out was, “I'm really hurt. You need to find me.” Then he went out of consciousness again, so we went looking for him. My cousin and I went one direction; my other family went the 43 other. The direction that my cousin and I happened to go in was the right one. What I saw first was just a healthy trail of blood that led in a direction. As soon as I saw the plane, I was like, “Oh.” I looked over at my cousin and I was like, “Hey, you should drive towards the blood. I'm going to call the ambulance because I think we'll need it.” So I immediately called the ambulance as soon as I saw the blood. In situations like that, where it's more serious, I tend to not shut down, but go into action mode. I called the ambulance; I made sure that they got there okay. I made sure that nobody was doing anything dangerous before the ambulance happened. I did all of that. I don't remember a whole lot of the actual day other than the hospital. The hospital that my dad stayed at, I thought it was really funny, the audacity that the doctor had. He came in and he was like, “Hey, the percentage of your dad coming out of this is really low. You should probably prepare yourself for that.” He said that with the kids in the room. Me and my cousin, and my sister. I think I was the only one in that room that was like, “No, he's not, he's fine,” which made my grandparents really mad at me. It's because they hadn't seen me cry. Because why would I cry? I went into a fix-the-problem mode instead of crying like my sister. People deal with trauma in their own way, naturally. My grandparents thought I was heartless because I wasn't crying for my dad. They thought that I wasn't sad, or I wasn't scared, but it was just more of a “No, I know he's fine. He's my dad, he's fine. He completed an Ironman before this, and he started training a year before that. He's fine.” I distinctly remember thinking, “The only thing that would be able to take him out is him being old and then wandering into the forest. Even then I think, would make it out okay.” Tensions between me and my family—it wasn't just my immediate family, but we were living with my grandparents at the time. Our house wasn't fully built, and 44 between my dad and my dad's side of the family, I was really singled out. It was my grandparents thinking I didn't love my dad; my dad was hurt, but he and I had been fighting for a while before that, and it wasn't even arguing. It was fighting. It wasn't throwing punches or anything like that, but it really wasn't good. LR: Did that relationship change after his accident? CR: 100%. As much as I love my dad, being empathetic is not his strong suit. He used to have the mindset of, “If I can do it, then anyone else can. It doesn't matter what their situation is. If I can do it, so can anyone else.” He didn't take mental health into account with that. LR: I can see where that goes. CR: Yeah. So I’ve been known to voice my opinions. I had been diagnosed with ADHD by this time; I think middle school was when I got that diagnosis. Little did I or my family know, there's things with ADHD, like task paralysis, where if there's too many tasks or the task is too big, your brain just stops. You'll stand in the same place for however long until you either decide to walk away and feel bad that you didn't get anything done, or you just sit down and sleep. Task paralysis is terrible. So I had that going on top of mood swings, which I didn’t even know were actually happening. I just thought, like, “I'm depressed, but not all the time. I'm depressed, but then I'm not for an hour.” I didn't really know what it was. After my dad's accident, it still wasn't good. I also got really mean. I tried my best to be nice to everyone that I was around, but unfortunately, my one weak spot was my dad. No matter how hard I tried, I felt like it didn't matter how nice I was. It just wasn't enough. I don't think that really had anything to do much about me being queer. I think me being gay did kind of start it, because my dad didn't feel like he could relate to me. The time that he did try to spend with me turned into a lot of, “Well, I'm doing this, so you're going to join me.” 45 Then I went, “I have other things I'm doing.” Then he would go, “But I want quality time with you because I don't get that.” This is kind of how our arguments kind of escalated. I went with, “No, I don't want to do that. That's not fun for me. No.” He would kind of escalate with, “Well, I never get to spend time with you, so I want to do this thing.” It was usually running. “I want to do this thing with you, so you're going to do it. I would respond with, “No. The only time you want to do something is when it’s stuff you want to do. So, no.” It would just go from there, and he would get louder and louder and louder until it was just not good. So after my dad's accident, it still wasn't great. My dad, for lack of a better way of saying it, was experiencing true emotion now. He had more complex emotions to deal with, which, understandably so. He went from being someone who could do literally anything he put his mind to, he could just do it. Then he went to being able to do maybe a quarter of what he could before. Those are complex emotions; those are complex things to deal with. At that point, I just wanted to be left alone. LR: You need to be done at 6:30. We’re getting close. I like the idea of stopping here, because we're going to get to you being diagnosed. Then we can get into when you're going to graduate, when you start doing drag. I think there will be one more, and we'll be done. Part 3- August 12, 2022 LR: It is August 12, 2022. We are in the Stewart Library with Colte Rindlesbach, finishing his interview this afternoon. With me is Raegan Baird on the camera. So, Colte, when we finished last time, you had literally just talked about your dad's accident and the relationship that you had up to that point with him. You were 46 talking about mood swings and—the only word that's coming is chaos—in your life. I'm going to start my first question with, when were you diagnosed with bipolar disorder? CR: I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, I believe, junior year. I think it was either the end of my junior year or around the time of my dad's accident, because things started to get not great with my mental health around that time. One day I just kind of walked up to my mom. I was like, “I'm not good. I'm really not good. I don't have control over anything that I'm thinking or saying. I'm being super impulsive. I feel way too happy and extremely impulsive in making choices.” I'm thinking that the best way to describe mania is, I have an idea and then my body does the idea. But while my body is doing the thing impulsively, my brain is still active in the background, and the logical part of my brain is going, “No, don't do that. That's going to be a mess later that you're going to have to clean up. You're going to feel really bad about it later.” It is the definition of being trapped in your own body because your body is doing the thing, but your brain can't stop you from doing the impulse. It's a terrible experience. LR: Okay, so when was your dad's accident? Do you remember the time of year? CR: I want to say January of 2015, 2016. Somewhere around there. LR: Okay. I suppose I could look. CR: I probably can look it up too. I believe it's January-ish. I think it happened around Christmas break, and I think it was after New Year's. LR: Okay. So it would have been 2016, then? CR: 2016, probably. LR: Alright. Probably the end of your junior year, then, you finally went to your mom. Do you think that your dad's accident helped you, kind of pushed you over the edge to actually get help? 47 CR: I think there was a couple of things. It was a combination of my dad's accident and my dad's side of the family living with them during the accident. I think I didn't really get a grieving time period. My dad had this accident. Winter break had ended, and there were three days that I didn't go to school. On that fourth day, my grandparents said, “Well, you gotta go to school.” I responded with, “Okay, but my dad's in the hospital recovering from something pretty serious.” They said, “Yeah, but you still have to go to school.” I went with, “No, I'm not going to school.” They got real upset, and then things just kind of progressed from there. On top of that, everyone dealing with my dad's accident in a way that they could, and me very much trying to take the time I needed. I don't know, it was just a bunch of things that eventually pushed me there. Around that time, I was also in an emotionally abusive relationship. There were a lot of things there. LR: So how did being diagnosed change, or did it change, how you interacted with your environment? I mean, obviously. That's a dumb question. CR: No, I think it's a great question. I think it's a really good question because we do not always ask people who have a diagnosis what's going on emotionally for them. Does it change how they approach things? For me, that's kind of what it was. I had a diagnosis, I knew what was wrong with me, but I wasn't doing anything about it for the longest time. I knew what it was, I knew what was happening. I had an answer for why I was having such a hard time all the time. But instead of taking medication—because for the longest time, really awful, awful stigma of medication. It wasn't, “What if I depend on it forever?” It's more like, “What if I get really addicted to it?” even though mood stabilizers are not an addictive drug. That was just the mindset that I had, always had to have that in the 48 back of my head. I hated taking medication for my headaches because I was like, “What if I just get addicted to it and take all of it?” Thinking about it, I'm pretty sure that that was just a lot of anxiety. But yeah, I didn't do anything about it for the longest time. It actually wasn't until two years ago today, I actually started taking medication and sticking to it. LR: Okay. Did the diagnosis change the way you saw yourself? This is going to sound like a weird question, but the only way I can think to phrase is, did it change your queerness, in the way you approached that? Am I making sense? CR: Yes, I think I know where you're going with it. My mental health didn't affect my queerness or my perception of my sexuality in any way. LR: See, I knew it wouldn't sound right. What I mean is… CR: Like how I approached it? LR: Almost, did it allow you an opportunity to be more authentic? If that makes sense, now that you know what's happening in your head. CR: A little bit. I think it was the whole experience of my mental health in general. So my mental health had gotten so bad. My living situation was to the point where I was staying at a friend's house for two weeks. It wasn't too great. All of these things that weren't so good got me to a point where I became a lot more independent, emotionally and financially, sooner than most people would have. Because of the independence that I've gotten that I had at the time, I felt more comfortable being who I was. Granted, I had friends. I had a safety net that I could fall back on when I needed it. If I ever had a mental emergency, I had people I could call. But I did get a sense of independence because of it. My mental health in that high school period is kind of what put me on my career path of what I want to do and helped me gain a 49 purpose. If I'm going to be completely honest, I didn't think I was going to live past 18. LR: Okay. Why is that? CR: My mental health was that bad. I wasn't sleeping. A combination of my mental health and then my bipolar disorder, and then me not feeling comfortable at home, it was kind of a triple threat situation. I'd get the impulse to go do something. I would immediately go do it. Because I was doing the thing, it was normally late at night because I couldn't sleep, I would stay up ‘til like four. Then I would wake up at six to get to school, and then I would work until one or two at night. More times than not, I recognized that I was driving drowsy constantly. I lived in a woodsy farm town, and I was going for walks at like two in the morning. Sometimes I would wander near forested areas and mountain lions existed where my hometown was, so I could have been mauled. I was sneaking out with a boy at the time too. I just knew I was making a lot of choices that weren't safe for me. I was making a lot of decisions impulsively that I knew were impulsive. I couldn't control that impulsivity, but also my mental health was so bad that I figured that I wouldn't have made it past 18 for one of three reasons. Either made a dumb decision, put me in a bad place that got me really hurt. Unaliving myself because my mental health was so bad, or that I would be emotionally dead because I stayed with my ex at the time, and I knew that was where that was leading to. LR: Okay. You said you didn't start taking medication until about two years ago. So then with all that's happening, did you graduate from high school? CR: Yes. LR: How? The reason I'm asking this is, what did you do to make it so that you could graduate from high school? Because that had to have been a lot. 50 CR: No, you're good. Spite, pure spite. To be honest, a lot of the stuff I do is purely out of spite. Before I got medicated, I had a rough time finding direction. More times than not, the direction I had was when people said, “You can't do that. There's no way that you can do this. Whether it be that you're not smart enough, you're not dedicated enough, you don't work hard enough,” things like that. Unfortunately, some of those things came from my home. I also have ADHD. One of the symptoms of ADHD, and Oppositional Defiance Disorder is a symptom of it. That is, more or less, someone tells you something and you go, “Try me.” That's a big reason for how I graduated, is that my dad said I would never graduate. The path I was going on, I wouldn't do anything. I would end up homeless. Not really, I don't think he would have let me fail that bad, but I did a bunch of stuff that said that I wasn't going to be worth it. So I went, “Try me.” I was missing about two and a half, three credits to graduate. A little bit of the work happened about a month before I was supposed to walk and graduate. But that last week, I made up either a credit and a half or two credits within a week, so I was able to walk. At that point, I was running purely off of just trying to prove someone wrong, which isn't the healthiest way to do it, I am fully aware, but it's what I needed at the time. Thankfully, I had a friend who put a lot of effort into making sure that I was able to succeed too. So with the support group that I had and then a ton of spite, I was able to graduate. I think around the time I started working more on my mental health, not just kind of going to see my therapist—it was very spotty because I'm terrible at keeping schedules and was really bad then. I switched to more spiritual practices. I picked up tarot cards and that kind of stuff, and I just started exploring witchcraft. Going into more the spiritual end of practicing and not your more common religions, I was 51 able to work on my mental health. A lot of it focused on the power coming from you and not asking for some kind of power or strength from divine sources. A lot of it came from the intention that you put into the things you do, and that resonated a lot with me. LR: So after you graduated, did you have a plan? CR: Yesn't. So my senior year, the last two months, I didn't think I was going to graduate. I was doing the work. I was working hard. I hoped I could do it; I was doing my best to graduate. Wasn't sure if I was going to be able to. But I knew I was working really hard to get there. In those two months, I literally did nothing for all of high school except be sad, depressed, and then a little bit of theater. So I said, I need to do something to make sure the school is better than when I got in. So I started building and setting up a GSA Club for the next year, after I was gone. I talked to a couple of friends who were a grade below me. I said, “Hey, here's my plan. Here's what I'm thinking. I think you guys would be great to get it started. We'll work together to set up the groundwork for it these last two months. We'll plan on how to do things and how we want to do things. Next year, you guys will take over, and I'll be here to answer any questions or help you run it. But I want your help setting it up.” Those last two, three months, I had reached out to a couple of people on how to set up a club. I got an email from someone on how we could set it up. They came and we had a meeting with two teachers, this woman who I wanted to be the president. I know this sounds bad, but the first year for the GSA, I didn't want it to be an election. I wanted it to be people who were actually invested and really wanted it to get started. I feel like if there was some sort of election for the president of the GSA for the first year, especially with me not being there, then it was more likely to fail. I wanted to make sure that there was groundwork, and have someone 52 that I trusted and someone I knew who cared about the community, to help run this club in a right-leaning farm community. After setting it all up and getting it ready to go, I realized how much I really liked doing that. I really liked how much I had to communicate, sending emails and getting set up. I loved the feeling of doing it, even though I won't be there to reap the reward of all the work I put in. I knew I was helping other people, and I really liked setting it up to help the kids before me. That was my plan. I was focused on those two things, but honestly, I didn't really have much of any plan because I didn't think I was going to make it to graduation. So I graduated honestly, and with the combination of, one, fighting for my life; two, fighting to graduate. Now that I had graduated and I'm on my own, I was like, “Now what? I put in all this hard work and effort. I have made it to this age. I feel like, from 18 on, I'm on borrowed time, time that I wasn't supposed to have, but now I have. What do you do with it?” That's just kind of the mindset I was at a point. LR: This was at Morgan High, you created the GSA Club? CR: Yes. That only lasted two, two and a half years, though. LR: Okay. That's sad. CR: Sucks. It was more that there was no one there to maintain it. I know there's plenty of queer students within the community. Nobody was there to help maintain it, or at least be able to put enough of a fight to keep it around, or have it at least be something small. It wasn't the school that shut it down, it just lost steam. LR: Okay. So creating this club and doing the groundwork, that led you to what, after graduation? CR: So after graduation, I picked up a couple of jobs. One of them was with Cutco, selling some of the knives and stuff. But I picked up a lot of stuff on the side. I really like helping other people. One of the bigger things they did when I graduated out of 53 high school was that my grandma had found out that she had cancer, or at least it came back. That was kind of rough for me and my sister. We both really, really love my grandma. When her and I found out, I was on a phone call with her, and we were talking. She said something like, “I'm tired of feeling sad.” I was like, “I am, too.” That's kind of when something in the back of my head clicked. Last time, when we first found out my grandma had cancer, my sister had set up a bracelet sales booth, where that mailbox is, on the corner of that cul-de-sac when you turn into the neighborhood. She sold a ton of bracelets there that she had made herself, and then donated whatever she had sold to the Huntsman Cancer Research Center. So I was like, “How much did you sell then?” She's like, “I think it was only like $200.” I was like, “Okay, I think we can beat that.” She's like, “What do you mean?” I was like, “Let's just do a fundraiser. I'm tired of feeling sad. I want to do something to help, so let's just do something.” So my sister and I brainstormed. I think it was September that we found out. She and I came up with, “Let's do a pumpkin carving contest on one of the weekends in October. We'll get prizes. We’ll talk to people, local businesses, and see if they want to donate anything and give something to us for prizes so we can have an actual pumpkin carving contest.” I was like, “We can do a bake sale too. Whatever we make, we donate.” Within a month, we were able to set up and host a pumpkin carving contest in the Morgan City Park. We made $500, so we beat that $200 goal that we wanted to beat in around the time of a month. I think that was like my second date with my fiancé, too. He came to help us set everything up and run it. After that happened, the light bulb came on and I was like, “This is what to do. This is what I'm good at. 54 This is what I can do. I want to help people.” That was the thing that really gave me a direction of where I wanted to go. LR: Okay. Did that involve going to school, or was it just finding the job that worked for you? CR: I'm taking kind of a roundabout way. Some stuff has happened between then and now, but career-wise, I haven't gone to school. I decided to not go because school has never been a strong suit for me. I'm not good with due dates. I'm not good with learning on other people's terms. I didn't want to borrow money, whether it be from my family or taking out a loan and things like that, knowing that at some point I would lose steam. I didn't want to be put into debt for me to lose steam and burnout. I did have a plan and do have a goal of where I want to be, though. Over time, the concept refined itself over things that I did. When the light bulb first kind of came on, I just wanted to work within the nonprofit realm and industry. The more fundraising or volunteer work that I ended up doing, I kind of realized, “Oh, there is not a ton of money with the nonprofit work. It's not enough to raise a family or live super comfortably, or at least the way I want to.” At some point I want kids, probably; still trying to think about that. But I want to be able to financially sustain a family if I wanted to in the future. Then I kind of went, “I could work on the corporate end of things. I can work in a philanthropy department for a company.” I kind of liked the idea of, “Oh yeah, I love taking companies' money and then giving it to people who need it. That's great. It's like Robinhood, but legal.” Then just recently, I made the decision, I'm going to work as a philanthropic consultant. So if a nonprofit wants to start up, or a company wants to do a big fundraiser for a year, or the company wants to start a philanthropy department, they would call me in and I would consult for them. I would help them set it up. I would show them resources, the ways to set it up, the ways to make it 55 easier. Pool ideas and give them to this company or these nonprofits, or these fundraisers to help them be as successful as they can. Because the more successful a philanthropy department is, the more money they'll be able to get to help others. The more successful a fundraiser is for a company, the more likely that company is to do it again. I want to be there for repeated success, not for just having it fail. I want to set things up so they're successful long-term. LR: So when in all this did you decide to start doing drag? CR: I had been thinking about it since my senior year of high school. After I had broken up with my unhealthy relationship, I started dating somebody I met from debate. They are the sweetest person on this planet. They were super nice. They introduced me to Pokemon cards, or at least getting more into that. They introduced me to Drag Race and drag as a whole, and we would just talk about it all the time. They were like, “Yeah, so when I do drag, this is my plan.” I was like, “I wonder if I'd be able to do drag.” So since then, it's always been in the back of my head, like, “This is something I can do. I feel like I'd be able to do pretty good at this.” I had always taken notes. I had been watching Drag Race pretty consistently. It wasn't until I think November of this last year that I started going to physical drag shows. I went to a drag show, I think it was like my second one, and then afterwards there was a meet-and-greet. After, I went to go and meet with—I think it was a RuPaul Queen. While waiting in line for RuPaul Queen, I started talking to a local queen, and their name was SQ. I feel bad, I can't really remember if their drag pronouns are she/they or just they/them, so I'll just go with the generic they. They're the sweetest thing on this planet. I was talking to them and I was like, “Hey, what do I do to start drag? Is there anything you need to do?” 56 They were like, “Oh, really you just do it. There's no way to really start unless you just do it.” I was like, “Yeah, okay.” Then they were talking about, like, “What do you think your drag name would be?” I was like, “I don't know.” A couple of ideas were going through my head that time. The queen, SQ, they said, “Oh, my next show is going to be this. Are you going to be there?” I said, “Yeah.” They were like, “Are you going to be there in drag?” I have pretty bad anxiety about doing things. The way I get around my anxiety is I say yes, before I give my brain a chance to talk me out of it. My brain also has another thing where if I make a commitment, I have to follow through, whether I like it or not. So I said yes. I made the commitment to be at the show in drag. At that point my anxiety was like, “What are you doing? You know nothing. You won't look that good.” But then I made the commitment, so I had to do it. Two weeks went around, and I went out in drag for the first time. I said hi to SQ and they were super nice, super sweet. Then I started to introduce myself to a lot of the other queens. That's kind of where I got started, was just saying ‘Yes,’ before I had the chance to tell myself, ‘No.’ Since then, it's just been really fun. It's been a really, really good way for me to build confidence that I didn't have before. It's amazing what dressing up as someone different does for you. LR: What was your first drag show that you actually participated in? CR: It was a play. It was The Playground Show in Salt Lake City. It's a show that was done in Sun Trapp before the old owners left, because they shut down for a little bit 57 this last year, and then the old owners are opening up a new bar somewhere else. It was at the Sun Trapp and it was one of my first shows. My look was a winter mushroom lady thing, and then I did the song “Hallucinate” by Dua Lipa. LR: That's fun. So the one that you did at the event we had in June, is that a fairly new—I don’t know what to call it—look? CR: Look, yeah. My drag kind of switches between two different styles, I’ve noticed—at least styles that I feel comfortable with. I'm still relatively new, haven't been doing drag for more than a year, so a lot of my drag lately has just been experimental. I've been messing around with songs I like, songs I want to do, songs that I feel comfortable doing, and then songs that I think would be interesting to do, confidence-wise. Because that's the big thing that I need to work on in drag, is feeling confident when performing. So that last performance was a kind of go between the ones that I feel more comfortable with—this biker girlfriend or streetwear, kind of more on the powerful, confident woman who owns her sexuality, biker girlfriend, that kind of end of things, and then more on the fantasy end of things. That sadder look that I did was one of my two more fantasy looks that I've done. The one before that one was the mushroom look. I had made a mushroom hat that I put on over my natural hair, but I had curled my natural hair out, so it looked like the little mushroom gills on the hat itself. So I either switch between more fantasy stuff or the other end of my drag, that I tend to perform more as my ode to powerful women. I don't know, it's just what makes me feel comfortable. What a lot of it is, is just me trying my best to live up to the examples of amazing women I have in my life. LR: Okay, so you've hinted at your fiancé. How did you meet him? 58 CR: We met on Tinder. We had been chatting for a little bit, going back and forth a while, and then we decided to go on a date. Around this time, I was kind of done with dating. I was like, “I'm done. I'm just gonna enjoy my time, I'll date around every now and then.” I even went on a couple of dates because I didn't want to pay for food. I was just kind of dating around; I wasn't looking for anything serious. Then I went on one date with him, with my fiancé, and I was like, “Well, shit, I wasn't looking around for anything, but I guess now I'm done.” That was more of a couple of months into it, but it really was just, “Well, shit, I want to spend more time with this person who is amazing. He's a kind person.” I also took a different approach to dating this time around too; instead of hiding a lot of myself, straight-up, during the first date, I said, “I have bipolar disorder, I have ADHD. This is how those have affected my relationships in the past.” I was really upfront with a lot of the things that I would experience. I said, “Here's my family; here's how my family relationships have been. That's what I have to deal with in terms of a relationship.” I really just laid everything out. He responded with, “Cool,” and then he laid everything out too. It was very much, “Here's all the shit that's going wrong with me at the moment. Here's my familial trauma and the stuff that's happened to me in the past.” Then he went, “Same here.” Then it was a “You're cool with this?” He went, “Yep, are you cool with this?” We said, “Yes.” That was pretty much how the first date went. It was like 5 hours long. We started with bowling, and then we just kind of started walking around Ogden for a bit, and we were just talking the entire time. 59 LR: That's really cool. Okay, so now I'm going to ask a question, it's not something that I know a lot about, polyamory. When did you know that you were more on that—do you call it a spectrum? CR: I don't know. Again, I'm super new too. I don't know a lot of other people who are truly relationship-polyamorous. Most of the people that I've dated outside of my fiancé have been people who have been like, “I'm open to it.” They're either not in a relationship, or they're in a relationship, but they haven't fully talked about it on their end, so my experience has always been different. How it came up was we were playing a get-to-know-you-better game with some friends. Then it was like, “What’s something your partner doesn't know about you?” My fiancé went, “Well, I'm polyamorous.” It was just out of the blue. I went, “What, huh?” Our relationship had been open for a little bit before that. There was a lot of talk about that, just back-and-forth working on it and seeing how a relationship was like that. It went great. Of course, there were some rocky bits in the beginning there, but it was going pretty good, and we worked out effective communication, talking about what we were comfortable with, what we weren't comfortable with. That kind of set the foundation we needed. After that happened, after my fiancé was like, “Yeah, I'm polyamorous,” I was like, “Were we going to talk about that?” He said, “Not with friends around.” I went, “I mean, yeah, I guess.” A couple of weeks later, he brought it up again and said, “Hey, I'm polyamorous. I've been thinking about it for a couple months now. I've read a couple of things and I've listened to a couple of podcasts. That's where I'm at. I could and would like to date and have relationships with other people besides you.” 60 It was rough at first. I think mostly because I've also listened to a ton of podcasts and stuff and heard stories of other people's experiences, that I was like, “Okay, I'm not saying ‘Yes, let's do it right now.’ But I'm also not saying no.” I told my partner, “I want you to feel absolutely validated in the way you feel, because I'm listening to you and I'm going to do what I can to understand.” That was a rough conversation to have for me at least. I started doing research, started listening to podcasts and understanding how polyamorous relationships work. The more that I did research into it, the more I realized with myself that I've had relationships in the past where I've always been like, “I really love the person I'm with. I really do. But also, I just met this other person that I vibe with in a different way. I like them in a completely different way than I like the partner I have now.” Then it caused a lot of stress, where it was like, “Do I have to pick now?” I would get really unhappy with the relationship I was in, because I'm happy with the relationship I'm in, but then I felt guilty because I wanted to be in a relationship with someone else. When approaching the topic of polyamory, I really liked what one podcast host had to say: it's not about a fear of commitment, it's about really liking commitment. Not only are you making a commitment with one person, you're also making commitments and obligations with another person. The way that the relationships are defined are just different because the love that you get from one partner, it's like your specific love. That's how they love you. They won't love anyone else the way they can love you, and vice versa. My partner, I love them very much, but my love for him was very specific to him. I'm not dating anyone else right now, but if I were to meet someone else, I would love them too. But the love I would have for them is in no way the same as the love I have for my fiancé now. It's a lot like a family. It's just a family of people 61 you love. That's kind of the simplest way of putting that. Yeah, it was a lot of work. It was a lot of trying to tackle the topic of jealousy. LR: That was going to be a question, but you're talking about it. CR: Yeah. That's the big thing that most couples who are closed and then realize they're polyamorous and then do the polyamory-everything after that; jealousy is a thing. It exists, and pretending like it doesn't exist is like the number one problem that you can have when opening something up. Jealousy isn't something that should be feared. I don't know how to phrase it other than this, and it sounds kind of cold, and I feel bad. Jealousy is nothing but an analytical emotion. Jealousy is an emotion that gives you data on what's actually bothering you. It's like a secondary emotion. So if something is bothering you in the relationship, something like, “The dates I go on tend to not be as good as the dates my partner takes their partner on.” If that makes sense. LR: No, I think it makes sense. CR: Yeah. That was kind of the one that I ran into when my fiancé started taking somebody on dates. They were nicer dates, and I was like, “I kind of miss that. It just feels like a little bit more is put into it.” Then I got super jealous. I got really jealous around the time my fiancé started dating again, started going on dates with someone. Took me a minute to fully express it, and unfortunately it was one of those things that overflowed, and I made the mistake of not addressing it when I should have. But we then had a good talk and I said, “I'm feeling really jealous.” He said, “Okay, well, why are you feeling jealous? What's the thing that's bothering you?” I said, “That's a really good question.” Then I dug a little bit deeper and I was like, “Well, you normally go on these dates, and normally we just kind of sit at home and eat dinner next to each other and stuff.” 62 He responded with, “Oh, okay. Well, that's something we can work on. We can go on more dates, and we can address this because I want you to feel valued. While I'm also going on dates and stuff, you're still my partner, still my fiancé, and I love you dearly. So let's figure out what we can do to address that problem.” That's kind of what jealousy is; it's not something that's there to make things harder, make you feel more lonely. I feel jealousy is more of a tool to tell you what you're missing in your relationship, that you didn't know that you were missing before. If you use emotion as a tool to help you address that thing, that makes the relationship 100% stronger. Now that my fiancé and I are starting to get a lot better at it, there will be times where we'll be doing something, and then whether it's related to dating, or if it's just a problem that's in the relationship, one of us will just speak up and go, “Hey, this has been bothering me for this long. Here's why I've been feeling this, and here's why it's been bothering me.” Then we're able to kind of stop for a second and talk about it and then go, “Cool. What's our next steps? How do we solve this? Because you're feeling some sort of way, and I want to make sure you're happy, and you want to make sure we're good here.” Because if our relationship wasn't healthy, or if our relationship isn't going well, it's hard to maintain our care and relationship with other people. It's just made us a lot better at communicating. I've gotten so much better at setting boundaries and sticking by them because of it. Or at least, if I feel like something's wrong, I've gotten really good at telling other people, like, “I'm not comfortable with this,” because of that open communication that I've been able to grow at home, because of the way we date and the way we deal with relationships. LR: Well, thank you for sharing that. Before I ask the last two questions, is there any other story or any other experience you'd like to share? 63 CR: I think that's pretty much it. There is one, but it's kind of dark. LR: It's up to you. If you'd like to sit on it, you can. CR: Yeah, let's sit on it. LR: Add it after the fact if you are comfortable with it. CR: No, you're good. It's one of those things. I'll sit on it. Let's answer the two questions and I'll get back to you. LR: Okay. Forgot my questions, so I'm winging it here. I know you've really only lived in Layton and Morgan. How do those two places differ when it comes to your LGBTQ experience? CR: I've spent more of my time being out in Morgan than I was in Layton. In Layton, it was mostly just hoping and praying nobody found out. I wasn't super comfortable about it until I found out there were a ton of scandals going on in my ward. Then I was like, “Oh, okay, my mess is not nearly as bad as their mess.” Then I kind of felt more comfortable. I think parents don't realize how much they're kids hear. So Layton was a lot more about people not finding out; Morgan was a lot more of me learning how to deal with people being passive-aggressive about who I am. LR: Where do you live now? CR: Ogden. LR: Now that you've been out now for quite some time, how is Ogden different in that regard? Do you feel like it is? I'm asking a couple questions at once, I apologize. CR: No, you're good. LR: Do you feel like there's more space to be yourself in Ogden? CR: I'm going to give a lot broader of an answer. I'm sorry. LR: Go ahead. CR: How I want to answer is, there's a significant difference between living with your family and living at home and being gay or queer or within the community, than 64 being outside of it and living on your own, whether it be with roommates or just outside of your home. It wasn't as much about the cities that I've lived in, it was more about how I lived. The second that I moved out and lived on my own, it was so much better. I didn't have to care about what other people thought of me. I didn't care about whether or not my parents found out how I was living because I didn't live in the home anymore. If a family friend, or someone in my hometown, or somebody in Layton or Morgan, saw me do gay stuff outside of the home, and it reached home, who cares? I didn't go home at the end of the day. It's no longer my house. Yeah, I might have a look or two when I visit, but in the end, that's truly when it's my life. The biggest change was moving out. That was when I noticed a truly different change on who I could be. LR: So it didn't matter what town you were living in, it was just not being home and being able to be yourself. CR: Yeah, it was more about the pressure. I came from a home where most of my family always talked about what other people would think of our family. So when I got to a spot where I didn't have to come home to hear about what other people thought of the family, I didn't care. I could finally do what I wanted to do. I was already on the way there when I was in Morgan. But also, when your mental health is garbage, it gets really hard to care about what other people are thinking. It's really hard to care what other people are thinking about you living your life when your life is just trying to exist. When that's hard enough, it's hard to care about what other people think. LR: The final question is, if you had a chance to talk to your younger self, especially as you were starting to just identify, what advice would you give to your younger self, and to these young kids today who are coming out? CR: Fuck, that's a really good question. What would I say? I mean, for me, I would tell myself, “Truly, you don't have to care. You don't have to care about what other 65 people think or say or do. You really, really don't.” Because that's when I did my best growing. My senior year of high school, when I learned that I didn't have to care about what other people did, I knew what was right, and I knew what my moral compass was. Nothing else really, truly mattered, as long as I lived the way I believed a good person would. It doesn't matter what other people think. Really, truly, honestly, it does not matter. Because in the end, you live with yourself, and people don't live with you. You need to make sure that you're living with yourself in a way that you love yourself, and make sure you're someone you can live with. LR: Do you have any questions? Do you feel the need to add that last story? CR: I probably should. This kind of goes along with, “You don't have to care about what other people think, say, or do.” Shortly after high school, I was working at Wal-Mart. I was trying to save up money to leave the house. Started going on a couple of dates with this boy, he seemed okay. There were a couple, looking back, red flags and things like that. Honestly, I kind of caught on to the red flags, but I didn't really enjoy how the relationship was or anything. I had gone over to his place, and I was going to let him down smoothly. But he started kissing me, and things got way more heated, went a lot further, than I wanted it to go. I just didn't say anything. I was sexually assaulted. I'm good now. I mean, as good as someone can be. This happened in 2018, a year or so after I graduated. Big reason I want to at least have this story documented: the more I tell my story, and the more I'm open about it, the more comfortable other people are coming forward, too. I am lucky enough and grateful enough and I'm happy enough that I had a therapist who was willing to help me work through it. So I'm at a point where I can talk about it, where I can have some sort of voice. 66 I'm also a really niche demographic where I am a man who was sexually assaulted. I never came forward, and I never reported the person who did that. Because I figured that in Utah, being a man above the age of 18, reporting a sexual assault would have absolutely gone nowhere. Looking back on it, I think that that was something that changed, because at least his name would have been somewhere. LR: What is your hope, moving forward? I'm not quite sure how to ask this question. CR: No, you're good. LR: What do you think needs to change for more male victims to come forward? CR: Fuck. There's so many answers to that one question because there's so much stigma around sexual assault to begin with. One, stop victim blaming. Then there is, make sure we treat people who make the allegations with respect, because until the person who they said assaulted them is proven innocent, it's better to just assume that something terrible happened. The other thing is when these allegations come forward, do serious investigating into them. There are so many things that go into the stigma of sexual assault that have made it not impossible, but extremely hard, for not just men to come forward—because again, it's a really niche group. But as far as I'm aware, there's not a lot of men who come forward and speak up about it. In general, there's a lot that prevents a lot of other people from coming forward and talking about it. There's so much stuff that causes trauma on top of the trauma. The best thing that I can honestly recommend is when someone tells you about it or comes forward, believe them. Unless there is solid evidence to suggest otherwise, believe them. Fight for the victims. LR: Anything else you'd like to add? CR: No, that's it. LR: Well, thank you very much for sharing your story and for being so candid. 67 CR: [Nods]. 68