Oral History Program Austin Sheffey Interviewed by Faith Christiansen 9 August 2022 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Austin Sheffey Interviewed by Faith Christiansen 9 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: Sheffey, Austin, an oral history by Faith Christiansen, 9 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 Austin Sheffey conducted on August 9, 2022 in the Stewart Library at Weber State University by Faith Christiansen. Austin talks about his childhood, coming to understand his sexuality in a conservative religious upbringing and the effects of bullying in school. He also talks about mental illness and how it manifested in his life and his time doing drag. Also present is Sarah Langsdon FC: It is August 9, 2022, at 5:30 PM. We're at the Stewart Library. I am Faith Christiansen. I'm going to be conducting this interview today, and my pronouns are she/her. I identify as bisexual/pansexual. SL: I am Sarah Langsdon. My pronouns are she/her. I identify as cisheterosexual, and I'll be on camera today. FC: And you are? AS: My name is Austin Sheffey. Hi. My pronouns are he/they. I identify as a gender queer gay man who's poly. FC: Okay. I know we talked over the phone about some boundaries, like topic sensitivity, and we were kind of open. Are we still? AS: Yep. If I can talk about it in therapy, I feel like I can talk about it here, because you guys want to know the stories. FC: Okay, perfect. Just as a reminder, feel free to opt out if anything becomes uncomfortable or I ask an uncomfortable question. You can take a break at any point, too. Thank you for your willingness to share your story. Are you ready to begin? AS: Let's get into it. FC: Okay, so we're going to start all the way at the beginning. Where were you born? AS: I was born in Preston, Idaho, at the Franklin County Hospital, I think the name was. FC: And when were you born? 1 AS: July 25th, 1996, I think like 1:00 in the morning. I really don't know what time. FC: Did you have a best friend growing up? AS: I did, but I didn't get along with a lot of kids. I was made fun of a lot. I had one kid who was just as weird as I was, and we used to hang out. I grew up in a trailer park, and we would hang out all the time. His dad gave me the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles VHS for my birthday. I hung out with him a lot, and then I hung out with my brother's friends, but they only dealt with me because they liked my brother. FC: What was your family dynamic growing up? AS: I always get confused by this word. What do you mean? FC: Family dynamic, it can be a lot of things. Just like how your parents raised you, or how many people are in your family. What was your family like? Things like that. AS: My mom was only able to have two kids due to health issues. My brother's older than me by about two years and a few months. My dad worked away from home a lot as a child, so I didn't see him a lot growing up. When we lived in Logan, my mom was going to Utah State for her degree in Family and Consumer Sciences with an emphasis on family finance. I grew up with my aunts because my dad was working; my mom was finishing school. My aunts watched me a lot. FC: What was that like with your aunts? AS: They got me into a lot of things I'm still really into nowadays, like Eurodance. I just kind of picked up on their mannerisms growing up. It was okay. It was childhood. I don't want to say that it was the worst, but it wasn't the best either. FC: Why wasn't it the best? AS: I got in trouble a whole lot. I'd leave food under my bed. One time I put Kool-Aid in a bowl of Cheerios instead of milk because I wasn't paying attention, and then I didn't want to get in trouble for doing that, so I put it under my bed and it made its own colony. It was bad, it was really gross. 2 FC: Sounds like a science project. AS: So yeah, it was not what you consider a normal childhood, but it was mine. I honestly don't remember a lot of my childhood. There's certain things and it's usually the negative things, but a lot of my memory of childhood is gone. I remember, periodically, random pieces of things here and there. FC: So you said you were raised by your aunts? AS: Not really raised by aunts, I was watched by my aunts a lot. My parents were home every night. My aunts were babysitting me a lot, and my mom was doing her internship, and my dad was working. FC: So what did you learn about gender roles? AS: I grew up LDS. I grew up with stereotypical women, especially from my mom's family. They're misogynistic and the women are stay-at-home-mothers and men need to be masculine and provide. FC: Were those placed on you quite a bit? AS: Yeah, they didn't really like that I was feminine. I just used to put a blanket around my head and pretend I was a princess, but I was a weird kind of feminine. I hate dolls. They creep me out; I've hated them since I was a kid. I did feminine things. I played with makeup. I grew up with the stereotypical—I'm going to say it the way it is—Mormon gender roles. My mom kind of pushed it a bit because growing up LDS, it's usually you go to college, find a husband. My dad proposed, my mom said, “Not until I have my Associates. You can wait.” So my dad proposed to my mom in February, and she didn't say yes until May. I kind of grew up with them, depending on who I was with, kind of a thing. FC: Makes sense. What were you taught about sexuality growing up? AS: Not a lot. I don't know how to explain it. I wasn't taught that being gay was bad, but I wasn't really taught about sexuality in general. Just kind of the, “Husband and wife 3 love each other very much.” But I did grow up with gay people around. My dad had one of his workers, because he was a manager for Osmosis, the telephone pole people. One of his gay coworkers would stay with us every once in a while. This is based off what I'm told. I don't remember any of this because I was really, really young. People in my mom and dad's ward would be like, “Are you afraid he's going to touch your children?” My mom was like, “I'd be more afraid you'd touch my children.” I grew up around with my cousin who was gay, so I grew up around people who were of different sexualities, but it's just kind of what you heard from the outside. It wasn't really talked about. FC: So what was your first exposure to queerness? AS: Will and Grace or Jerry Springer. My mom, when I was younger, used to lay on the couch and we watched Jerry Springer together. But that was like the bad representations of queer history. FC: So that brings me to a good question. Did you see representation growing up and what was it? AS: It was Will and Grace and Jerry Springer. You get that, “I slept with your husband and I'm a man,” or you get where they play on stereotypes of gay people. Was it better with Will and Grace? Obviously. But it wasn't the best at some time. FC: What was your first exposure to genderqueer? AS: That wasn't until I was in high school. Do you mean my own identity? I got so confused. My bad. So I've done drag since 2017, and when I started, I did straight female drag. Then I held the title for a year that I did straight male drag, and then I realized I was gender non-conforming at the time. I realized that some days I just don't feel male. There's some days I just kind of feel in-between. Now, will I ever wear it out of my house? No, because I know I live in Utah, and my job may be 4 progressive, but at some points you always have to be careful. It's corporate America. I did drag for our pride event. But as a whole, after doing both, I took the gender neutral title and realized, “Oh, I'm genderqueer, I'm not just male.” Then I came out at work. I told my boss, I changed my job titles, and put my pronouns in my signature. Now my signature pronouns are he/they. FC: We're gonna go back to childhood again. When was the first time you felt different? AS: My whole childhood, I never really felt like I fit in anyway. I mean, it didn't help that my aunt would call me Austina when I was acting feminine, so I always felt different. I didn't really feel like I fit in. I don't know how to explain it. FC: You explained it well, you explained it well. AS: I just did what I had to do. SL: Did you conform to what you were expected growing up in an LDS household, especially in Cache Valley? AS: Yes and no, I did. When it comes to wanting to go on a mission and being baptized, which as an adult, I realized as an eight-year-old, I don't understand what those covenants are. I didn't understand what that meant. It was just that my parents were proud of me, so I was going to take the win. So I did conform, but I always caused issues, it’s just how I was. FC: How did the conforming impact you? AS: I've lost a lot of who I was conforming to the Mormon church. There are times I go back to it. Sometimes it's a sense of comfort because I know it. But there's a lot of things because of religion in general that I've lost trying to conform to what I'm told I should. “This is what it should be, so I need to fit in this box.” I want to apologize in advance. Sometimes these thoughts and words make sense in my head because of my ADHD with its associated thinking. 5 FC: No, you're doing good. So did you feel like you needed to traditionally come out? AS: I don't know how to explain this. I came out. I got made fun of for years about being gay. I wasn't even interested in men. It wasn't until the summer of my junior year; I came out as bi and my parents saw things. I became kind of more, “Yass.” I think my parents suspected but didn't want to admit it to themselves. They had assumptions. I just kind of told them one day and I was like, “I'm gay. Okay, bye.” FC: How was that experience? AS: Not great. My mom told me that I wasn't gay. I was only gay because my friends told me I was, which makes sense to me. She could accept it from one person, not in our family, who's not your child. But when it's your own child, it's not okay then. My dad is more accepting of it because my dad was a convert to the LDS church. He would tell me stories about his grandmother's hairdresser, and I'm very feminine. Like I'm very, [mimes waving fan] waving the fan and everything. My dad's like, “My grandma's hairdresser makes you look straight. He was out there.” So my dad's more accepting of it; my mother, not so much. It's still a struggle for her to admit she enjoys drag shows because I'm her child. It's not okay then. FC: How was junior high? I know you got made fun of a lot. AS: Can I swear? FC: Yeah, swear. AS: It's fucking awful. It all started because my brother, when he was in school, would walk around, call me a faggot. That just built on it. Then a girl accused me of masturbating in class three different years in a row. Because we were a small school—the sixth grade was in elementary, seventh and eighth were in the high school—there were a hundred kids between every grade altogether. We were really close. It was a small school, so I had to deal with her. I got accused of masturbating in class for three different years. The thing is, I never changed my story. She did 6 every time, and then she got caught stealing. So who are they more likely to believe? Another girl, she got made fun of, and I was her way to take it out on someone. The only time we got along when I lived there was when she would bring a full human-sized Barbie doll and we would take care of it together. That was the one time we got along, but the school didn't really do much. All these kids who I thought were my friends were just as mean behind my back. They'd steal stuff from me. I did things to try to fit in that I regret very much. When I moved to high school, when I was in seventh grade, it got really bad. The principal pretty much told me, “Well, if Austin doesn't talk the way he does, he wouldn't be made fun of.” I got victim-blamed for being bullied. The same girl who got bullied and took it out on me ripped out a chunk of my hair. Some kid punched me in the nuts saying we were ‘shadowboxing’—I still don't know what that is. It was hell. My parents realized. We moved to Dugway, Utah because my dad started working there in 2003 on a contract. We moved out there after my mom finished college, so my mom could actually see my dad more often. But after that, like five years—we moved there the summer before third grade, and we moved after eight— they realized it was either they stay at Dugway and not have a kid who's living or move away. They didn't realize how bad it was, how many times I tried killing myself, living at Dugway. I asked for help. I stole 60 bucks from my mother, and when she found out, I told her I didn't love her. They called a cop friend of the family, and he said, “I can take you to juvie.” I literally looked at him and I said, “Take me anywhere. It's better than here.” 7 Then he said, “I can let your mom take you out back and beat you and I'll look the other way.” I was like, “No, please, just take me to juvie. I'd rather go to juvie because I'm afraid of my mother.” My mom is a scary woman. She grew up the second oldest of 13 kids. She may be a woman, but she's freaking strong like a man in stereotypical ways. I know that’s some women, but when you grow up in a misogynistic home, she's ‘one of the boys’ kind of thing. Holy shit. She's got a strong swing. FC: You talked about wanting to talk more about Dugway in your pre-interview. Anything else you want to add about Dugway? AS: It shaped who I was. I was talking to someone who I thought was a friend, and I said I had a crush on another girl, and I had a dream that we got married and had kids. He told her, and it got around the entire school. I got made fun of for it hardcore. It got so bad my mom left her job, came down to the school and said, “If I find out you're the one who did this, I will make you regret it.” My mom was my biggest advocate. Sometimes she's also my biggest villain. Then I moved back to Dugway. I worked dispatch for them from August of 2019 to March of 2020. While I was there, I knew I wasn't very well-liked. We had a lesbian worker there, but she was a conservative lesbian, so she fit in. One of my coworkers would make gay comments. I yelled at another coworker for making racist and sexist comments. One of the girls who had been there the longest, she was trying to help him because he was getting mad, and he's like, “I don't need your damn opinion. You're a woman.” I flipped around and I was like, “You will never say that fucking again, Rudy.” He's like, “What? She's a woman. I do it to my wife.” I'm like, “That doesn't make it okay.” 8 Then he made a comment about how Mexicans are lazy, and I was like, “Dude!” “I'm a Mexican.” I was like, “That's just like saying I can make horrific gay jokes because I'm gay.” Right. I made a mistake on a call once and I owned up to it. I said, “Oh shit,” over the radio once, because we had an old system, so you had to use pedals to use the radios. I didn't lift my foot up high enough and I said, “Oh shit,” over the radio to the firefighters. I redid their entire training system after—[laughs] this is so dramatic. So when I got hired, it was right after the old supervisor got fired. She was married to the head detective. She was having an affair with a married director over the entire department. Then she got caught kissing the files, so she made up records that is required of army base dispatch and police officers to have. When I was redoing the entire record system because it was an absolute mess, I asked the officer, “When did you get this?” He's like, “I don't even know what that is.” “Awesome. Cool. One of you needs to get it.” So I messed up on that call. Then one of my coworkers' husbands was in Qatar, I think it's called. He's in the Middle East. We'll go with that. President Trump had a speech come up on Fox News. They had a call come in and I literally turned around, said, “Can we turn this off?” She's like, “My husband's in the Middle East.” I was like, “Cool, you can watch this at home? You get mad when we turn on the TV when you're trying to do something. Please turn off the TV.” So they gave me five ‘consultations’. When I got fired, they said I got five ‘write-ups’ and they fired 9 me two weeks after they had already released everyone from Dugway due to COVID. I got called in. The director said, “You are not fit for emergency services. I tried to find you another job at Dugway, but none were available. I will give you a glowing review. If you need help moving, I'll bring my truck and I'll help you move.” I was like, “I don't want your help moving. I want my damn job.” So, yeah, I got fired, and I literally called my dad and I said, “Get me the fuck out of here. I have to be out by Wednesday.” This is Monday and I applied for unemployment that night. The only good that came out of Dugway the second time I lived there was how close I got with my dad. Other than that, all Dugway does is eat your soul. It is a horrible place. FC: What was the culture there? AS: Conservative nuclear families. FC: How does that differ from Utah? AS: It's a lot worse because what I've noticed is that the smaller the town, the worse the nuclear family ideal is. At least here it's not as bad, or like Salt Lake. Salt Lake is very liberal, but Dugway, just a lot of people there are very, very conservative. They love talking about how much they love Trump and how great of a president he is. Then they get weirded out that I'm like, “He's not that… okay. I don't want to cause issues. I'll just go with ‘okay.’” Dugway as a whole has never brought me anything but more hurt. FC: Are there any other military bases you've been to? AS: I've only been to Hill Air Force Base for a job interview and then to get fingerprints done when I worked at Dugway. Was it Dugway or the IRS? It was one of the two. I think it was Dugway. FC: So after Dugway where did you go? AS: The first time or the second time? 10 SL: Go back to the first time. AS: We moved from Dugway back in 2010, the summer after my freshman year. What's kind of funny: my mom grew up and we moved to Montpelier, Idaho—Bear Lake. My mom grew up there. She flat out said, “I will never move back.” While they were visiting my grandpa because he had just got diagnosed with stage four melanoma, my mom got the feeling. As she said, it's the Holy Spirit telling her it's time to go home. My mom thought, “Oh, F that.” On the way home my dad's like, “Honey, it's time.” So they started looking into Montpelier. They got the house across the street from my grandparents’ house where my mom grew up. When we moved out there, the house only had the master. The master bedroom at the time was only like a third of the size of this room. There was one bathroom and no washer and dryer hookups. The old owners went to the laundromat every Wednesday for 40-plus years. So we expanded out the house and we lived at my grandparents’ during then. The bullying was bad, but it wasn't as bad as it was. Let's just say it's not as memorable, like I don't remember as much of it as I did when I lived at Dugway. I still got made fun of, obviously. I'm a very feminine kid, in band and choir, doing show choir, dancing to horrible songs. FC: How was that? AS: Awful, I hated the teacher. He was a piece of shit. There's so many things about him that I know that I don't want to. He's just not a good person. We were called the elite group, but anyone who auditioned got in. It got so bad that when I was singing tenor, he'd be like, “You stop singing. You've got it right. Let's work with the rest of you.” I now have “21 Guns,” “I See You” from Avatar… What other songs did we do? I know I can't listen to half the songs anymore. They are so bad to me. 11 I did theater. My freshman year we did Sweeney Todd. I played Toby until I had a mental breakdown. In the part when “Pirelli’s Miracle Elixer” is first starting with Toby, they start crowding in around him. I had a panic attack because I felt claustrophobic, and it got so bad. My teacher had to call my mom and dad to come calm me down. So I did one show that my parents could see and then I just did prop after the rest of the time. That teacher, I actually am friends with, she's come to drag shows. She's been a judge in a drag pageant. She's on one of my partners’ sets for one of our major events this year. She saved my life freshman year. FC: What's her name? AS: Christina Hartman. FC: Can you spell that? AS: C-H-R-I-S-T-I-N-A H-A-R-T-M-A-N. She's married, and I don't know her married name. She was just that odd duckling out, and I just kind of clung to it. She only worked at the school for a year, but in that year, she got the art students to paint a unicorn pooping rainbows on her wall in her classroom. She was just so weird, but I freaking loved her. I'd just go to her when I struggled. She caught me doing geometry homework and I said, “I just don't have the energy to do it at home.” So she talked to my teachers. She reached out to my parents; her and my mom got along so well. Christina's been married twice. The first time she got married, my mom crocheted a thing with her married name on it, and Christina kept it after she got divorced, so she still has it. She’s just an amazing human being. When I moved back to Ogden, it was only this year, but I invited her to a drag show, and she started coming around. She's just been gone for the summer because she works as an educator. She has a doctorate, and she teaches at… I don't know if it's like a college or a technical school that's connected to Utah State. SL: Bridgerland? 12 AS: No, it's right next to where Convergys used to be. There was Lee's and then Convergys. The schools in that area, I don't know. I never went to it because I was too young to go there, but she still works there. Another teacher my freshman year that I absolutely adore, his name is Travis Thurston. He taught government. When I first moved to Montpelier, I was still a really weird kid trying to find myself. We had; it was called TALL Class. It's just our study hall. I don't know what TALL stands for. But one of them stole my phone, and their little group of friends, because they had known each other, one of them was sitting on it. I asked for help trying to find it, and I'd call it and it wouldn't go off. I got so mad, and when I got mad, when I was younger, I used to cry. That just made me madder ‘cause I was crying. One of the girls who was part of the friend group was like, “Why don't you just calm down?” I literally turned and said, “Fuck you, bitch!” and walked out. My teacher was like, “No, she probably deserved it,” ‘cause this girl was an asshole. There's a few teachers that have stuck out to me from high school. I don't have to talk more about high school, but I lived in Montpelier from 2010 to 2015, and moved out March 2015 to go to Utah State. FC: Anything else you want to add about high school? AS: I got concussions a lot. Probably messed me up a little bit. I used to work at Minnetonka Cave, which is a living cave up in one of the canyons. We would have to do algae cleaning because the water was dripping and the cave was still growing. When you have lights, the algae would grow up until we had to scrub the rocks. One time, there's one kind of rock in the very last room, and it's really muddy because of all the water. You have to go up and scrub it. I slipped and a pointed rock hit me hard right in my face and everything went dark. I couldn't hear them 13 talking, and when I did, it sounded like they were really far away, and it was all dark. I thought they left me in the back, so I was screaming at the top of my lungs. I worked there for two years. It was awful because my grandmother was my manager, and she still takes advantage of any of the family who helps out. I'm trying to think. I just have little stories here and there. I did Academic Decathlon. It's actually because of AcaDeca, that's why I kissed my very first guy. We went up to Boise my freshman year. There, I can't remember his name, but he's from Middleton, and we got really close. After we did the finale—what do you call it? “Here's who won awards. Here's who's going to state in person, who's going online, whatever.” He's like, “Hey, can you come with me?” I said, “Yes, sure,” because I was going to stay in Boise with my aunt and he was getting ready to leave. We went back to, I think it was the Red Lion Hotel, which incidentally, I think I was in the same ballroom just a couple of weeks ago. We went behind something and he just leaned over and gave me a kiss. I didn't hate it. I didn't know what it was. I was like, “This is weird, but I don't hate it.” After he left, I talked to him for a while, and then he got quiet. I got a text back saying, “This is his dad. He no longer has his phone because he got caught smoking pot.” That's where I kissed my very first guy, on a school trip in Boise. I did academic decathlon all four years. FC: Did that experience help solidify things for you? AS: Oh yeah. There's so many queer kids in AcaDeca. We called it AcaDeca, some call it AcaDec. It just depends on what school you're in. There's so many gay kids in that program. If they're not, it's like you have the exact opposite. You have the really gay kids who use it to get out of their house, but it makes their parents happy because you're learning. Then you have the ones who are like, “Ew, gay people.” 14 There's no in-between. So yeah, it got me around queer people. Also in band and show choir. Theater not as much. I came out my junior year of high school. The summer before my junior year, I was dating a girl unofficially for a few weeks, and then officially while I was on a band trip. We went with Marsh Valley, which is another school. One of the kids from March Valley—I hung out with the queer kids or the ones that were queer allies. There was a huge group of us; we would play truth or dare. One of the dares was, “We dare you to hold his hand for two rounds.” We sat there for like 20 minutes after the two rounds were done and like, “Oh, we're finished.” One of the guys told me, “I really want to kiss you.” I was like, “Cool, I don't cheat on people.” I didn't cheat on her. When I was doing Youth Government, I think it's called, I got a call from a girl that both of us hated because we openly talked about how much we couldn't stand her. She's like, “Just so you know, your girlfriend got arrested. I'm like, “For what? I don't even want to talk to you right now.” My girlfriend told my brother before she admitted to me she got arrested, and it's because she was known associating with drug users in Montpelier. Because Montpelier, the big thing is, meth or Mormon? Are you a meth user, or are you Mormon? Montpelier is the meth-moving capital of Idaho. A lot of it moves through Montpelier. Because she was associated with them, they found her drug paraphernalia in her room. I broke up with her because of that. Incidentally, the same guy who wanted to kiss me on the band trip came to work at the Minnetonka cave. He lived with my parents, and that's the first time I had sexual interactions with someone. We were both underage, which I now know is not a smart idea. I regret every minute of it because he's just a major douche. That was my very first sexual experience. I think he was 16, and I was 17. 15 When I finally did graduate high school, I got on Tumblr, which was known really when I was in high school. It was big for gay people talking to each other and sending nudes. I would send nudes of myself when I was 17 on Kik or on Snapchat because I had just come out yet again. Regret every minute of it because some of those people were creepy. Then I got Grindr like a month before I turned 18. I made a lot of dumb decisions, because when you grow up kind of sheltered—I've heard it a lot from a lot of gay people. When you're sheltered and grow up in heteronormative situations and then you finally come out, you try to experience everything that you should have growing up all at once. I then moved to Logan. I lived with my brother. I relied on sex and liquor for my depression. I wasn't in therapy. I had stopped it by that point. I don't even remember. I found my first boyfriend through Craigslist. How I wasn't murdered, I don't know. He broke up with me because I was ‘too happy for him.’ I was like, “Girl, this is called a facade. I'm sad all the time.” After that, I started drinking a lot more. I used to have one of those bottles of Fireball at night, and then on weekends I’d get a handled one and drink that with Monster within two days. I drink a shit ton, but I probably didn't get alcohol poisoning because my grandparents were alcoholics. I had sex with 15 different men in two weeks, and I don't know any of their names. I'm such a douche for this. I hooked up with a guy. He tried to come over. It didn't work out. He left my house and I said, “Don't talk to me again, you're not really cute. I just wanted sex. Bye.” Then I tried killing myself that night. Logan, it's a dark time for me. I went to the psych ward. This is just a conglomeration. It didn't help that I was financially supporting my brother because he wasn't working. I went to the psych ward, I came out, and it started to get worse then because I started financially supporting his wife after she moved in. He was working, kind of, but it was nothing compared to my pay. I pay for groceries; I pay 16 their bills; they would barely pay for gas and maybe a few things to eat here and there. Going back to when I came out of the psych ward, I was there for only a few days. They got me into therapy, and the therapist that I saw after coming out of the psych ward is incidentally the same therapist I'm seeing now. I saw her for a while when I lived in Logan, so that was from November of 2015 to July of 2016. Then I moved to Rexburg, and then I came back to Utah, saw her again, quit because I worked in Salt Lake, she was in Logan and she wasn't doing telehealth at the time. My job offers a program called Lyra. I signed up for it. I saw her on there, and she texted me saying, “You're the only Austin Sheffey I know.” I said, “Yes, it's me.” So I started seeing her. I needed to get out of Logan, so I started to go back to church because I just wanted to go to another school, and the only school that would accept me is BYU Idaho, because it has a 96% acceptance rate. I'm not happy with a lot of the decisions I made in Logan. I regret a lot. I regret them, but I don't regret them. I learned from them. I wouldn't change them, but if I could take what I learned and then not make the decisions again, I absolutely would do that. I kind of forgot where this question was going. FC: I know you talked a lot about alcohol, is that still happening as much as it did? AS: No, so I quit drinking for a long time. There have been times I've gotten hungover, but not to the extent that I was. I went to the psych ward and I quit drinking altogether. I started dating a girl who I'm still actually really good friends with. We can go months without talking, and then we talk, and it's like we never stopped. We dated for a while, but the reason why we're so close is because I wanted to be what I considered ‘good enough’ for her. I have a deep, deep love for this human. 17 There's certain people I'm trying to avoid names for you. She has gone through a lot. When she was in the psych ward for electroconvulsive therapy, her parents didn't visit her at all. I worked in Salt Lake, and she looked at me one day and said, “I need cigarettes.” I said, “You betcha.” The only thing I heard from her parents is, “Why do you give her cigarettes?” I said, “She's in a psych ward alone. You guys don't visit her. She can quit smoking. If she cuts the wrong way, she's not going to come back. She can quit smoking if she wants.” The second time she went in, because there's like a 5% chance of it not working and you becoming more aggressive, which is what happened to her. So she went back for a second round. Her parents only came to get her keys because she drove herself up there. They took her car and left, and yet again, they didn't want to visit her. Back to how they connect to Logan. I quit drinking and smoking because I wanted to be what I considered ‘good enough’ for her. My best friend at the time told me that I was settling for my parents, and I was like, “Girl, you don't even know my parents.” She met my dad once because he had to get something from me. Because of that, I quit drinking and then I moved to Rexburg. I started doing drag, and when you do drag at a gay bar, you're going to be around liquor. There was one night, my friends—there's so many things that connect to this. To understand what happened, I have to go back to another situation. I started dating a guy named Edgar when I lived in Rexburg. I dated him for five months at that time. That was the longest relationship that I had, and I found out he cheated on me on Valentine's Day. It was an act of God. I used to donate blood because F their homophobic rules, so I was donating. I was supposed to go 18 on a certain day. I couldn't go, so I rescheduled. One just popped up and I was like, “Oh, I can go that day. It's Valentine's Day, I don't work,” so I signed up for it. I show up for this event and someone that I became friends with because of donating blood who also gay was like, “What are you doing here?” I was like, “Donating blood. That's why I'm here.” He's like, “No shit, Sherlock. I know that's why you're here. Why are you here in this building?” I was like, “Because I had to reschedule.” He goes, “This is only supposed to be for employees of the building. No one else has signed up for it. You're the only outside person, I think.” “Oh, okay, cool.” He's like, “We're good. You're on the list. I'll still do it.” So we did it and started talking, like, “How's life?” He's like, [whispers] “You dating anyone?” because we're whispering to each other. I was like, “Yeah, a guy named Edgar Renteria.” He goes, “Oh.” I was like, “What's that supposed to mean?” He's like, “Nothin’.” I'm like, “Okay.” We finish up. I go outside, he calls me over, and he's like, “This is your boyfriend. He's been texting me for sex cause he saw me on Grindr.” I was like, “Cool.” So I went to where we usually had dinner, which was Perkins in Idaho Falls, and I said, “Hi, ‘kay, I know this is your number. I know you're asking for sex. Just be honest with me.” “It wasn't me. I was with my ex.” “Okay, that's one.” 19 Then he's like, “And I did coke again this weekend.” “Okay, there's two.” He is Latinx, but he told me he was born in California. Then this is right after Trump had just stepped up as president with all of his… policies. We'll go with policies to be nice. He's like, “I don't want to be deported, so I’mma join the cartel and die suicide by police.” I'm like, “Okay, I'm out.” That was a whole thing. What led to me drinking hardcore for the very first time since I had quit this was in September of that year. I was driving to Pocatello in my Subaru and I had stopped and pulled over. He gave me a promise ring when we were together, and I held on to it and I was like, “I don't need you anymore.” I chucked it out my window and I started to drive. Five minutes later, my transmission blew in my car. So I had to sell my car to the towing company because I didn't have $250 to pay them. I spent $80 on liquor for me alone, which I probably shouldn’t have spent because it was all on my credit card. I got so drunk; I was hungover. I only woke up for like one hour the next day to eat pizza, and then I got sick again. My roommate from my apartment in Rexburg had to come pick me up, and then I got sick in his car when we got back into Rexburg. Since then, I drank a lot more when I first moved back to Ogden because I felt like drinking was the only way that I could be fun because doing drag in Pocatello was hard. You make a character and mine was a ditzy, dumb person, so I kind of went with it and I drank a lot when I first moved here. Then I met my partners and I don't drink as much as I used to because of it. I realize I don't need to drink. Sometimes when I go to parties by myself, I'll have a few shots because I'm more likely to talk that way ‘cause I've really bad social anxiety, but once I start 20 talking, I don't stop talking. It's one extreme or the other. I've only got hungover, I think, two or three times in the past three or four years. One funny story to me is, I reigned with a guy. I was a Rainbow Princess in the Imperial Rainbow Court of Northern Utah, and he was my Rainbow Prince; we were together at the same time. I became friends with him, and at his birthday party, I got there at like two or three. I had two mimosas, two other mixed drinks and 13 shots of Fireball. Thirteenth shot is what got me over the edge. I’ve gotten drunk on Fireball so many times. I went to throw up, and then I went and stumbled into his guest bedroom. The next morning, I woke up, and I was super hungover. But I was like,” I've got to help my partners take apart a bunk bed and put in new IKEA beds. I can't drive without my glasses.” We destroyed his whole room moving stuff. I was like, “Oh, I’m going to get sick again,” and then I found my glasses behind the toilet. I've gotten hungover once or twice since then. I can have a full bottle of wine and I'm not hungover, but it's hard liquor. That's my problem. That's also from my grandparents, because my dad's parents were hard liquor drinkers. FC: So we covered high school. Do you want to go into more detail about the psych ward? AS: We can. FC: Only if you want to. AS: It's a funny story. So at this job that I was working, with Conservice in Logan, they do utility billing. The department I was in was for single homes, because if I remember… Was it with Sally Mack or Fannie Mae? It was one of those housing companies that owned a lot of complexes. They had just started a new department for single family homes. American Homes for rent is the major one we help with. My department, when the data entry people would type in the utility bills for these apartments, I would audit the information. 21 We were not allowed to have our phones out for whatever reason, even though we're grown-ass adults. So I had my phone out for like the third time. They were writing me up, and the night before was when I told the guy, “I don't like you, you're gross.” I broke down on them and I was like, “I need help. I tried killing myself last night.” So the HR Director and someone else drove me to the hospital and waited with me until my brother could get there. I sat in that room for like five hours. My brother and I cried a lot. Then this older lady came and asked me a bunch of questions and then said, “Well, Logan Valley Regional is full, so you can just go home.” I was like, “I'm not leaving this bed until you get me help.” So I had to strip down. They strapped me to an ambulance bed and drove me to LDS Hospital in Salt Lake. When I got there, they were like, “Where are your clothes?” I was like, “I was told I couldn't have them.” “What were you wearing?” I was like, “A button up shirt and pants with no belt.” They're like, “You could have worn your clothes.” I think it was October 20, and I think I left October 22. I was there for a very short time. I just needed to be medicated and to learn what was wrong. They diagnosed me with borderline personality disorder and started me on some medications. Then when I got out, I went and I started seeing a doctor in Logan who is a psychiatrist, and she worked with the therapist I see now in the same office. My therapist doesn't think I have borderline personality disorder. I show some symptoms of it, but I don't show all. BPD is a very generic mental illness term for, “This is mental illness; we don't know what. You have some of these symptoms, and then these symptoms don't really collaborate with these ones, but we still don't know what either of them are, so BPD.” 22 So I got diagnosed with BPD and then because of that, I started doing DBT, which is Dialectical Behavioral Therapy. They teach four skills: mindfulness, emotion regulation, distress tolerance, and interpersonal effectiveness. Like I said, I've been in therapy multiple times across the years. This is my third time seeing the therapist I started with after I got out of the psych ward, and we started over. But now, because of further traumas that have happened since that first point, I'm now doing Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, which is stopping negative thought processes and EMDR, which is used for PTSD. I'm not excited for that one because my partners have done it and it's very draining. FC: It's a rough one. AS: Very needed. She's had nothing but good results. It's not something we're going to do until I'm done with DBT. I'm just not excited for it because I have chronic fatigue because I have Epstein-Barr. I don't know if it's from sharing a drink with someone or being a whore, because it's a herpes strand. It led to mono, but they said, “Oh, it kicks up when you're stressed.” Well, when you have Major Depressive Disorder, BPD, and anxiety—social and situational—I'm never not in a state of stress, so I'm chronically fatigued. There are things at my house I have not touched. My blinds have never been cleaned. I've lived there for two years. I have dishes in my sink. I just don't have the energy to do it. I cleaned my shelves yesterday, that almost killed me. FC: Just one task for the day. So, skipping around a little bit. AS: I'm sorry. FC: No, you're good. BYU? AS: We can go to that one. I moved to BYU in July of 2016. My mom had just had some health issues, and I told her I needed to start a job because the next training class they started wouldn't start until a month later. I was like, “I need a job.” Even though 23 I was a registered student that was to start in January, they would not let me live in on-campus housing because I wasn't an active student. I lived in this really shitty house. We had to have locks on the inside of our doors. We had five rooms and we had padlocks on the outside of each of our doors. It was bad. My mom tried to guilt trip me because I wasn't home, and I was like, “I need to start a job, I'm sorry.” So I lived there. When I first lived there, I worked at a place called Avantguard. They actually have one here in Ogden. Don't work for them, personal opinion. They are awful to deal with. Rexburg’s site is mainly medical alarms, and then message centers, which is when people call in about things like, “Hey, I got this voicemail about this medical alarm. What's happened? Can you update me?” Stuff like that. I was working days at this time. I also was a social worker for the state of Idaho. I worked with a special needs adult. His name was based off a name in the Book of Mormon. I don't want to state his name. I worked with him, and it was actually very enjoyable. Most of the time, he wanted to sleep on my floor or listen to “Forever Young”. I listened to that song so many times with him, and so I did that for a while. During that time I started dating Edgar. I don't have a problem with pot; I do have a problem with my roommate smoking pot in the bathroom that we share. He didn't even open windows. One time he smoked it, all the windows were closed, didn't light a candle, and so I could smell it hardcore in my room. I worked at a medical alarm place, and I picked up a night shift. I went to the police station and said, “This is my roommate. He's smoking pot.” So they searched the house, they found him growing it in our shed, and he got arrested. One time, Edgar was over at the house in my room with me, and my roommate said, “You're going to be forever alone. No one fucking loves you.” I was like, “I have my boyfriend in the room with me.” 24 Then a lot of them stole my dishes. I had a Knott's Berry Farm cup with my name on the inside, and I was the only Austin in the house. I was like, “Well, that's my cup.” One of my roommates is like, “No, it's mine.” I was like, “Is your name Austin? This is my cup, don't go there.” So I had to padlock my room. I got a mini fridge that my parents bought me for Christmas and I make everything out of my rice cooker: eggs, ramen noodles, rice. When I moved out into what would be my new housing at the time, I dropped off my keys. I had my single room, and then next door, there was a double room, so two people would live in this room. I was like, “I think my roommate's dead. He got a baby cat, and I haven't heard it in weeks.” I then said, “Okay, bye.” Dropped off my keys and left. Then I moved to the housing that I had before the final place that I lived in Rexburg, called the Blue Door Apartments because all of our doors were blue. I started working graves then. I became really good friends with some coworkers of mine. On nights that we didn't work. I'd go over to their house and we would just sit up and play video games all night. We made dinners together. I made a whole roasted turkey one time, never done it since, and I never will. I hung out with them all the time. FC: Were you able to find any queer, or just safe spaces, in your communities while living at BYU? AS: Yes and no, because just like BYU, Rexburg had USGA: Understanding SameGender Attraction. When I went there, not a lot of people attended because there was a lot of drama. We did host a drag show at the public library. And I won the title of Miss USGA 2017-2018. That group has now fallen apart due to infighting on who would be leadership and who the better queer representatives are. Now there's a 25 bunch of splinter groups, so I'm still the only title holder. I'm still Miss USGA 20172018. I became really good friends with another drag queen. I actually haven't talked to him in a while, but this last month he said he was actually going to come and visit me because he lives in Texas now. He's going to come up in November for a major drag event. I had a gay roommate that I became really good friends with. My roommates, when I started doing drag and going to Pocatello, I would choose an outfit and they'd be like and they'd be like, “Gross.” So they chose my outfits. I did that for a long time. Then I went on a dinner date. I met someone off a dating app, and I just wanted to go on a date. I wasn't looking for anything because after I broke up with Edgar and then being sexually assaulted, I said, “I'm not having sex anymore until I'm comfortable.” So I went on this date, we got really gross Indian food. The next day, I told my coworkers, “Hey, I went out with another gay person. We just had dinner,” and two people turned me into the Honor Code office. The first words out of their mouth when I got into the office is, “Why did you break the rules?” I said, “One, it's none of your damn business. Two, I went to dinner, period.” Literally that night, because it was near the end of the semester anyways, I packed all of my shit in garbage bags. I told my dad yet again, “Come pick me up. I'm leaving.” I moved to Montpelier for about two weeks, and then I moved in with my brother, where he lived with his in-laws, and that's how I came down to Ogden. When I lived in Rexburg, after I broke up with Edgar, I started using Grindr a lot more, just to kind of make things seem less empty. I met this guy on Grindr. I told him my boundaries and he broke all of them. Are you okay if I talk about it? FC: It's up to you. 26 AS: He didn't wear a condom, he finished in me, and then I had to clean his house naked, and I had to suck his toes. But because I said yes, I was like, “I consented to this.” I got in a car wreck back in August 2020, and in December of that year, my brother had also gotten in a car wreck within that span. I didn't want to drive, so one of my partners was driving me to my brother and my parents’ house with me in the car. We were talking about bad sexual experiences, and I said, “Well, one time I was afraid this guy would beat the shit out of me, so I said yes and it was awful.” My partner was like, “That's rape. You were raped.” I was like, “No, I said yes.” “If your brain and body still say no, but your mouth says yes, it's still rape. That’s not full consent.” I blamed myself for it for like a year because I went looking for it. It just blows my mind how unoften it is talked about among gay men. It blows my mind how it's talked about with women. I've had family members ask, “Well are you looking for it? You shouldn't have been having sex then.” “I shouldn't have been assaulted in the first place.” Ever since that point, I went two and a half years without having any sexual connection with people. It wasn't until I lived here, I think it was April of 2020 or 2021. It was in the last couple of years that I had sex for the first time. That kind of messed me up a lot. It surprises me how much things are taboo in the gay community when we have been treated like taboo. So yeah, I don't care for Rexburg. There's only a few good things that came out of that place. There's a lot of things in my life where one or two good things came out of a certain time of my life. SL: Okay, so you were doing drag in Pocatello, but they didn't know about it, right? Or did they? 27 AS: The school. SL: Right. Because you would have been kicked out long before. I mean, is that really breaking the honor code? AS: Well, so here's the thing. When they give us our student IDs, they print the honor code on the back of it. [Shows Faith and Sarah] They literally give me the honor code on the back of my student ID. FC: [Referring to the honor code on the ID] A lot of these are very broad, like respecting others. AS: Which is funny, because when BYUI changed the wording of the honor code to take away, and then they're like, “JK, it's still in there, but not in words.” People would do the rainbows and everything; students would drive by and call them fags. FC: Oh, right. Because like this last one says, “Encourage others in their commitment to comply with the honor code.” AS: It's not ‘love thy brother’ at BYU Idaho, it's ‘report thy brother.’ You are looked on more favorably if you report people who break the rules. My apartment complex is not mainly watched, so they may not have also realized it with me because I looked way different [in drag]. My makeup was trash. I looked like a Minecraft character the very first time I did my own makeup. It was really bad. So I did stuff at the library and everything. My roommates knew, and some of my coworkers did, but no one said a word. Like I said, they chose my outfit sometimes. I bought a businesswoman outfit, because shopping for clothes in Rexburg is either 90’s prom dresses or boho chic working mom or maxi dresses. Those were my three choices. I still own two or three of those maxi dresses because they are comfortable. FC: That's awesome. What was your first experience with drag? AS: My friend that came to visit me, I don't remember how I met him. I went to Idaho Falls Pride; I think it was the second one. They had a drag show at a hotel there, 28 and it was the very first drag show I remember seeing. I think I started hanging out with who would then become my drag mom, because I kind of knew Alane—that's her drag name. FC: Can you spell that? AS: A-L-A-N-E. No, you're good. Her last name is Change. C H A N G E. Alane Change. FC: Oh, I just got it. That's amazing. AS: I hung out with her there, and then she asked to be my drag mom. I said no, and then I hung out with them more. I started going to Pocatello just to watch the drag shows because I knew who would soon be my drag mom. I asked her one day, “Would you be willing to be my drag mom?” because he seemed to be the only one who wasn’t an asshole with a head stuck up their ass. So Sara Furr became my drag mom. She said I had to do something punny, so my first name originally was Katherine Furr, because I have a friend from Montpelier whose name is Katherine, but she went by Kat. I was talking to another drag queen from Pocatello, and she's like, “You dumb bitch, no one gets the reference. Go by Kat.” So it's been Kat forever since. My roommates are really accepting of it, especially having a gay roommate who didn't really grow up around gay culture. Having me there kind of helped him get more in touch with it, because after he left Rexburg, he also became more in tune with his queerness. Look at me, I am a miracle worker. Drag is a major part of my life. As much as I hate it, it's hard to get out. It's like an addiction. It's like smoking cigarettes. Once you put your foot in it, it's hard to pull it all the way out. FC: Why would you want to? AS: Because the drama is fucking awful. There are so many backbiting, shitty things, people downgrading others. It should be used to bring people together, and people 29 use it to make themselves act better than others. They just cause a lot of issues, especially when you're on a nonprofit board. SL: I think you can stop there on that one. AS: Oh, no. There's so many things I could say, but I want to be nice because someone came and visited our board. SL: That would be me. AS: She came to drop off Queering the Archive stuff and talk about how they want to hold our records. I just don't want to ruin a working relationship that we have with them. All I'm going to say is, certain people don't know when to shut up. They beat a point dead and then they're like, “Wait, I can beat it even more.” SL: That's why your meetings are hours long. AS: The longest one I've been to was ten hours. My partner is one of the top four, so we had to be there an hour early. We got there at 9:30; they have their meeting at 10. With everything plus executive, which is our closed meetings, I did not leave that building until 7:30 that night. Most other courts get done in like three or four hours. There's just a lot of issues. I will never work on a board of directors again for two reasons. One of them being that I don't have the time for this. Two, I work for a brokerage firm, and because I work with money, I have to get approval from my job. If they ask me again, I have to get re-approval for my job. If I get questioned about any money issues, I could lose my job, and I'm not willing to do that. I only took the board position because one of my partners’ the Princess. I did drag. I started in October of 2017, and I moved to Ogden in May of 2018. I got a few shows up there. I did the very first open drag night, and I did Adore Delano’s “I Adore You.” I had on this dress; I think it was supposed to be a shirt that was long, because I leaned over the bar and everything would show. I had 30 a purple wig that I could pull into a ponytail. I remember this entire night. I did it with another queen. There was only one other queen that night, and it was her very first time doing a show as well. Sorry. Like I said, my thoughts kind of go everywhere. I go back and forth. Here, there, and everywhere. FC: Would you be okay if we moved to Utah? AS: Absolutely. FC: Do you live in Northern Utah? AS: I live in Ogden, just down the street. FC: So how is Northern Utah different than all the other places that you’ve lived? AS: The only other places I've lived are both very Mormon conservative areas. I’ve lived here, Dugway, Logan, Montpelier, and Rexburg. Then I lived in Boise for about two months because I worked for the Idaho State Government during a session. So I don't really count them because it was just to do a job. They've been all the same. The further south they go, the less restrictive, I guess is the best way to put it. FC: Are you able to find any community spaces here in Northern Utah? AS: I haven't really done anything with Ogden Pride, but the Imperial Court of Northern Utah is the only one I'm really a part of. That's the one that I've held multiple titles for. I've raised money, I've done shows, I’ve hosted shows. One show I raised over $750 without any raffles, just packing the bar. That was for the Make-A-Wish fund. I've raised money for our cancer fund. That show was called “Historical Homos.” I had someone take a white sheet and put brick prints on it to represent Stonewall. I got these fake columns, and I spray painted wig heads in gray so they represented the Roman columns. I had my pride flags hanging. That's the only community I've really been a part of. I've done stuff at Ogden Pride; I've been a part of Ogden Pride’s entertainment every year since 2018, but other than that I don't. 31 FC: Anything to add about the Imperial Rainbow Court? If not, that's okay. AS: They do good things, but sometimes the people don't do it with the right thought in mind. There's a lot of drama and issues that a lot of people do not see. While I thoroughly enjoy what they do, I try to get people to come to shows. Some people in our court have turned many away because of their attitude and how they treat others. FC: Do you face any discrimination in Northern Utah? Do you have any good memories of Ogden at all? AS: Maybe not discrimination, but sleeping in my apartment, there have been some nights where I'm like, “Is that a gunshot or a firework? I don't know. There's no major holidays.” One time I went on vacation to Portland, I came back, and a bunch of cars had their windows smashed out. A lady broke into every basement apartment in my complex with a broken table leg. I think one of the funniest things I've had happen was one year I moved into my apartment in September of 2020. I think it was August of the year after. I had my windows open, and I heard a drunk guy singing sea shanties. I just said, “Get it!” He stops. It got real quiet and then he just starts going again. So I haven't really faced discrimination, to be honest. I really don't leave my house unless it's for drag shows or to go to certain people's houses. FC: Are there any places in Utah that you wouldn't feel safe being openly gay? AS: Provo, which is funny because they have Pride, they have drag queens, but I've seen how some of those students treat other people in the queer community. I haven't really had any. The other cities that I have gone to, I wasn't out, I wasn't into men at that time. I've known I was gay all my life, but I didn't even think men or women were really attractive until I was 17, and then both hit at once. So I wasn't 32 out when I visited other places: Ogden, Salt Lake, Logan and then Brigham City. I really don't get out of my house unless it's for drag shows, work, or to visit people. FC: How’s the LDS culture in Utah? AS: Oh, they can kiss my ass. When I first started going to BYUI, I had a bishop tell me this lovely story that he knew a guy who was gay. He was friends with this guy, and my thought process was, “No, you’re not.” He's friends with this gay guy, and this gay guy said he'll never go straight. He only loves men. One time, when they were working together, he saw the most beautiful woman and he knew she was the one. Years later, they got married and had like eight or ten kids together. I'm like, “So either this guy is not real, this guy's not gay, or he's bi/pan.” I've had some really good bishops, and I've had some really shitty bishops. SL: Do you still consider yourself an active member of the church? AS: [Laughs] I went to Boise a couple weeks ago, and my aunt grew up LDS. She went on a mission. She was the one aunt I kind of always clung to. I knew she was having issues because some people were creating big problems because they didn't like that. With what my aunt does for her work, she told some people, “Your family is toxic. They beat you down, and then they do one thing and they're like, ‘I'm your savior.’” My aunt called it out, and so this one person went to my aunt's bishop and just caused a bunch of bullshit, spread a bunch of lies. So my aunt left. I went up to her house, and I thought about quitting after I got my degree, but I didn't want to break my mom's heart, even though my mom's kind of narcissistic. I went up there and me and my aunt talked. We were up till 4 AM talking about it, and I realized, “Holy shit, I need to leave the church.” Hearing some of the things that they put people through—I understand the sense of comfort that religion can bring. I've seen how it brought my mom and certain family members comfort, when they've lost kids, when my grandma died. I 33 respect that, but holy shit, some of those covenant things are weird. Hearing about it makes me uncomfortable. I realized I'm probably going to leave the church. When, is the question. When I lean into my intuition, I feel like it's going to be when I'm like 30 plus, but I'm going to stop going. That's when I’ll officially pull records. I'm going to stop going once I get my degree, because BYU and BYUI have been known to hold degrees if they find out you break the honor code the week of graduation. So I'm going to wait until I have my degree in my hands before I say bye and get my ears pierced. That's still up in the air, because I can barely take care of myself. I don't want to have to clean my ears. It was a struggle to keep my tattoo clean. That's why I'm glad I had second skin, because it probably would have cracked otherwise. FC: Has your queerness changed your relationships with your family? AS: Oh, absolutely. My uncles and I didn't get along, but when I came out, most of them stopped talking to me altogether. There was one time one of my uncles, I went to his house for one of his son’s farewells. I heard my aunt say, “Don't be an ass. Go talk to him.” Then it was, “How you doing, Austin?” I was like, “Good.” He's like, “Good,” and walked off. I was like, “Oh, great conversation.” A lot of my uncles don't talk to me and they go to my mom if they want to see how I'm doing. I'm like, “I'm a grown adult, they can come talk to me.” I don't talk to most of my aunts anymore. I talk to my aunt—I have two aunts who live in Boise. I talk to the single one a lot. I spent the week I was there with her, but I also visited my other aunt in Boise. I didn't even visit my uncle or reach out to him, because I have two aunts and an uncle who live in Boise that are all my mom's 34 siblings. I didn't even reach out to the brother. There are things about him that I do not understand, and I'm not willing to get into it with him. FC: Has your queerness changed how you interact with the people around you, or even the world around you? AS: Yeah. They always say you grow up on your parents' coattails, so I grew up conservative. I worked for the federal government, and I was there when they did the ‘Add the Words,’ if you guys remember that. They had ‘Occupy Boise’ at the same time; it was back in 2014. They were trying to add sexual and gender orientation to our Civil Rights Act of Idaho. I was there when that was a big thing. I heard them talk about—because the committee that I was on would be the one that would push the bill forward—if it was okay for a baker to deny a gay couple a cake based on their religion. I heard about all of that. That really pushed me because I used to be socially liberal, fiscally conservative. Then I was like, “Oh, no, they're messed up on every level. Never mind.” I kind of changed how I approach politics, how I view things in the world: how I view gay people, how I view strength, even transgenderism. Because especially being in small towns, you have gay people, but we treat it in some ways like it's the LGB kind of movement. It's really big in the UK, where the T is not your sexual orientation, it doesn't count. Being a part of that, I met transgender people. My high school used to do a government English paper. As part of our senior project, I started working on one about camping on campus grounds, which ‘campus’ means the state grounds. That was the way it was worded in the bill. So I interviewed people. This is one defining moment for me in my queer life. I met this guy because he was part of the court case, and his name was Anthony Yenafuck. [Laughs] It is the worst name ever. A-N-T-H-O-N-Y Y-E-N-A-F-U-C-K. FC: Actually? 35 AS: Yeah, it's Anthony Yenafuck. FC: I was like, “Maybe it'll be spelled differently.” AS: No, that's his name. I went to interview him. My aunt drove me there because her husband worked during the day; she worked at nights. So I was there and I'm asking those questions like, “Okay, well, thank you for answering.” He's like, “Wait a minute. Are you queer?” I'm like, “What?” He's like, “You seem like you fit in. Do you want to go to a queer house?” I'm like, “What is that?” He's like, “It's where a bunch of queer people live. You should come.” He gave me the address and he's like, “I will be there late, but you should come tonight.” So I did. My aunt let me borrow her car and I went over there. We watched Princess Mononoke and ate lentil soup. They had anarchy books all over the house. They had vinyl records all on the wall. It's the very first time I ever vaped; it was banana split flavor. I remember this vividly. Yeah. We watched Mulan afterwards, and my aunt texted me saying, “Do you want Carl's Junior?” I was like, “Oh my gosh, that lentil soup was very kind, but I want some real meat.” So I drove home. It was like 1:00 in the morning and I was like, “Yeah, they were watching Mulan, but you said I'm supposed to be home by midnight.” She's like, “Yeah, for your mom. If you want to stay, you could have stayed. I would have put it in my fridge.” That kind of defined who I was as a queer, that there are communities of people who just hang out. The one gay person I had in Montpelier, his parents said they sent him to military camp, and when he came back, he's like, “No, it was conversion therapy.” That's what I was around. There wasn't a lot of…the one gay 36 person I remember vividly was my cousin who owned multiple bars here in Utah, one of which was in Layton before it closed down. I grew up with what he went through. He was one of those… he would tell stories about just things I don't think children need to hear about, how he'd shake people's balls to greet them at clubs. He was a very big club kid, party kind of thing. That was my only real interaction in person until I met these people, so that kind of changed my life when it comes to who I was as a queer. SL: Can I just ask; do you remember what your cousin’s clubs were called? AS: Club JAM and Linda Lou's Time for Two. It's where the South Gate Tavern is now in Layton. SL: I'm always interested in the gay clubs that were around here. AS: Yeah, we had Club JAM; that was over in Salt Lake. They used to put a rendition of Angel Moroni on the top during Conference, and people would wear their garments to the bar. When he took over, he stopped that. He’s like, “I may not like them, but still, my family's LDS. We're not doing this.” Then he took over Linda Lou's Time for Two, which was on bar rescue, I think. They tried to make it into a laundromat, which is very common in other states as a speakeasy, which is illegal in Utah; You cannot turn one business to hide another business. So they shut that down after that, and then it became South Gate Tavern. FC: We talked a bit about legislation. AS: We did. FC: How do you feel about Roe v. Wade? AS: I don't even have a uterus and I'm pissed. I don't want to have children and I'm mad. I think it's utter bullshit that men can get pills for impotence from the government, but uterus owners cannot decide what they can do with their own fucking bodies. I have a lot of people from my hometown of Montpelier, some who 37 are super, super conservative. I have my family, I have my queer friends, and people who are allies. I posted day after day about standing with abortion and abortion rights. It caused a lot of issues with my family. I blocked people from Montpelier. I was like, “I'm not dealing with your shit, bye. I don't deal with you anymore. I don't see you, and every time I do see you, I try to avoid you because you give me the creeps.” FC: How do you feel about gay marriage being hashed again from a queer perspective? AS: Can we just burn it all to the ground? FC: I know it's a rough question, but it's happening now. AS: I know. Why can't people leave well enough alone? If it's not broke, don't fix it. Also, if you don't like gay marriage, don't get gay married. If you don’t like abortion, don't have an abortion. It's the same idea. I watched a TikTok the other day where people were getting mad that Cracker Barrel was adding impossible sausage. If you don't like impossible sausage, don't get impossible sausage. FC: You don't have to eat it. Is there anything else you want to add to your story before I start towards some wrap up questions? AS: Not that I can think of right now. It always comes afterwards. Plus, my ADHD meds have worn off for the day. FC: Okay. What are some common public perceptions of LGBTQ people that you find offensive? AS: That we're groomers. That has been so big lately, which is funny because the LDS Church has been caught with sexual abuse claims. The Southern Baptist Church, the Catholic Church are rife with it. They have their own organized religion where they say we're sinners against God. They call us groomers, but yet we have evidence of time after time after time, it's coming from within their own fucking house. Oh, I hate that. 38 FC: What resources for LGBTQ people do you think Utah or even your university needs more of? AS: Oh, BYU Idaho needs a lot of resources. They need to be more Christlike. They talk about preaching, about loving God, but then do nothing He actually did. I don't know what Weber State offers. I only came here because I did Pathways for BYU, because the rules were different at the time and I have to go to sacrament there. FC: What about Northern Utah? AS: I like how Ogden Pride is trying to raise money for a building just like Utah Pride is. I think if people know more about it, it will be easier to move the process along. That would be good. A lot of queer people don't know about the court system, although it has caused me so much drama in my life. It does many good things. We give scholarships away. One of our events for the HIV/AIDS Christmas Fund, we give gift cards to the Northern Utah AIDS Coalition, so people who are affected by HIV/AIDS have help with Christmas. The Princess and Prince—my partner and someone else—their goal was $10,000 this year. They raised 12,500-plus dollars in one night. That doesn't include everything we already had in the funds. They've made about $15,000. We do good things when we actually have our hearts in the right place. FC: What would you say to your younger self? I know this one is existential. AS: It is quite existential. FC: Take your time. AS: It gets better. I know that's so stereotypical, but your life isn't ending. It feels like you've lost everything, but it's only a new beginning. There's change and love and you will find amazing people in your future. The biggest, most loving relationship you'll have will come from a non-sexual throuple, from a trans man and a lesbian. 39 You'll learn what true love and appreciation is from that. I never thought I'd be freaking poly. FC: What would you want to say to others who have been through similar situations? AS: It's okay to talk about it. People sometimes shut down when it comes to religious trauma, when it comes to sexual assault. You are not alone. Talking about it is the only way so we can move forward and find the right resources. Talking about it is the only way that we cannot be ignored. Religious trauma and sexual assault have ruined people's lives, and then we don't talk about it because it's treated as we're the problem. We are not. They are. FC: So if we have funding—which, cross our fingers, we should—would you be willing to be reinterviewed in 5 to 10 years? AS: Oh, absolutely. 40