Oral History Program M. Wilson Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 13 August 2022 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah M. Wilson Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 13 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: Wilson, M., an oral history by Lorrie Rands, 13 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 M. Wilson conducted on August 13, 2022 by Lorrie Rands. Wilson discusses their experience growing up queer in an LDS family in Utah, their schooling, and how they think Utah can become more inclusive. Also present is Amy Perry. LR: Today is August 13, 2022. We are at the Stewart Center at the Davis campus of Weber State University with M. Wilson, doing an oral history interview for the Queering the Archives Project at the Stewart Library. I am Lorrie Rands conducting, and Amy Perry is with me on the camera. Just to begin, we always start with our pronouns and how we identify. My pronouns are she/her and I identify as lesbian. AP: I use she/her and identify as straight. MW: Today, I'm using he/they. I identify as bisexual, demisexual, and genderfluid. LR: I actually understand demisexual because that's my son. Very happy that I understand that. MW: Took me a long time to figure that one out. LR: Oh, it's a process, I've noticed. Thank you for your willingness to share, everybody. So, M, let's start with when and where you were born. MW: I was born in St. George in 1998, November 6th. LR: How long did you live in St. George? MW: I lived there for about seven years before we moved up to Salt Lake. LR: What were some of your experiences growing up in St. George? MW: There wasn't a lot of LGBT exposure when I was a kid. I was raised Mormon, so me and my siblings had internalized homophobia when we were kids. We would hear Katy Perry's “I Kissed a Girl” and change the lyrics, which was funny. Whenever we were mad at our brother, we'd call him gay. But later on, when my aunt got a girlfriend, none of us even questioned it, so that was confusing. 1 LR: Let me just ask you this: what were you taught about sexuality and gender growing up? Let's start with sexuality. MW: When I was really little, almost nothing. I was about 10 or 12 when we really started to learn, because that was when my aunt came out as a lesbian and got a girlfriend. My mum started to teach us about that kind of stuff, take us to pride parades. That was around the time my little brother figured out he was trans, but before he actually came out. LR: What were you taught about gender roles? MW: We didn't really have a lot of the standard gender roles. My mom was in college and working full time, and then my stepdad was also working, so it was kind of equal between them. Now my mom is the breadwinner for the two of them. We were never really super strict. They were definitely there when it came to expressing gender, like how you dressed, but less so on what my mom expected us to actually grow up to be. It wasn't like she expected us AFAB people to clean the house and the boys did nothing. We all cleaned the house, we all did chores. We all could grow up to be whatever we wanted to be. But she was still struggling with the idea of boys wearing skirts or AFAB people dressing more masculine, until more recently. LR: You're saying the term AFAB, will you explain what that is? MW: Oh, yeah. AFAB is ‘assigned female at birth’. AMAB would be ‘assigned male at birth’. Or you can use AGAB, which is ‘assigned gender at birth’. LR: Okay. I know the terms, but just for the sake of this; I keep forgetting every time I hear them. What was your family dynamic growing up in St. George? MW: In St. George, we had our dad for a while, and then my parents got divorced and so it was just my mum. For a long time, I was the one taking care of the household. I 2 had an older brother, but I was the one taking care of the younger siblings and making sure everybody ate, up until 2008 when my mom married my stepdad. LR: So how many siblings do you have? MW: I have one older brother and I have five younger siblings. LR: Okay. Talk about elementary school in St. George. MW: It was fun. I was a very imaginative kid. We played a game called The Magic Game. We would run around the backyard. One of my friends insisted on being a vampire and we were all fine with that. We had a lot of fun during recess, just making stuff up as we went. My school was pretty nice. It's Dixie Sun Elementary now. I was there from kindergarten to third grade and had a lot of friends there. It was nice. LR: Is there a memory that stands out at that time? MW: One. We had a girl, unfortunately, lose her life on the playground one day, which was really sad. They built a memorial to her in one of our fences. LR: Were you a student there at the time? I know it's not a fair question, but how did that experience shape your time there? MW: It was definitely scary ‘cause everything was fine, and then the next day we go to school and the playground is covered in police tape. We have to go straight from class to lunch, and we weren't allowed to have recess because it was a crime scene. It made it harder to feel safe at school after that happened. LR: What grade were you in? MW: Third grade. LR: Okay. Knowing that you moved soon thereafter, did that help, moving away from the school? MW: Not really, ‘cause once we moved to Salt Lake, the students there were meaner than St. George. That was when I had my first real bully, in Salt Lake. LR: What prompted the move to Salt Lake? 3 MW: That was when my mom married my stepdad, because my stepdad lived and worked in Salt Lake. My mom wanted to start going to the University of Utah, so it made sense for them to move with him rather than him moving down to us. LR: Where in Salt Lake did you live? MW: I went to Roosevelt Elementary School when I was there. Trying to remember. I can picture that house and the streets, but I don't know exactly where in Salt Lake it is. It was definitely more rural. It was quite a drive up to downtown Salt Lake. LR: That's okay. You don't need to remember, I'm just curious. You mentioned that there was more bullying in Salt Lake. What were some other differences between St. George and Salt Lake? MW: People knew swear words, but part of that might have just been because we were older then, because that was when I started the fourth grade. We had two playgrounds, one for the older kids and one for the younger kids, and they were right next to each other. Everyone pretty much intermingled during recess. I saw a lot more of my younger siblings during recess and we all could play together. The kids there did not appreciate my creativity like the kids in St. George had. They definitely weren't as used to someone who didn't care and just had fun with magic, whether it was real or not, so a lot of them did not like me. But I had two close friends in fourth grade that didn't care that I was weird or whatever. LR: When did you first start to notice that you were a little different? MW: It took me a long time to figure it out, partly because I'm demisexual. I'm bi, so I was still attracted to boys and didn't even think about it then. Looking back, I can think of times where I would have figured it out, but I didn't actually start to notice it until I was about 16. LR: That's pretty standard. For sixth grade, you were at Roosevelt? MW: Four through sixth. 4 LR: Is there any other memory that stands out of your time at Roosevelt? MW: Yeah, during my fifth-grade year, my mom had five kids at the time, me and my siblings. We struggled a lot with lice because we were a bunch of little kids that did not care about our hair. We had finally gotten a handle on it, and one of my classmates was struggling with it. I went up to her and I was like, “I've had that, too. I understand where you're coming from. It's okay.” She was one of the kids that was ostracized from the class. Looking back on it, she was probably autistic. [The class] didn't like that I sided with her and understood where she was coming from, because then they all freaked out that I had lice, too. The two friends I'd had in fourth grade stopped talking to me entirely, but me and this other girl stayed friends through the rest of my time there. My sixth-grade year, my two friends from fourth grade got over themselves and started talking to me again. I had one friend, KM. She was a little bit older than I was, but she was awesome. She made it so much easier to just exist instead of having to look over my shoulder all the time. LR: You mentioned that when your aunt started dating, that your brother had come out. MW: He hadn't come out yet. LR: This was around 2008, you said? MW: Yes. Somewhere between 2008 and 2010 was when he started figuring out his identity. LR: Do you remember how that started? Did you notice things changing with him, or was it more internally for him? MW: For a while, it was more internal. He told me the other day he figured it out when he was 12, but it really started to show around 13 or 14 when he started dressing more masculine, even if he still used his deadname and stuff. I think he came out at 14 or 15. It's been a while. 5 LR: Where did you go to junior high? MW: I went to two different junior high schools ‘cause we lived in Murray with my grandfather for about six months. But he was terrible to all of us, so we ended up moving again up here to Layton. I went to North Layton Junior High, and then we stayed in Layton after that. LR: I'm going to ask kind of the same question. How was Layton different from what you were seeing in Salt Lake? MW: The uniform. We had a uniform back then, which was interesting. I hated it. I was grateful they at least let the AFAB people wear pants. We didn't have to wear a skirt all the time, but it was odd. It felt like I had my individuality stripped from me. I couldn't just wear what I wanted. I had to look like everybody else. LR: So you spent a year at a junior high in Murray? MW: Six months I was there. LR: Just six months. So you spent most of your junior high time at North Ogden? MW: North Layton. Most of it was at North Layton. LR: Okay. Is that the one that's just right down here? MW: Yeah, it's just down the street. LR: Okay. I know you were young—in fact, you're born the same year as my oldest. But I'm curious what your memories are of 9/11? MW: I remember seeing it on TV, footage of it, but that's about it. We started learning about it in schools the year after that. I do remember seeing footage of it, but I can't remember if I saw footage of it the year it happened or later on. LR: Okay, fair enough. I know you didn't come out till you were 16-ish, so that's high school. MW: Yeah, that was high school. 6 LR: As you're watching your brother figure himself out, and then going to junior high— which is always a wonderful time for everyone—what were you noticing about yourself? About inclusivity? MW: That was around the time when I finally started to actually learn things about LGBT people. The few that were out at my school, I didn't even think about it. They were just like any of my other classmates. I was part of several clubs in eighth grade, and the board game club was super inclusive. We had all sorts of people there and it was nice to have a variety rather than having only people that appeared to be straight, anyway; you never really know. LR: This is true. But we have to recapture the question that I have in my head. Did you notice any discrimination happening or was it pretty…? MW: I didn't notice anything explicit, but the uniforms might have made it harder for LGBT people to express that. I personally didn't notice any, but that might have just been because I was the quiet kid by then. I had some friends, but I didn't really talk to a lot of my classmates. I wasn't super sociable. LR: I know you said the uniforms kind of kept things... MW: Hard to tell. LR: Yeah. Do you think that might be one of the reasons why they used uniforms? MW: Possibly. I know a lot of schools do that because they want to get rid of any class differences, so that poor people look the same as the richer kids, but that didn't really work. You could tell who got their clothes from a thrift store. I think it did definitely help with lowering discrimination between the straight students and the queer students. LR: Is there any other story or memory of junior high that stands out? MW: Just one, really. Very first day of eighth grade math, I was basically just adopted by a table of girls. They liked that I was quiet and adorable, and they wanted to bring 7 me out of my shell. I sat at their table with them, and that was my first real group of friends there. I started halfway through my seventh-grade year, so I didn't really know anybody. They liked me. I'm still friends with one of them now, and both of us are out as queer now. LR: Okay. So where did you go to high school? MW: Northridge. LR: Okay. I thought you were going to say NUAMES. Northridge, that's a really big school. So, going from what was probably a very small junior high in comparison to Northridge… MW: Yeah. Compared to Northridge, it was easier to navigate. LR: What was that like for you? MW: Northridge was incredibly overwhelming at first. It was huge and I didn't understand the numbering system at first. Once I figured it out, it was easy to understand, but it was so big, and it was overwhelming to be in such a big school with so many people and have no idea where I was supposed to be going. Then it switched from having all of my classes on the same day to having an A day and a B day. LR: That's right. Wow, I thought they started that system a long time ago. MW: They did. When I went to North Layton, they had [classes] one through seven all on the same day. I know it's changed since then, just because my brothers went to North Layton too. But when I was there, North Layton had one through seven all on the same day, and then Northridge had one through eight, A day and B day. LR: I thought that changed. AP: I don't know, I didn't go there. LR: Well, I didn't either. AP: I think they dabbled in it. Every district dabbled in it a little bit to see if it worked or not. When they figured it out, they just pushed for it. 8 MW: Yeah, I think it changed pretty soon after my younger sister started there, or even right after she graduated from North Layton, so it was still a while ago. LR: Okay, that's interesting. You're a sophomore. So you were a junior when you came out? MW: Yes, I was a junior. LR: That's right, ‘cause you were an old junior. You're the same as my son. Same month, same year. If you're willing to share, did you have experiences that helped you to finally be able to come out to yourself? I know coming out for yourself is the most important thing. MW: When I finally figured it out and came out to myself, it was because of a friend of mine. She had come over one day and asked me to help her figure out if she was bisexual, so she asked me to kiss her to help her figure it out. She thought maybe actually kissing a girl would make it click, and so I did. Then I was like, “Oh, okay, got it.” We figured out we were bisexual at the same time. She was actually my first kiss. LR: So the demi-bisexual part probably took a little bit longer. MW: Yeah, I figured that out when I was 21, 22. I figured that out because me and my sister and some of my coworkers were playing Truth or Dare in an IHOP at 3:00 in the morning because we worked swing shifts up at one of the factories in Ogden at the time. On Friday nights, we would go to IHOP and just hang out after work. It was pretty late and we were just playing Truth or Dare, and they asked me a truth question. They were like, “Have you ever had sexual dreams about this person?” I was like, “No, you know what? Now that I think about it, I don't think I have ever had one about anyone.” That was when I started to look into it, because I was like, “Wait a second, these three clearly have, but I haven't. What's the difference?” That was with my sister, her husband and one of our other friends. 9 LR: If you were to explain demisexual in the simplest terms, how would you do it? MW: Demisexual is when you don't feel sexual attraction at all unless you have an emotional connection to someone. You have to know them really well before that can even be a thing, and even then, it still might not happen. You're asexual until you're not. LR: Okay, I like that definition. Going back to high school, once you were in touch with your own sexuality, how did that change how you presented at school? MW: At school it didn't really change much because I didn't have a lot of friends. The few friends I had were also friends outside of school, and I hadn't come out to them yet. It did affect my life at home more because I had to remember that I hadn't told my mom yet. I would try to make jokes about it and then remember that I'm not out yet and have to stop myself because my brain was just like, “Oh, everyone knows now,” but they didn't. Though, coming out to my mom didn't end up being my choice. It wasn't until I was 17 and I had a boyfriend that my mom even learned I was bisexual. My little brother was upset with me about something and had texted my boyfriend, outing me and claiming I was cheating on him with my best friend. Luckily, he was cool with the bi thing. Didn't believe my brother about the cheating because it wasn't true. That was how I had to come out to my mom, like, “Hey, my brother did this and it's not okay.” LR: Okay. With it not being your choice, what would you have done if you'd had the choice? MW: If I had the choice? I would have probably sat down with my mom and my stepdad and been like, “This is how I feel. This is how it is,” had a chance to actually explain how I was feeling and all of that rather than having to do it by, you know. I wish I'd had that choice to do it on my own time when I was ready. 10 LR: Was your mom supportive? MW: Yes. My sister K actually came out as bisexual first. I just hadn't had the courage yet. LR: Your brother had already come out at this point as transgender? MW: Yes. I believe he was still trying to figure it out, so I think he was going as nonbinary at the time. He was only non-binary for a very short time before he realized, “That's not right. I'm actually trans.” AP: That's how my son was. LR: That's actually very common. N was never non-binary, but... AP: C did the whole thing. LR: Okay. Let's see. While you were at Northridge, were there any clubs or a community that you could be involved in? MW: The GSA at Northridge started the year after I graduated, but I knew there were queer people in the school. They were there, they were out, and some of them were on the student council. We were all there, they were just still working on actually founding the GSA. LR: Did you have any role models within the LGBTQ community that you felt like you could look up to? MW: I have to really try to remember. I watched a lot more anime than I did anything else, so a lot of the LGBT people I saw through the media were through anime. My very first one was Fairy Tail, I think. It wasn't until later that I started watching anime with more queer people, because I just didn't know they were there. In high school, there weren't a lot. At least I had my aunt, but I can't think of anyone specific—that I can remember, anyway. LR: Is there a memory that stands out to you from high school that that you just want to talk about? 11 MW: My junior year, I was actually in the ProStart program. That’s their college level cooking class, and that was one of my favorites. I loved that class. I didn't get good grades because I am terrible at remembering to do homework, but the actual cooking portion was one of my favorite things to do. Then my senior year, halfway through the year, I was in that class again. We had a new teacher and she kicked me out of the class because my grades weren't high enough. All the other seniors were leaving. They were going to do other college stuff, so I ended up having to pick different classes for my second semester because Pro Start took up two periods. It freed up a lot of my schedule. So I took dance classes, I took an astronomy class, which was my favorite class. The teacher was great. We didn't really have homework; we had a few inclass assignments and then the tests. I felt like I was actually learning because I wasn't so worried about getting my homework done. I could focus on just taking my notes and enjoying the class as it was, because the stars have always been one of my favorite things. That was my special interest, the stars, so that was my favorite. I aced that class, aced every test, every assignment. I loved that class. Northridge, at the time—I don't know if it's true now, but it was the only school in the district with the observatory on the grounds. We had multiple telescopes, so we would go after school when it was dark and we would pull out the telescopes and have star parties where we would get to look through the telescopes at the stars. It was really cool. That was my favorite, where I really got to excel in class because I wasn't limited by homework. I struggled with executive dysfunction, and then I had four younger siblings at home I had to take care of as well. LR: You mentioned ProStart, what is that? MW: That's just the name of the class. We had Foods I and Foods II, which we were required to take before you could do ProStart. You had to write an essay and take a 12 quiz to even get into ProStart because you could get college credit for that class for culinary arts. We would go on field trips up to the Weber campus to learn how to take apart a chicken. Some of my classmates competed in competitions against other schools and that kind of stuff. We got to make a lot of different recipes and we actually ran a restaurant for the teachers that we did once a week. LR: Interesting. Were you thinking about going to culinary arts? MW: I was thinking about it, but I also was writing a lot. I started creative writing when I was in my sophomore year, actually just by hand, because I didn't really have access to a computer. Culinary arts and creative writing were the two things I thought I might actually want to go to college for. LR: What other experiences did you have in high school to help shape your identity? MW: Well, I had a boyfriend from when I was 17. We dated for a year and a half. I got to go to prom—I had my junior prom, my senior homecoming, and my senior prom, and that was a lot of fun. My junior prom, we had a bigger group, and so we actually got to go to prom in a limo, which was very fun. My boyfriend was nice. He was a good guy. I really liked him. Our friend group was bigger. My favorite of the three was definitely homecoming because it was smaller and there weren't as many people. It wasn't as loud. That was my first time seeing an LGBT couple at the dance, so that made me really happy to see them get to dance with the rest of us. That was my favorite of my outfits, too. LR: Okay. Did you ever notice any discrimination at the dances, that you felt like there was anyone ostracized or not allowed? MW: No, prom was just huge, so I couldn't really see anybody. No one bothered the queer couples that were at our homecoming dance at all. We all just danced and had fun and no one said anything mean to them or bothered them at all. LR: Were you able to graduate from high school? 13 MW: I did graduate, the summer of my senior year. I struggled with grades and two of my classes my senior year required a final project where I had to present in front of the class, and I wasn't comfortable with that, so I just took the F and was like, “I'll just make it up later.” I ended up finishing out online. They made the math section easier because they wanted me to graduate and the senior level math was too much. I couldn't remember what I had learned, so I wasn't actually making any progress. They lowered it to an easier grade level so that I could make some progress and get that out of the way. But I got to the English section and there was something wrong with the system because it was asking me questions from source material that I didn't have access to. There was no passage to read. It was just a question about random stuff. I had no idea what it was talking about, so I went to my mom and asked her for help. It was the very last day I could do it. She said she would help me and I got up in the morning and she wasn't home. I had no idea where she had went, so I was like, “Oh, okay, I guess something changed.” So I walked up to Northridge because it was right down the street—we walked to school every day anyway. One of the counselors sat down with me to help me do it, and that was when we figured out it was definitely broken and that there was no way I could answer any of the questions. They ended up looking back at my ninth-grade year and found an extra reading class I had taken for fun. They used that as my final English credit and I graduated that day. So I did end up graduating, I just didn't walk. It was in the middle of the summer, but that was fine. I didn't want to walk anyway, ‘cause that's a lot. LR: It can be, yes. Did you ever think about or ever want to go to college? MW: By my senior year, I had given up on that idea because I had settled on being an author. I was like, “At this point, the Internet and those communities have grown 14 enough that anything I could learn from a professor at college, I could also learn online from someone who was putting out an online class.” That would be a lot cheaper than a college would. So I didn't end up going to college at all. LR: Okay. How many of those online classes did you utilize? MW: I've taken quite a few because I use both YouTube and Skillshare, the two platforms I usually use. LR: What's Skillshare? MW: Skillshare is kind of like YouTube, but instead of being any videos, it's educational content. Authors, artists, anyone can put out film videos in the format of classes that you can pay a subscription for to see the content. They teach you what their specialty is, so they film videos like, “This is how you use this skill.” It's a bunch of people sharing their skills through video formats and other ways. LR: Have you found it easier for you to learn that way? MW: Yeah. I could do it on my own time and again, there wasn't homework involved because it was an online sharing platform. I didn't have to turn anything in. I got to do it my way and still learn what I needed to learn. During that summer, I finished the first draft of my novel. I'm on the second draft now because I'm not the same person I was when I started writing it in sophomore year. I've grown a lot as an author, so it's very different. I'm more proud of it now because it's definitely more diverse than it was the first time, and that was really important to me. When I started rewriting it, I was like, “This needs to have more than what it had before.” LR: Is that something you want to pursue as a career, then? MW: Yes. LR: How are you going about making that novel become a reality? 15 MW: My friend is actually a writer, too, so we sometimes will just get together and just sit and write. Then it motivates both of us to just sit and write, no judgment. We are each other's betas, so they'll send me their story, and I read what they have, and then they read what I have. It means we both have someone to catch the little mistakes that we miss. Once I do finish it, I plan on having both beta readers and a sensitivity reader, probably multiple sensitivity readers, because they'll catch on any microaggressions that I would have missed. One of the main characters is black and one of the other main characters is deaf. I'm doing a lot of research in the process to make sure I'm representing them properly. The sensitivity reader will catch anything I miss. LR: Okay. So you graduated in 2017? MW: Yes. LR: Okay. Same year as N, that's why I know this. I’m trying to find the right questions here. I'm just going to ask, are you still living at home? MW: I am not. I actually live with my sister and her husband. LR: Okay. MW: Both of my brothers still live with my parents. One of them is in school and one of them's not. I lived with my mom until I was 19. Now I live with my sister and her husband, just down by the mall. We all work at the same place too. LR: How have things changed for you, being more independent? MW: It's been nice getting to just exist in my own space because K’s my sister and I've lived with her our entire lives, but we're the two that are really close in age compared to A or M (brothers). We had a different relationship compared to those two, because A and M I was raising when my mom wasn't home. She was doing a lot with college and work. But K was old enough that I didn't have to do that, so we were a lot closer in more sibling ways rather than parent ways. Living with her, it's 16 nice because I know she's not going to judge me at all, and she knows I'm not going to judge her. We have a mutual understanding and her husband fits into that really well. My room can look how I want. My cat lives there with me. She's been so helpful for my mental health. She's a fluffy little butthead, and I love her. I have always been very independent, mostly due to trauma, so it's actually harder for me to reach out for help when I need it. Having someone there who's been with me the entire time makes it easier for me to ask her for help, rather than someone on the outside that I don't know as well. LR: Do you think it's easier for you to express your identity too, being on your own? MW: Yeah. LR: How has that changed? MW: I only recently figured out I was genderfluid. I actually at first thought I might be what's called demifemme, where you kind of feel like a feminine person or a woman, but also there's a lot of that you don't fit into. At first, I thought it was that, but then there were days where people would use she/they, ‘cause I have a pronoun pin on my hat for work, and that would be fine. Other days I would hear ‘she’ and flinch. Sometimes it was okay and other times it wasn't, so I was like, “Okay, maybe that's not it. Actually, I'm gender fluid.” So sometimes ‘she’ and ‘they’ are okay, and other times that's not right. My three non-binary friends call me Mr. Mom most of the time. When I told them, they all switched fairly easily. I have my little pronoun bracelets to make it easier for them to know what pronouns it is that day. Sometimes I use a set of pronouns for days at a time and other times it switches halfway through the day. Figuring that out was definitely easier with K and J, because I knew they weren't going to judge me for not having it right the first time. They're not going to judge me 17 for just being genderfluid either because they're both bisexual and they're both polyamorous. LR: Do you find it hard to explain to people about being genderfluid? MW: Yeah. I actually tried to come out to my mom on Sunday, but she wasn't really paying attention, so I don't think she even heard me. A is the one where it’s like, he’s my little brother, but I also work with him. At work a lot, he asks me what my pronouns are. I haven't gotten my new pins in yet because it will have all of the pronouns instead of just ‘she’ and ‘they’. I haven't really said anything to a lot of my coworkers yet because I don't have a way of telling them which pronouns, because I can't wear the bracelet at work. It's food service. I work at the Jimmy Johns by the Target, actually, so until I get the pins, I haven't really mentioned anything to them. When I did switch to ‘she’ and ‘they’, one of my managers was immediately like, “Okay, do you have a different name?” and switched and was correcting people when they got it wrong, or being like, “Hey, use both.” That was really helpful and made me feel a lot more comfortable at work. Most of our managers are LGBT, so that's made it a lot easier. The one that isn't has been super open and corrected himself any time he got my brother's pronouns wrong or anyone else's. It's been nice having that support there. LR: Have you noticed that there are more inclusive spaces in Layton than others, and if so, what are those? MW: Yeah. Definitely more than when I first moved here. When I first moved, Northridge didn't have a GSA yet. Now, I believe it started this year. We have the Davis Pride that I actually went to with my younger friends, which was fun and nice. My sister was so mad she missed it, though I didn't know what was happening until the day it happened. Our local Jimmy John's, it's like almost every single one of us is in some way LGBT. I saw a younger person come in with a non-binary flag bracelet. I didn't 18 say anything because I didn't know if their parents knew what that meant, and I didn't want to accidentally out them. But I noticed that, and then they can notice my pride pins and it makes them feel safer where I am too, because they see all of us being open about it. It's nice for a lot of the younger LGBT people in Layton. When they come into Jimmy John's, they see my pins and immediately say something. They're like, “I love your pins.” I'm like, “Oh, thank you. They're great, right?” It makes it so they know that there's someone here that's safe. If they wanted to come in as whatever gender, if they were trans or something, they could come in there and we wouldn't judge them at all. They see A’s pronoun patterns and they see mine and they see my two pride pins, so it feels like a safe space there. At least on the morning shift, because that's when a lot of us work. I don't work nights, so I can't really speak on that, but it's nice to have younger LGBT people and even older ones come in and recognize my pins. AP: Does that help you feel safe just at work, because obviously you are with the public a lot. MW: Yeah, I work with the public a lot. When people recognize my pins, I am like, “Yes, one of us.” Especially the demisexual pin—a lot of people don't recognize that one, so when they do, it's nice. It makes me feel like I know they're not going to freak out on me for having those pins on my hat. I haven't seen any customers really freak out about any of our pride pins or anything like that. LR: Before I ask the final two questions, is there any other story or any other memory you'd like to share? MW: We were raised Mormon. We're not anymore. But our local ward—I'm not going to say any names because they might have changed completely now—but when my brother first came out, my mom accidentally outed him to one of our youth leaders. 19 His final year before he left, he wasn't allowed to go to girls’ camp, but he also wasn't allowed to go to boys’ camp. He wasn't allowed to be with the men or the women, even though he was one of the guys at that point. They just blocked him out completely as soon as they found out. That was when I stopped going. My very last sacrament meeting was when they announced that if your parents were same-sex, then you had to disown them to be baptized. My brother could tell that I was pissed. That was the very last sacrament meeting I went to because I was like, “No, you're done.” They've changed that recently, I think, but that was like, “Okay, this isn't a safe space for us. I'm leaving and I'm not coming back.” Specifically the Mormon Church—I don't know much about any other ones—has a long way to go. Right now, I'm actually a Unitarian Universalist, so I go to a little church up in Ogden that doesn't have a specific religion or deity. It doesn't matter what you believe, you're welcome here. If you still believe in the Mormon religion, that's fine, you can talk. If you're atheist, you can come. It's for everybody, and it's really nice. I'm part of the choir there with my mom. LR: How has spirituality been, and has it been an important part of your life? MW: When I did finally leave the church, I didn't know what to really believe, so I just went with ‘atheist’ for a while because I didn't really know anything else. I believe it was last year I started identifying as a pagan. [Points to necklaces] That's what these are. My necklaces are both from that. One is Celtic and the other is Nordic because my dad's side of the family is from Norway. LR: One of the final questions is, how have you noticed things are different in the different places you have lived in regards to the LGBTQ+ community? MW: Northridge was definitely the most open about it out of all the schools I went to. Very accepting, at least from the people I interacted with. When my little brother 20 went there, he was able to put in his chosen name as his name there. All the teachers were given ‘A’ and not his dead name, and he was able to use that all through school instead of having to be dead named all the time and mis gendered. That was nice to see because I had already graduated by the time he started there. But yeah, Northridge was the most open about it from all of my schools. LR: All right. The final question. If you had an opportunity to talk to your younger self, or to those young members of the LGBTQ+ community, I'm talking 12, 13, what would you say to them? MW: It's okay if you get it wrong the first time. It's okay if it takes you forever to figure it out. If that's what feels right in the moment, that's okay. That's still perfectly valid, even if after that, you realize that wasn't quite right. It's okay to change it once you've figured yourself out more. Once you realize that this wasn't quite right, but this feels right, that will still be valid, even if you do change it again later. You don't have to only come out once if you get it wrong the first time. It's not a bad thing to get it wrong because you're figuring yourself out, and that can be complicated and take a long time. It's okay if it takes a long time; you're not any worse than anyone else in the LGBT community just because it took you until you were in your thirties or forties to figure it out, or if you figured it out when you were a little kid, everyone is just as valid at it as anyone else. LR: Thank you so much for your time, for your willingness. I appreciate it. 21