Oral History Program Sam Young Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 17 May & 3 June 2022 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Sam Young Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 17 May & 3 June 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: Young, Sam, an oral history by Lorrie Rands, 17 May & 3 June 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 Sam Young conducted on May 17, and June 3, 2022 by Lorrie Rands. Sam shares his childhood experiences growing up gay in an LDS family in Layton, Utah. He talks about his love for theater, his struggles with mental health and sexual assault, and his drag career. Also present is Ky Jackson. LR: Today is May 17th, 2022. We are in the Stewart Library with Sam Young, doing an interview for Queering the Archives. My name is Lorrie Rands conducting and Ky Jackson is on the camera. Just a reminder, if I ask a question you're uncomfortable with, please just say something and we'll move on. Before we actually get into the questions, we're going to begin with our pronouns and how we identify, and then ask that of you. So my pronouns are she/her and I identify as lesbian. KJ: My pronouns are he/him and I identify as queer. SY: My pronouns are also he/him most of the time, unless I'm in drag, then it's she/her. I'm also a gay man, although just ‘queer’ works. LR: I'm beginning to understand the term ‘queer’. SY: It's just overarching because, like, Cara Delevingne is so beautiful. But I have a boyfriend, so I just think it's just a preference. LR: All right. That being said, let's just jump right in with when and where you were born? SY: I was born here in Ogden at McKay-Dee Hospital in September of 2000. LR: September of 2000. All right. So being born here in Ogden, were you raised here? SY: I was raised in Layton down by Adams Canyon Trail. I was raised just on the other side of 89 from that. I grew up there my whole life, except we spent one year in Idaho. But that was like during the recession. LR: So 2008. SY: Yeah, ish. 1 LR: All right. So let's kind of stick with your childhood here a little bit. So that's a really beautiful area to grow up in. What would you do for fun? SY: Just like in my neighborhood? LR: Yeah. SY: I had a best friend named J who lived across the street. We would never go to my house. We'd all go to his house because he had, like, nicer snacks. So we would go over there and we like, played imaginary, which is like so broad, but we just would pretend stuff. We played with chalk, just like normal Americana neighborhood stuff. LR: All right. So let's talk about your family dynamic a little bit, your parents. What are their names? SY: M and D. LR: Young? SY: Yes. They're both married, they've been together for thirty-three years. LR: Okay. And how many siblings do you have? SY: Six. LR: And where do you fall? SY: I'm six of seven. So I have one younger sister and then five older siblings. LR: Okay, so you're towards the bottom? SY: I was the baby for seven years, and then C was born, so I was, like, just aware enough to be like, ‘I'm the baby,’ and then it was gone. LR: Do you remember how that felt for you? SY: I feel like I was excited. We went on a cruise to announce that my mom was pregnant with all of us and it was like the biggest family vacation we've ever gone on when we were all kids. We went to Hawaii. I was excited once C was born, but then me and C had fought a lot when we were both younger. But she's really cool now, so, like, I'm super stoked because we'll be younger than a lot of my siblings for 2 longer. So I'm excited to have a friend, but it's like a mixed bag when you're a younger kid, it's kind of hard to have a younger kid than you, I think. But I love her. LR: Let's talk about school. Elementary. Where did you go to elementary school, first of all? SY: I went to Sam Morgan Elementary and I thought that was so cool because it's my name on the elementary school. But it wasn't for me. I went to school in Kaysville. I lived right on the border of Kaysville and Layton. I went to Sam Morgan my whole elementary school, except for just 2008. In second grade, I was in Idaho because my dad got transferred up there for work, and then he lost his job because everyone lost their jobs, you know? Which was shitty, but then we came back to the exact same house. We just rented it out and came back and moved back. So I lived in my same house my whole life until I moved out for college. Sam Morgan, it was awesome. I loved it. My mom works there now; she's on ground duty, she has been for like, almost ten years. LR: What are some of your fondest memories, or just memories in general, of elementary school and that time for you? SY: Oh, gosh, it's later elementary school, but in fifth grade, we had this marionette module. It was like our theater thing for the year, and so we all got to make tiny marionettes and do a show with a person from our class. They were like historical figures we got assigned, so my character was Theodore Roosevelt, and my good friend GM’s character was JFK. It was just our marionettes being like, ‘I am the president!’ ‘No, I'm the president.’ I loved that. We had a Shakespeare Day in, I think, sixth grade where we all got to do scenes from Shakespeare shows. That was another one of my favorite days. I got to play Witch #1 from Macbeth, which is a dream role to this day. Yeah, I had a really great kindergarten teacher named Mrs. 3 M, who was just so sweet and nice. I had kindergarten PM, so I got to sleep in before I went to school. I just loved her. Then she came into my work years later, at a dry cleaner. I was just like [gasps]. But I loved being in Mrs. M’s class. LR: Okay. When during your elementary years do you remember noticing that you were a little different? SY: I've been girly my whole life. I just played with Polly Pockets when I was little, before elementary school. I loved Barbies and stuff, but I never really thought I was, like, different different. I still had friends and stuff, but then in about fifth or sixth grade, I made this friend named M, and she was not LDS, and all of the other people I knew were Mormon. It was like a shock to my system. She had a gay brother or something and she was like, “Yeah, you like kind of act like my brother.” I was just like, “Oh, that's so weird.” But probably around then, my friendship with M, I heard the word ‘gay’ for the first time. I was like, “It's interesting,” but like, I was like a prepubescent little kid, so I didn't really have real crushes on anybody. But around fifth or sixth grade, I started wondering what was going on with me. LR: What were you taught about gender roles growing up? SY: Very basic Mormon stuff. I mean, my mom stayed at home and nurtured us my whole life and my dad went out and worked a job from 9-5 and took care of us. We had a very nuclear, Mormon poster family. There were a bunch of kids, my dad was successful, my mom was in the primary presidency; it's just girls taking care of the family and raising a home, and then men go out and take care of the finances and protect the family. I lived in suburbia. Just very archaic gender roles I learned about as a kid, but I started crushing those pretty early because I liked dressing like this [gestures to himself; he is wearing a shirt he described off-camera as a 'magenta, 4 pussy-bow lace blouse']. I started dressing like this in high school and my mom was like, “That's not what boys wear.” But she likes it now. Well, she tolerates it now. LR: I don't know if you can answer this, but growing up in a very traditional Mormon home, how did that affect the way you saw yourself and as you were beginning to figure out, “I'm a little different?” SY: Sure. So it was me and my friend M and our other friend MA and MA’s parents. I remember it was 2008, so as President Obama was getting elected, it was Prop 8 and stuff, and all the gay marriage talks were happening but hadn't been legalized or anything yet. I remember MA’s parents supported gay marriage and told me about that. I was like, “That's so weird and wrong,” because my parents had told me that it was wrong and that marriage was between a man and a woman. I think there was a lot of denial early on. I came out really early in my life, and so a lot of the things that people do before they come out, I did when I was like 12/13; most people are in their twenties or whatever. I was like, “I'm not gay. I just really like gay people, and I think that they should pray the gay away.” I was really into the idea of praying the gay away, which was not great, but I did it anyway. It didn't work. But yeah, it was mostly negative, I think. None of my ward was ever mean to me. No one ever said anything mean to me. My [unintelligible] was like, not openly queer, but visibly queer, and we all knew that. It was pretty welcoming in my neighborhood. I want to make that clear. It was very nice and I never got called names or anything. It was just like the doctrine in general, but no one offended me personally. Does that make sense? LR: Yeah, it does make sense. Okay, you kind of jumped into junior high. Talk a little bit about that. I mean, junior high is hard for... SY: Everybody. 5 LR: So talk about what that was like, going from elementary to junior high. You're starting to come into puberty and everything's changing. Talk about that a little bit. SY: My first crush on a boy that I remember being a crush was in seventh grade, which is the first year of junior high. I had a crush on this boy named S in my art class, and he was at my table, and I thought he was just the cutest guy in the world and he was so funny. He didn't like me back, though, but that was okay. Then I auditioned for the play at my junior high school, but I didn't get in that year. So I auditioned for a play at the Playhouse in Ogden with my best friend L. I did it because I had a crush on L, because I was like a 13-year-old boy who was like, “I have a crush on this girl in my class.” I didn't really. But then I did that show with her, and I had a huge crush on this boy named MER in our cast. He was older, like 16 or 17. I just remember texting M and L about how I thought I had this crush on this boy, and then my parents went through my cell phone and read my text messages. That's like my coming out section; I never really came out to my parents. They just kind of knew from like 12, 13 on. That was the biggest change: I started having crushes on boys that I knew were crushes on boys, and I was doing theater too. I didn't have a lot of friends outside of my theater class, and I was kind of overweight; I was a chubby kid. I started feeling, not dysphoria, but I didn't like my body in a really unhealthy way, and it started in seventh grade. Then I would do these theater classes with my teacher, JL, and I was her favorite student ever, and she was so nice to me and she made me feel super cool. She gave this speech, and I totally forgot that I remembered this, but on the first day of theater class, she's like, “I don't care who you think you are now or what you're going to be in the future. You are my students, and I like you, and like it's totally okay to explore whatever you want because this is theater class and that's what happens in theater class.” That really stuck with me, I 6 think. She said something like, “There's a lot of gay people in theater. That's totally okay.” It really stuck out to me. I just felt safe in general around her. That sounds so dramatic and cliche. LR: But for a seventh grader, yeah. SY: Everything's dramatic and cliche. LR: Where did you go to junior high? SY: Fairfield Junior High in Kaysville. LR: Okay. You kind of touched on this a little bit, talking about body image issues for you. Not dysphoria. SY: Yeah. I didn't hate my body as a boy. I feel fine as a cisgendered male. I like all my parts or whatever [laughs]. That sounded so crass, I'm sorry. I’m used to online discussions. LR: [Laughs] No, it makes me laugh because that's something that my oldest would say. That's how he would describe it. I'm not laughing at you, I'm laughing with that. SY: No, you're totally good. Yeah, I'm totally fine with my body anatomy, I just felt fat. This one girl in elementary school named A told me that, like- this is like so mean. Kids are so mean. She told me that my man boobs looked like pyramids on my chest, and that really stuck with me. My chest has been my biggest insecurity my whole life. I just had really intense body image stuff and it just made me feel really bad. Not in seventh grade, it wasn't so bad, but then throughout junior high, it got worse and worse. I developed an eating disorder, but I hesitate to say ‘eating disorder’ or all that stuff, because I never went to a doctor. I was never diagnosed with anything, but I wasn't eating. I got dangerously thin-looking. Plus, my dad one time, after I had started eating again when I was getting healthier, told me that I never had an eating disorder when I mentioned it. I think it's just him, a generational thing where you 7 never hear about anyone having an eating disorder when you're his age level, let alone boys having an eating disorder. So that confuses me in my brain sometimes, like, “Did I or did I not?” But no, I definitely wasn't eating, and it was really hard for a long time. That's something a lot of people deal with throughout all of their life, even in waves. I'm doing a lot better in the past few years, but the end of junior high, beginning of high school was really bad for my body image issues. I wouldn't want to look at myself, but I also wore really tight stuff because I wanted to be cool. It wasn't a look, you know what I mean? LR: Yeah. So during this time when you're having these body issues, did you ever feel like you had anyone you could talk to and connect to during this time? SY: About my body? LR: Yeah, all of it. SY: Yeah. Me and S were really good friends in junior high school, the boy I had a crush on. We would talk about… it’s such a my age thing to say, but we talked about the gay YouTubers we watched and how happy they made us, which is such a weird parasocial relationship that we all grew up with when you're my age. We would talk about Connor Franta and Troye Sivan, like, ‘They're so cool and we want to be like them.’ But I could talk to S about that stuff. In eighth or ninth grade, I became friends with this boy named SE who is also a gay kid and he had really bad body image stuff, too. This sounds so mean about him; it's not, we were both in a bad space, but he kind of put me on the anorexia train. Neither of us were eating, so I could talk to him about feeling fat and stuff, which doesn't make sense because in reality, looking back, we were children, we weren't obese people. At the time we're like, “Oh my God, I feel so huge,” and we just would skip lunch together, I remember. So it's not healthy, but I had someone to talk to about it. Does that make sense? 8 I didn't talk to my parents about it or anything, really, I don't think. We would have these blowout fights and then nothing for months about the gay thing and stuff. They knew that I liked boys, but I would like to tell them that I was working on it and reading my scriptures more, which I was not doing, but I just didn't want to deal with that. Then they would read my texts again and I would be texting S or whatever, and it would blow up again. We would sit on the basement stairs and my mom would cry and tell me that she was so heartbroken and scared. This is heavy stuff, I'm so sorry. LR: No, you're fine. SY: She was so heartbroken and scared of our family not being together in eternity or whatever, and that would really stick with me. I just started shutting down when that would happen. I do this thing where I fidget a lot, even if I'm not in a high-stress, emotional situation. My mom would be crying and I would just twiddle my shirt and silently cry while she was upset. Eventually, later on in the middle of high school, I told her, “It's not fair for you to burden me with all this emotional stuff that you say I'm doing to you, just being myself.” Then she stopped crying in front of me, and that was helpful. But my dad will tell me sometimes—well, not anymore, we're doing much better now. I think being an adult and them letting you be an adult is really helpful for a lot of queer people. But my dad used to tell me how I would break my mom's heart and stuff. It was hard. We talked about it, but not in a good way, so I didn't have a good outlet. LR: Right. You mentioned the role that your religion played in the relationship, especially with your mom, and that you finally were able to have that talk. Looking back, how do you think religion… SY: It's a high-demand religion and it's part of your whole life. 9 LR: Yeah. And because of your mom having those discussions with you, that's a lot for a teenager to be burdened with, if you will. SY: I don't want to degrade my mom or anything. She's a wonderful mother. LR: No, and I'm not trying to do that, but I'm thinking about what that was like for you as a teenager, having this burden of, “I'm causing my family to…” SY: Not be together after we die. LR: “…not be together.” That's a lot, so I'm just wondering how you navigated that and worked through that. Healthy, unhealthy, what were your coping mechanisms? SY: It was really tough. Oh, boy, it was a dark time in my life. I don't really remember specifics. I think I… not repressed my childhood, but I just don't remember a ton of details about the harder parts of when I was growing up, which I think is normal. But it was really hard. I remember being in the basement after my older brothers had all moved out and it was just me down there. I remember one time kneeling in front of my bed and praying or whatever, like they tell you to do, and just sobbing. I was like 14, and I was so sad because I'm sure I had just had a fight with my mom about not being obedient and not following the rules in their house of not talking to boys, which is crazy. I didn't have a boyfriend or anything, I just would talk to my friend S about Youtube. But it was just like, “Avoid the very appearance of evil,” you know what I mean? That whole saying in the Mormon church of just ‘avoiding any part of evil’ [air quotes]. I remember just kneeling in front of my bed, twiddling with quilting, even though no one was there, like I do with my fights with my mom, pulling on a seam and praying and just sobbing to God and being like, “I am so sorry. Let me know what I can do to not ruin my family and break my mom's heart.” I didn't hear anything back from God, which was scary for a 14 year old. But I remember texting my mom and being like, “I totally heard Him, and He said that I'm doing better.” But I was just saying that to make my mom feel better, because I 10 think my mom had a really codependent relationship. We do things that hurt each other's hearts really badly, but then if either of us tells us, like, “You hurt my heart really badly,” then we're like, “Well, I'm sorry that I'm not a perfect son, or a perfect mom,” or whatever. So if I hurt my mom's feelings, I would say I was doing better and I would read my scriptures more and I would go to mutual that week. It was really hard. It was just a lot of lying, which is not something I'm proud to admit. I lied a ton as a teenager because it was the only way to have both, if that makes sense. I could explore my queerness and being a gay boy and all that stuff, but I'd also not have my parents breathe down my back or take away my phone or whatever. Which I hate, because I don't want to lie ever again in my life. I love every part of my life and I don't like hiding that from people. I felt like I had to then, so I would just lie about who I was talking to or what I talked about at school. There's just a lot of lying and hiding stuff, which wasn't effective because I lived in the house. They knew what was going on, but you're like a 14-year-old kid. It's hard to feel like you have to lie to be yourself, and not be yourself at home, right? But I wasn't myself at school either. I was either a toned-down or toned-up version of who I thought I was. But that's how a lot of kids are; not exclusively queer, I think. LR: Right. I keep thinking it's almost like you were playing a role when you were with your mom or at home: the role that she wanted you to play. SY: A hundred percent. I felt that way for a long time, and sometimes I still do, but not as bad because I live on my own and I pay my bills. It sounds kind of heartless, but it's a healthy distance of like, “You are not in charge of me because you don't take care of me.” I don't owe them my house. I don't owe them my car. I can do what I want in my house and my car, you know what I mean? It felt like I was playing a role for a long time, but not in a fun way. Not like a theater-y way; I love theater. I would wear the ‘boring student’ role and go to church 11 and pass out the sacrament or whatever, and then I would go to school and have a crush on S and talk to S about this boy we both had a crush on in our class. It’s kind of hard to live a… I was going to say a Hannah Montana situation, which is such a gay thing to say, but a double life of home and not-home. LR: All right. So let's talk a little bit about high school. Layton High? SY: Yes. LR: Okay. What was high school like for you? SY: I loved high school. I had a really good time in high school; I did not have a good time in junior high. I was eating again at the beginning of sophomore year and I was having a good time. They have the Productions Company and the Actors’ Company, which are two theater audition classes in school. My sophomore year, I got into the musical theater Productions Company. I was super stoked because that meant I had one class of theater every day. I would get to do rehearsals every day at school and just do what I loved and have fun with my friends and make stupid jokes every day. It was really awesome and I loved that. I did it with my best friend L; our older siblings are married and they were both in Productions together years before we did. It was really fun to do it with her and our other best friend SP, who we met in the first play I ever did, but then we re-met him when we all went to high school together and did that theater. I loved high school, but I had a rough junior year. But again, I don't remember a lot of my junior year, which I think is on purpose. That's probably the heaviest section of my timeline. I don't know if we want to go there right now. Junior year was just rough for me, but I loved theater and I had lots of friends. I was popular; I was prom king, and my date was my best friend L. That was pretty important to me, which is kind of lame to be important to someone, but it was really cool for me because I wore a really excessive gay suit with tail coats and a 12 bedazzled bow tie and I won anyway. It just felt really cool. I had a great time and I had a better relationship with my parents, for the most part. I loved high school. It was great. LR: So I have a question before we go into the heavy stuff. SY: Which we don't have to go to. It's just like, that's the timeline. Junior year was the rough spot. LR: Okay. Talking about your family: you said you never officially came out to your parents? SY: No. LR: How did you fit within the family dynamic with all your siblings? How did they interact with you? Were they okay with it? SY: We never talked about it. I never came out to my siblings until I was an adult, in high school. The majority of my siblings, the first five are older than me by at least five years—the closest one's five years older than me—so they had all moved out by the time I was in junior high school, and gone on missions. I have like the perfect family, not just my parents, but my siblings are all sealed in the temple and have a bunch of kids of their own. I think it sounds so mean to my parents, but it's just a generational, gradual change, I think. My parents’ age group for the most part, at least where I grew up, was not accepting at all. My siblings are still LDS and they're still Mormon to this day, but they're not mean to me about it. They don't tell me that I've destroyed our family or whatever. But no, never really talked about it. They make jokes about me being gay now, which is funny because like, I am gay now, and it's funny because they're funny, but we never joked about it when I was a kid; it was never really brought up. We just didn't really talk about it, but I didn't have a girlfriend or anything. Neither did they, we weren't allowed to date steady, ‘cause Mormonism. 13 I think that I had a lot of pent-up anger and internalized stuff, which I think I still do to an extent, but I feel like I took that out on C, my younger sister, when we were little. I've just been so mean to her and I feel really bad about it now. There's not an excuse, but I think the reason might have been that I was just going through a lot of my own stuff, and I didn't know how to handle it, so I feel like I blew up at my little sister a lot. We did not get along for the first 12 years of her life, which I feel really bad about, because she's the coolest now and she's so nice and talented and awesome. But I was really mean to her. I feel like I project a lot of my insecurities on other people. What I think people are thinking of me, I just assume that they're thinking. I'll think that I'm annoying, so I think that everyone thinks that I'm annoying, and so I'll just go on the offensive, which is not good. I've done a lot better in recent years with that. I think I just assumed all my siblings hated me and thought I was the worst and destroying our family, when they all love me. They're all my siblings; I don't think any of them thought that, and if they did, they never said it or did anything mean to me. I idolized my oldest brother, MI, for a long time because he's like the poster child Mormon guy on both sides. He's cool and nice, but then also works for the Bishop's Storehouse and has this beautiful wife that he married in the temple and they have great kids. It's rough because I feel like him and my sister H embody everything that my parents dreamed their kids would do. I'm sure they don't; that's me projecting what I think they're going through, but I really idolized him for a long time in an unhealthy way. I still do. He's my big brother. He's amazing. He's a great guy. But for a long time I was like, “If I could be like M and just find a great girl like K and we could get married, then everything would be fine. I would be what my parents want me to be. Everything would be cool.” But that didn't happen, which is fine. 14 LR: During this time in high school, did you ever feel the need to date the way your parents wanted you to? SY: Oh, they told me to try and date girls a lot. They would set me up on dates and I would go to dances. I never went to a dance with a boy. I went to every high school dance while I was in high school because it was so fun. I love dancing, going out with my friends, and I was the best dance date, hands-down, which is not bragging, it was just a fact. All the girls at the current dance, they'd be like, “Okay, I'm going to ask Sam to the next dance.” I think it's an understanding that a lot of straight girls and gay guys have that's just like, inherent of, “We got each other's backs. I'm not a predatory straight guy who's going to go to the dance with you and then try and feel you up or anything. We're just going to have a good time.” So I would just go to dances and then have tons of fun. I would flirt with boys at school and not date them, until my junior year: I started dating this boy, but that was a bad relationship. I tried to date a few times in junior high school. I had a girlfriend, but like all boyfriends/girlfriends in junior high, whether you're queer or not, it's not a real relationship, in my opinion. I don't wanna downplay experiences, but we would just Snapchat each other and be like, “That's my girlfriend.” I don't want to sound gross and crude, but I never was physically, sexually attracted to them, which is not crude, it's just a fact, because I'm a homosexual man. But no, I never really had a girlfriend. I never had a beard or anything in high school. My sophomore year, I had this girl named G who we went to dances together, I think twice, and I had a crush on her, but I didn't want to, like, make out with her. I just thought she was super cool, because she is super cool and she's super pretty and super nice. Now she's dating this awesome trans guy from our high school, so she's in the queer family, which is weird that we find each other in 15 these weird ways. But no, I never had a beard. They never pressed it a ton, but I felt the pressure. LR: So you've hinted at your junior year. Are you comfortable talking about it? SY: Yeah. I will laugh about it. It's not funny stuff. It's a coping mechanism, I think. LR: Yes, and I'm glad you mentioned that. SY: I just want to preface that it's not funny that I got assaulted, but I got assaulted, you know what I mean? [Laughs] Like, that's not a joking matter, but it's hilarious to me. I forgot—I say forgot, probably repressed, but that sounds so clinical and dramatic to say, you know? But I purposefully forgot that section of my time until college, by accident, I remembered that, and then things took another spiral. But junior year was [eye roll] great. I was in just Musical Theater Productions my sophomore year, and then my junior year I got into Actors’ Company and Musical Theater Productions. Musical Theater Productions would do a spring musical and a fall musical, as well as be required to do the mainstage that the whole school could do, so they would do three shows a year. Actors’ Company would do Shakespeare Festival in the fall down in Cedar City and compete, and then they do a straight play in the spring, and usually everyone in that is also on the stage. I was in both, so I was going to do a Fall Musical, Shakespeare Festival, Mainstage, Spring Play, and Spring Musical, but then they added a second musical for the Productions Company in the spring. We were in three shows at once in the spring, which was a lot. We went to Shakespeare Festival and I competed with my best friends, SP and DY, in a comedic scene. We did comedy and tragedy embodied with masks and Shakespeare writing, and we told him what to do and it was really fun. It did really well. Then this boy from this other high school gave me his number, which was shocking because I had never had any male attention before at all; no boy had 16 ever really had a crush on me or told me that I was cute or anything. It was so crazy to like go to a theater-y event away from home and be able to flirt with a boy during school stuff. It was so wild, and I was really excited because I thought he was cute too. We started texting in the weeks following the Shakespeare Festival, and then he asked me on a date, and I said yes because I was so stoked. No one had ever asked me on a date before that I was romantically into. It was just like dances and stuff. I wasn't allowed to go out with boys or flirt with boys or whatever, so it had to be a secret. I remember we were talking about going to get Chick-Fil-A, and then we were going to cuddle in the backseat of his car—which I did not realize was a divisive thing for men to say to you at the time, because I was 16 and I was really naive for a 16-year-old, I think. He was a year older, he was 17. I remember it was the day before Thanksgiving 2017. I told my parents I was going to go shopping with my friend LE from down the street, which they didn't love because he was also obviously a gay guy, but they were fine with it because they knew we weren't dating or anything. That's not where I was going, but I told them where I was going and I went and picked up a bouquet of roses to give to CA, the guy who was taking me on a date. I hid them under the playground in my front yard to sneak into his car when he picked me up and stuff. He pulled up and I snuck out to his car. Well, I didn't sneak out—my parents thought I was going somewhere else—but I took this bouquet of roses, and he saw them and he was really mean about them. He's like, “What am I supposed to do with these? What am I supposed to say to my parents? I have these roses, who am I supposed to say they're from?” Then he just threw them in the back seat and hurt my feelings. I was like, “Okay, cool. We're going on a date. I'm so excited.” 17 We drove to Chick-Fil-A in Farmington and he talked about Lagoon because he worked there, and he talked about roller coasters and how Cannibal has the steepest decline in the Northwestern Hemisphere of a roller coaster. I don't know why I remember that; I remember it so vividly, but I probably shouldn't. I remember he made me try Chick-Fil-A sauce even though I'm a really picky eater and I didn't want to, but I tried it anyway. I didn't like it, but I tried. He made me pay, which was fine, but in my brain of my 16-year-old romantic naive self, I was like, “He's gonna take me to dinner and he's going to pay for me and it's gonna be romantic,” but we got Chick-Fil-A and I paid. It was not romantic at all. It was just a letdown, which is the theme of this story. We were walking back to the car and I had never kissed a boy before. This is so lame and embarrassing, but I do this thing where I pretend I'm on talk shows when I'm by myself and I'm getting interviewed. I don't know why I do it, but I would do this thing where I would run the same interview. [Whispers] I sound like a crazy person. [Normal volume] I would be talking about my first kiss with a boy to like Oprah or whatever after I wrote my book, which I'm not going to do. I'd be like, [dramatic voice] “...and then it was super romantic; it was raining and it was like in a movie.’ We were walking in the parking lot of Station Park, and he just planted one on me, not like a romantic ‘look in my eyes’ way, he just kind of kissed me. I was like “Oh, wow. That's so wild that it just happened,” but it was so not special because I could tell it wasn't special to him. It's so sad to say. It was supposed to be really special. That sounds so bratty and entitled, but it was supposed to be special. I had been looking forward to it and imagining it for years, and it was just kind of… he kissed me in the parking lot in the middle of the day. 18 Then we got in the car and he started driving back towards my house and we were holding hands. I was like, shook, because we were holding hands and I was so excited. Then he was like, “Where can we go?” I was like, “Oh, we could stop at this cute overlook.” [To Lorrie] Do you know that place where they used to have that pine tree on Gentile, up that big hill? There's a pine tree that used to be a geocaching location. LR: At the top of Gentile. By 89? SY: Do you know where the temple is now? LR: I haven't been to Layton in years. SY: Oh. Well, there's a temple there now and it's like a block above from there. It's on the road with no houses on it, and there's like a little pullout where they had a pine tree where people would stop. I was like, “We could go there and watch the sunset,” because it's a really cool view of Antelope Island and the lake. He was like, “No, that's like… no.” I was like, “Okay, we could go to my high school and sit in the park.” He's like, “No, I don't wanna do that either.” I was like, “Okay, but that's weird.” Then he drove to… I remember the exact spot. This is when it gets heavy, and I'm sorry. LR: You don't need to apologize. SY: I know, but I do it anyway. He drove to this parking lot in South Weber, just off 89, on the left hand side of the road. It's like a commuter lot, people park there and they take buses. LR: Oh yeah, by Antelope. SY: A little past Antelope, where that Maverick is now. It's right there and he stopped there, and it was dark and he pulled up where there wasn't a light. We were holding hands. I was super excited because I was like, “We're going to cuddle in the 19 backseat.” The setting did not imply cuddling in the backseat, but I did not know that. I remember the songs he played. He played really loud ‘Green Light’ by Lorde, and then ‘Young, Dumb, Broke High School Kids’, and ‘Bad at Love’ by Halsey really, really loud. I remember that because I couldn't listen to those songs for years. I didn't know why. He was playing those really loud and singing, and I was just slack-jawed, staring at this boy who took me on a date. I was like, romanticizing and saying it was fine in the moment, even though it was a shitty date. I was like, “This is so incredible. We're going to be boyfriends and it's going to be amazing.” Then we started kissing, like kissing-kissing, making out, whatever. I was pumped and had never kissed a boy. I'm sure I was not a great kisser, but he pulled away and was like, “You're a bad kisser. You're way too aggressive,” which is mean to say to someone, even if it's true. But it was like my first kiss-kiss with a boy, and it really hurt my feelings. He didn't want to make out anymore after that, so then he played more music and was singing really loud. I remember we were holding hands in the center console or whatever. Then he started moving our hands towards his lap and I was so… Nervous isn't the word, but just like in shock of like, “Oh my God, what's happening,” you know what I mean? I knew what sex was, and I knew about stuff, but I didn't think that's what was happening. I thought we were going to go on a cute date and cuddle because I was 16 and had never known anything. So I was just kind of frozen, which sounds so dramatic and like whiny, but I was just kind of frozen. I remember he said, “Just say no if you want me to stop.” My hand was like on his crotch and he moved my hand up and down. I don't want to get too graphic and gross you out, but it's just like what happened. 20 LR: You talk about what you're comfortable talking about. If you don't want to get graphic, then don't. SY: Okay. Yeah, but… LR: Things progressed. I can help a little bit. SY: Thank you. Things progressed and I didn't say no, which bothered me for a really, really long time, and it still kind of does. Because I didn't say no, and he told me to say no if I didn't want to. But I wasn't saying anything, and I wasn't breathing, really. I was kind of just holding my breath and just so confused and scared. Things progressed and then they were progressing, and this is a graphic detail, but I feel like it's relevant. He held my head down at one point, and I couldn't breathe, so I couldn't say no, which looking back I think is important for me, just to know that I didn't say no, but I couldn't, ‘cause I was being held down. It's a dirty memory and it's not a pretty memory, and I don't like talking about it, I don't think, but it feels really relevant to everything else that's happened in my life. Which sucks. I hate that this colors my story. You know what I mean? He was holding my head down. I couldn't breathe or say no. Nothing came to a conclusion and he yelled at me about it—like, actually yelled and he was upset. He drove me home and didn't talk in the 15-minute drive from the parking lot to my house. Then he didn't text me back or anything for three days after. The parking lot thing was really bad, it was trauma, but then him not talking to me for three days, I think it really was like the nail in the coffin for my psychodevelopment, ‘cause I was like, “Oh, shit, I didn't do what he wanted me to do. It didn't happen for him. Now I don't get to talk to this one boy who's ever had interest in me, and I did it wrong, and I couldn't do the one thing that he was expecting that apparently is the thing that I'm good for,” which was sexual stuff. 21 I'm trying to think of where I want to go with this next part. That was really hard. He didn't talk to me for three days, and then he texted me back and was yelling at me that I was being needy and whatever, which was crazy and abusive. Looking back now, when you're 16, you don't have that understanding. The day before Thanksgiving was the day that parking lot thing happened. I remember ‘cause we were on Thanksgiving break. Me, SP, and DY, my three best friends from high school, we performed the Shakespeare Festival together, which is how we met CA. DY has really hard mental health struggles and has for our whole lives, and he was going through a really dark space in his mind, and I was going through a really dark space in my mind, clearly. I just kind of shut down after that, but like on a big scale. I just was kind of checked out, but apparently DY was really not doing well and it was really affecting SP. So November of 2017 was like the darkest month of all of our lives. We joked about it in the coming Novembers; we were like, “It's November, we better prepare.” But it was just really hard. We were doing White Christmas at the time for Productions for the Fall show. We had already announced that we were doing Three Musketeers for the straight play and Little Women for the musical for Actors' and Productions, and we were doing Wizard of Oz for the mainstage. Then on closing night of White Christmas, they said that they were going to add The Hunchback of Notre Dame to the spring repertoire, so Productions kids would be in three musicals at once. I was also an actor, so I would be in four shows at once. That was crazy. I auditioned for the shows, and I got Clopin in Hunchback, which was one of my biggest dream roles. He's not a lead, but he's the narrator of the show, so it's a big part and it's a lot of time. It's stressful. I was also D'Artagnan in Three Musketeers. I was the lead; I carried the show, so it was a lot of time and effort. I just dove into that and didn't really think too hard about what happened. 22 After that initial thing, me and CA dated for that whole year on and off, meaning he would text me and ask for gross pictures and then I would send them and then he wouldn't talk to me. But in my head, it was like, “We're dating. It's a rocky relationship, but we're dating,” which we were not. We were on-and-off throughout the whole rehearsal process, and again, we were in the four shows at once. We did the math one day and we were working 40-hour jobs on top of high school and rehearsals. The rehearsal conditions weren't great because our stage manager, I did not like, and he didn't really care about students and our well-being. We didn't break for dinner and we'd be there till ten after school. It was wild. It's so weird to say out loud because other people hear it, they're like, “That's insane.” I'm like, “I know.” So that was happening, and then I was also on and off getting used by CA. My grades started slipping really bad because—it sounds braggy—I'm a smart person, but I'm not super great at academics, and with all of that stuff going on, I became really bad. I was failing a bunch of classes, and so now it was fights with my parents about being gay and being disobedient and failing a bunch of classes and not applying myself and not doing well in school. November until the end of junior year got worse and worse and harder and harder. I remember we opened Hunchback of Notre Dame, and CA came because it's one of his favorite shows, and he went out with me and my friends after. He was like, “I have notes. It wasn't great, but it was fun.” All my friends were like, “That's mean.” I was like, “No, he's just, like, sassy.” But when you're in a toxic situation, you get weird and defensive about stuff. I remember that. 23 Then CA told me that some kid in his theater group at his high school had reported him for misconduct, and he was getting taken to court. I was like, “That's wild. Why would he do that?” He's like, “He's lying. You know me. I'm a good guy.” I was like, “Yeah, totally. I love you,” and all this stuff. He never said he loved me back. But I was like, “I'll stand by you in this trial and defend you.” I did not go to the trial because I was in the show, I didn't have time. Come to find out, he had accosted and harassed at least three other boys in his theater department sexually, and it had gotten to the point where this one kid was like, “This is enough, we can't handle this anymore.” So he got kicked out of school at the end of our junior year. I remember being like, ‘What the hell?’ and then he just kind of fell off the face of the earth and we weren't together anymore, which was good. I just remember that really vividly, hearing that he had done similar, if not the same thing to other people throughout the same year. I thought that we were like on again-off again, but I thought we were together, which is sort of trivial and stupid, but it was really hard to hear that, ‘cause I didn't feel special on our date, and then it was like, “I really wasn't special.” I was just a pattern for him, and that was really hard. It impacted theater too. You have to re-audition for Productions and Actors' company every year, and there's a GPA requirement, as there should be. Because of the psychosexual trauma, the four shows at a time, the family tension, I had failed English class and I didn't get it back up before auditions. My theater teacher was like, “I can't. What am I supposed to do? I can't put you in this. You don't have the grade. What is everyone else going to say when, just because Sam Young is funny, I put him in the show, when he didn't do what he was supposed to do?” 24 I totally understand, it's a fair point, but Productions and theater was the one thing that really kept me afloat during all this. That's so gay and annoying to say, like, “Theater saved my life,” but it did, and I really did not want to lose it. They would still let me be in Actors' company, but I couldn't be in Productions. and I couldn't accept that because L and SP were still going to be in Productions and Actors', and I was like, “I want to be in things with my friends, and I want to do all this stuff, and I'm talented, and I want to do it, and it's important to me.” My best friend L was Productions president that year for our senior year, and so she petitioned our director and put her own neck out for me, like, “I'll be accountable, and if he slips again, you can blame me,” all this stuff. I worked really hard and I got my grade back up and had my GPA back to where it was supposed to be the week after auditions and L was like, “He's worked really hard. It's the most important thing to him. Please let him be in it.” Our director said fine, and I was so overjoyed. So I went to Titanic auditions with the Productions crew. DY had failed out of more classes than me, and he did not get his grades back up, so he was not in anything. Me and SP and DY had a falling out like a month before. Me and SP were still good friends, but DY kind of didn't like us anymore. He found out that I was at Titanic auditions when he had been kicked out, and he texted all the parents of kids who didn't get into Productions and was like, “You know, they let Sam Young back in. They didn't let your kid in.” They all texted our director and were like, “This is an outrage. Kick him out.” So they kicked me back out after I had gotten back. That was a really hard week. It was the first week of June, because I had been kicked out of Productions, felt so bad, got my grade back up, got back in, and then my old good friend rallied parents of kids who didn't get into the program against me, and they were like, “This is unacceptable.” Which it could be, could be not, I don't know. But that was rough. 25 So that's basically junior year. Sorry. It was so long and so sad. It was hard, but then senior year came and it was much better. LR: It's okay. What made senior year better? SY: I wasn't dating CA. [Laughs] I think that's what it was. I was in Actors’ Company and it was awesome. I did a lot more visual art that year because I didn't have all of my classes taken up with Actors' and Productions. I did some painting classes and I did a lot of dance classes and that was really awesome. Then I met this other boy from the same high school and theater department as CA. He was really sweet, and that was a good relationship for what it was at the time, ‘cause we were in high school. Senior year was a lot better for me. I found myself a lot more, because I lost myself a lot in my junior year. I was like, “What the fuck is happening? I don't even know if up is up or down is down.” Senior year I was not involved with CA at all, and I made new friends in Actors' company and it was awesome. It wasn't five shows that year, it was a lot less on my plate and it was just great. Senior year was much better for me. LR: I'm trying to decide what I want to do. We've actually been doing this for a little over an hour. Are you okay doing one more interview? SY: Sure! I hate to get stuck in my high school stuff, it just follows the sequence of events. That's what happened. LR: It's important. Let's end this out with the ending of high school and what that was like for you to just graduate and be done. Did you feel a sense of accomplishment, having graduated? SY: I did, but my grades did not get much better than my junior year [laughs]. I'm not good at academics. I'm really smart, I know a lot of things; I'm not good at doing homework. I almost didn't graduate, but I did. I walked, I got my diploma. My 26 advisor, my senior year at the beginning of the year, they're like, “Yeah, you have enough gym credits to graduate. You don't have to take anything this year.” I’m like, “Perfect. I'll just focus on art stuff.” But then halfway through the last semester of senior year, they're like, “You need four gym credits to graduate.” “What do you mean I need four gym credits to graduate? You said I was fine.” I cleared my schedule of all the electives I was taking and switched to all dance classes so I could graduate in the gayest way possible. I didn't take weightlifting, I took AP Dance. I felt really proud. I graduated with L and SP and our other friend O, who was really great. I felt awesome. I won an award that year for my performance in White Christmas the previous year at my high school and it was just really awesome. I played Petruchio in Taming of the Shrew, which was one of my favorite shows I ever did. It was set in the fifties and I was the lead in the Shakespeare show. Shakespeare means so much to me; I love Shakespeare, and I got to do a Shakespeare show my senior year. Iit was really awesome, it was just great. I made a lot more friends outside of theater, which I think is helpful, just to diversify who you talk to was really helpful for me. LR: Knowing that you grew up in the LDS church, did you feel pressured to serve a mission? SY: Yeah, but it's more dark stuff. I don't wanna waste your time. LR: That’s okay. SY: This summer after my junior year, as a non-intentional reaction to what happened in November, I became hypersexual. I learned that word through trauma research. It was a trauma response. I think because I felt like I didn't do what CA wanted, and what he wanted was sex, that I had to do just that for anyone who would take me. 27 So I did that the summer before my senior year. My parents found out about that, and I started going to therapy, and so I was not eligible for a mission, but there would have been pressure if I was eligible. My bishop did offer me to go on a service mission, but I didn't believe in the church at that point and I was like, “I'm good, but thank you.” But there was that pressure because all my older brothers have gone on missions, and one of my older sisters has gone on a mission, and I did not. I didn't really feel bad about it because I didn't like the church at that point and I wasn't in it anymore. I technically was, but I wasn't active; I didn't believe it. So yeah, there was pressure, but I didn't go, to answer your question. LR: I think that's a really good place to stop for today. Thank you so much for doing this. [Interview stops.] [Interview begins again.] LR: Today is June 3, 2022. We are continuing our interview with Sam Young. Same people are present, so I’m just going to jump in. You had just talked about why you didn't go on a mission and the dynamics of it, because most of your siblings had gone, but you were just, [grimaces] eh. SY: Not going. LR: Right. And you briefly talked about graduation and what all that was like. Is there any other portion of high school that you want to talk about before we move on? SY: No, I don't really think so. I already touched on how my best friends really got me through high school. Graduation was fine. I wasn't good at school; we talked about that. No, I'm pretty sure I covered what I wanted last time. LR: All right. One thing, as I was looking at it this morning, you talked about your favorite play that you were part of was Taming of the Shrew. SY: I love Taming of the Shrew. LR: So did you love the Shakespeare part of it or that specific play? 28 SY: It's the Shakespeare part of it. I mean, I love Taming of the Shrew, but I also recognize that it was written in the late 1500s or early 1600s. It's not the most progressive when it comes to ideas about womanhood and femininity and women's roles. But the beauty of Shakespeare is that you can play it a million different ways. That's why it's lasted so long, because it's just universal feelings in very specific stories, which makes good theater in any setting. We set it in the 1950s and it was just fun because I was Petruchio, and if you're not one of the principal characters in a straight play, let alone Shakespeare, it's not that fun. I've been told by my best friend L, who was in the show with me—she is more of a musical theater actress, so she's not really the leading lady in a lot of the plays we did. She was ensemble, which is not really written into Shakespeare shows that often, but because it was a group of thirty, everyone was in the show, because that's just how it works. A lot of them were like, “We don't do much and it's not that fun. We don't have any lines.” So it wasn't fun for them, but I just loved Taming of the Shrew. I love Shakespeare a lot. My drag name is based on Shakespeare. Every iteration has been. LR: Really? SY: Yeah, Samantha Stratford. Shakespeare was born in Stratford-upon-Avon. LR: I guess we can talk more about that as we get closer. But just as I was looking at that, Taming of the Shrew jumped out at me. SY: Yeah, it was really fun. I was told I didn't play a passingly straight Petruchio either, which is fine and true because I don't really pass straight, even onstage, which I used to hate. I went to straight-acting lessons with this adjunct teacher at my school, which… we didn't call it that. It was just how to act more masculine on stage, because I'm not a very masculine presenting person most of the time. She taught me how to walk without my butt backwards and my hips forward and stuff, but it didn't work. It was the 1950s, so we set it as we were two queer people 29 gaming the system. That's how I played it in my mind, but it was high school, so we didn't say that's what we were doing. It was really cool. I loved it. LR: Well, thank you. After you graduated from high school, did you plan on going to college? SY: I applied to Southern Utah University in Cedar City my senior year. I applied there in November for the College of Performing Visual Arts, and I got in in December. I was really excited because it's where the Utah Shakespeare Festival is held, and that's where the high school competition is every year in the fall. I had really loved Shakespeare competitions throughout high school and I was really excited to go. One of my older brothers had gone there too for accounting, but it was just a beautiful campus, and so I applied. I was going to go in the fall, so I got a summer job at a factory in Clearfield. LR: Okay, so what year? SY: 2019 I graduated. LR: So it was the fall of 2019 that you were going to college. All right, a factory in Clearfield? SY: I worked at Lifetime blow mold plastic productions. We made chairs and tables and stuff, which is a great job for a lot of people. I hated it. Every time I get a job that I don't like, I just think about how everyone has that job where you’re like, “At least I'm not there anymore.” That's Lifetime for me because it was just not fun. You don't really talk to anyone because you're on a production line, so it's very loud and very hot in there. It was July and it's all hot plastic. They pour down a bunch of hot plastic and then they press it into a mold and blow air into it. I didn't like it at all, it just really sucked. I fell off the face of the earth socially when I did that, because I was working full-time. I was doing eight hour shifts during the day, and none of my friends were 30 working because they were all better at school than me. They got scholarships and their parents were helping them with tuition, but I paid my way through college. I didn't graduate, but I'm very proud of the fact that I paid my own way. I never took out a loan, I never had a scholarship, and I'm not in debt. I paid everything myself. I didn't really hang out with anyone during that summer, and then I went to college by myself. I moved like two weeks before everyone else moved, so I was in Cedar City by myself without school, and I don't think I had started my job there yet either. I hated it. Cedar City is not the biggest town. It's very small and very conservative. I thought as a little gay teenager in high school, I was like, “I'm going to move to college and be in a bigger city and do whatever I want and be awesome.” I moved to Cedar City, which is much smaller and even more conservative than Layton. I just really did not like it. I got a job at Chick-Fil-A on campus, but we didn't start until the school year started, so I was just at my apartment by myself with no friends for like two weeks. It was not great. LR: Did you enjoy the college part of it? SY: I was in a program my freshman year called Jumpstart, and they don't do it anymore, but it was for incoming freshmen. It was just a program for one academic year where they had sections. I was in the pop culture group, which was just a class of thirty people, and it was all your gen eds that you had to get done for your Associate's degree. Then they would sprinkle in one or two electives in the interest topic of that group, so we had screen analysis and stuff because it was pop culture. I would go to class from 10-2 every weekday, and we just had a bunch of professors that would cycle through and collaborate with each other and teach us. I really liked that, but I'm still not an academic. I don't like homework; I don't really do my homework, which is not great, but it's okay. I did not do well in college at all, 31 which I'm very ashamed of. I had to deal with that because it blew up in my face, but I’ve worked through it a lot now. I liked college after I started making friends and hanging out with people, that was really awesome. I made some really great friends down in Cedar City that I still talk to today. But I went for theater and I wasn't really doing any theater because I was just in Jumpstart. It was all generals. We didn't have time for being in the theater program, so I wasn't doing any theater that I went down there to do. None of my friends from high school had moved down. SP and L went down to college with me but neither of them were in Jumpstart, so I didn't really see them all that much anymore, which was weird, going from seeing them a few periods every day in high school to seeing them maybe a couple times a week. But I didn't really love college. I did not do well. I failed every class because I was just—I hate to dive right back into heavy stuff, that's so annoying—but at this point, I hadn't really remembered the stuff that we talked about, junior year. I was still purposely forgetting that and not thinking about it. Then they had a weird dance in the Great Hall of the school. I went with two of my friends from college and I don't really remember what happened. I just remember remembering what happened to me that night and calling my mom and sobbing, which was so weird because I had never told my mom any of that stuff. I didn't even remember that that stuff had happened to me at that point, but I was like, “Oh my gosh, this sucks.” I had been dealing with that through hypersexual behavior like we talked about, and it continued into college. That's what I was focusing on instead of school, which was so stupid and I regret it so much now. That was what was going on up until then. That was fall 2019. COVID happened right after our first semester, a week or two into our second half of the year. It all happened so fast and so weird over the course of, I 32 think, three days to a week. It went from like, “We're going to have class online today,” to “We're going to be gone for two weeks but we're coming back.” Then we met one last time and we were like, “So this is done. Go home.” It was so weird. Everyone at the school basically moved home within two or three weeks after that, but I did not. I stayed in Cedar City by myself again, which was not great for a while. Then Chick-Fil-A closed down because it was a campus location, so we weren't getting any business. I had to go find a new job. I got a job at the Smith's in town, which is a great job for a lot of people. I love going to the grocery store, and I would have loved it if I was in the floral department, but I was not. I was a temporary hire because of COVID, and everyone was hoarding stuff at that point. I would just push carts all day in the hot sun because it was summer and it was not the vibe. Smith’s let me go because I was spiraling mentally and not doing well. Looking back, I realize that now, but then I was just in the mind frame of ‘I was lazy’ because my parents thought I was lazy for a long time. Then I got a job at a weird bead store on Main Street in Cedar City. It's called the Bead Forest, but it's one of those tabletop gaming stores with Magic the Gathering and D&D and comics in the back. I worked there for one week and then I was like, “This is not the vibe,” and I quit [laughs]. Then my parents found out that I had failed every class and so there was a huge blowout fight with them in Cedar City one weekend. Looking back, it wasn't a fight. They were very upset and scared for me, which makes sense now. But when you're a teenager, I was like 19, I just figured that they were mad at me and thought I was so stupid, which they were, but in a loving parent way. They're great at showing their love, but they're kind of tough sometimes. I was spiraling from that big fight and everything that I remembered my junior year and I just wouldn't show up to 33 work a couple times and they let me go. That really sucked. Then I moved home for the summer up here. I feel like I'm rambling. Do you have any more questions? LR: You're not rambling. This might be a little difficult, but when you talk about hypersexual activity, were you only dating men? SY: I wasn't dating anyone, which is gross. LR: Well, I think you know what I mean. SY: Yeah, I was only experiencing the male side of stuff. I've never been with anyone assigned female at birth or female-presenting. LR: Okay. The reason I ask that is the one thing I've noticed is as a lot of the youth are figuring out their own sexuality, they dabble between the two sexes, and so I was just curious how you did that. SY: I had a girlfriend back in junior high school, but it was junior high school. How real is it for anyone, even if you are straight? But no, I've never really dated a girl. I never had a sexual experience with a girl or a woman. Back then, I was averse to women in a sexual way, but the longer I thought about connection between people and what it means to me, I wouldn't be opposed to it. I identify more now as just ‘queer’ as an umbrella term, because I don't know what's up because everything is up, you know what I mean? So no, I had never been with a woman. LR: Okay. I was just curious. So now that you're home, has the dynamic changed at all? SY: Yeah. I think being away from my parents' house and living how I wanted to live was really beneficial to our relationship and my relationship with myself, but clearly what I was doing in Cedar City was not working. So I came home and made a commitment to myself to not be that person anymore, it's not who I am, which is true, but it was just in a very over dramatic style of things. I got a job at a bank in Layton from my family's bishop, who was a bigwig there. He got me a job, which was really nice of him. I was in the loan operations 34 department, and I would just go to an office job every day. I was basically just an office assistant. I would help them digitize their files and put stuff away. But yeah, the dynamic changed. I was just going to work and then coming home and hanging out with my parents, which was what I needed at the time, because I'd really gone off the rails in college my freshman year and the world had gone off the rails. I was just really stressed about it. But they didn't tell me all this harsh stuff about how our family was sad because I was pursuing a gay lifestyle. It was much more amicable this time. I started antidepressants that fall too. My parents were like, “You're not doing well. You haven't been for a while. Maybe we should talk to the doctor and see what's up.” I was really hesitant about it, which is kind of shameful to admit because I've always been like, “Do what you need to do for your mental health,” really vocal about it. But when it came to myself, I was not that way. I was like, “I should be able to do this on my own and be fine,” which is silly. But I started antidepressants, and they really helped. I continued them until I came home again. LR: Okay, that's good. So did you continue going to college? SY: Yeah. I was going to go back home to Layton for the summer and go back in September to school because it was kind of opening back up at that point. It would be mostly online, but I would still be going. But I got pretty good at my job, and then September came around and I was like, “I'm not ready to go back to school because I clearly did not do a good job last time, and I don't think I'm ready to do a good job this time either.” So I arranged with my job to keep me on for another three months. I stayed there throughout the winter until January, living with my parents, working in the bank, and coming home and hanging out with them. It was a really great time. I didn't have a boyfriend or that many friends because everyone was 35 busy or in Cedar City, but it was pretty good for my mental health, I think. I got in a really good place, and then I went back to SUU in January of 2021. LR: So you actually moved back down to Cedar City? SY: Yeah, I did. Into a different apartment than where I had lived, with roommates I did not know at all. I lived with SP my freshman year. We lived in a house with other roommates, but we both lived in the same house. He was still really busy because he was in the BFA program and I was not, so he was at rehearsal all the time, but on occasion we would have dinner together, hang out and watch a movie, which was nice. But at this house, I didn't know anyone, and they all knew each other and they didn't like me, which was fine. They didn't not like me, but they didn't like that someone they didn't know had been moved into their apartment. No one was in the fourth bedroom, so they had just used it for storage. Then I moved in and they're like, “This sucks,” but they were nice to me. I went back to school, and this time I was doing theater classes, so I was much more interested in what I was doing. I was doing better than I had last time for a little bit. But once again, I'm not an academic, so it did not go well, and I just stopped doing homework. I did much better than I did my freshman year, I will give myself that. I turned in a lot more papers, and I've always been good at discussing things in class, but out-of-class work is not my vibe. But it was going much better. I was finally taking acting classes and just things related to my major that I was really interested in, so it was really helpful for me. I did a play with a professor at my school; he was directing, and it was a radio play, so we had microphones. It was over the internet because it was COVID. It was really weird. We did The Matchmaker, which was the plot of Hello Dolly, but with no music. It’s the stage play that Hello Dolly’s based on, which was fun because it was a radio play, so anyone who didn't need to be there wasn't there. It 36 was just the people who had lines, and it was great. We all got really close and it was fun, but it was kind of dumb, ‘cause we did it like three times for an audience, which just means we streamed it on the internet while we were reading our scripts. It was a fun experience to do theater in a different way, but it was really lame. It was the only play I ever did at SUU, which, meh, but it's okay. I auditioned for the BFA program at SUU, which is like a fancier theater degree. I got in for the following fall in the acting program, not the musical theater because that's more of my vibe. I was really excited. Then everyone moved home for the summer, and I did not move home for the summer, and I was no longer working at Chick-Fil-A. I had gotten a job at this company called Chrysalis—it's in-home care for people with developmental disabilities. Most of the clients are middle-aged and older people who don't have a lot of family left to take care of them with disabilities and they get put in the program, but I was in a house with three teenage boys. Two of them were really low-functioning, one of them was higher-functioning, and it was basically just taking care of them when I was there. I really loved that job. I wanted a job that was more rewarding than just my paycheck because all the jobs I had were just paychecks, which is fine because I was like twenty. But I really enjoyed it a lot. I got really close with this client in the house. We were not friends, because I was a care staff and he was a patient. He was really low-functioning, so he didn't really get the concept of friendship; he wasn't vocal. His behavior plan got changed, and I don't know why, and his meds got changed, and I don't know why, and it did not go well for him. He started getting wild, a lot more aggressive and angry when things wouldn't go his way and the schedule wasn't followed to a T. He would start getting violent with me, which is sad and hard to talk about for other people, but for me, it was just part of the job for a while. He started beating me up every shift. My 37 shirts would get torn and I would get cut up because he had really long nails and he wouldn't let us cut them. [Shows his hands] I don't know if you can tell, but these are all scars from having to restrain him. He would just scratch your hands, which was really hard because I've never been in a fight or anything. It's not a fight, you just make sure they're not hitting themselves or breaking stuff until they calm down, but it was really scary a few times. Eventually, it had gone on for a few months and I still really cared about him, and he was really responsive to me and not a lot of other staff and it was just really sad to see him like that. But I decided I can't get beat up every day when I go to work. This wasn’t good for my physical health or mental health, even though I really cared about this kid and the other kids in my house and I really loved this job. I just felt like I couldn't take it every day. I think he needs more intense care than he's getting in the program he's in, and I was not trained or prepared for how to do that. We were all college kids working there. We weren't really qualified to do that, but they hired us anyway. I resigned from that job, which was sad because I still really care about the kid and I think about him even now. I hope he's doing okay. At the same time, I was doing a play at the community theater with L. We were doing Hunchback of Notre Dame, which I had done in high school, and it's like my favorite musical. It was really, really fun, but I had this huge crush on our director, which is so embarrassing to talk about now because he's a lot older than me. He's middle aged, but he's never been married. He's an openly queer person in Cedar City and he's just like a really good guy. We had been friends since I started school, we would just occasionally go to lunch or something, like friends do. This is so embarrassing and annoying, but it's relevant to my story, I guess. I really cared for him, and we basically were together in my brain at that time because we would hang out. We started hanging out a lot more because of the 38 show, and because we got closer, our relationship turned kind of romantic. It was really sweet and very important to me. It's nice to think about, but the age gap was huge. He's 27 years older than me. It's a lot. But he was much older than me and that's why I was always like, “We should just be together,” in my young, naive brain. I would tell him that and he's like, “I'm much older than you. We can't be together. That's not how it works.” I was like, “I guess that's fair,” but I don't know how I feel about that even now. I feel like if you love someone, there's definitely things that get in the way. But if it's a good, healthy thing for both of you, I think you should go for it. We didn't go for it, but we would watch movies and get dinner all the time and kiss and hug and stuff, and it's just really sweet and meaningful to me. I saw a lot of myself in him, which is what older people say for younger people. But I saw a lot of similarities between the two of us and he did too. It was just really cool to have a grown-up adult role model and mentor who I saw myself in because all throughout my life and high school career and college, it was all straight Mormon people. But he was very much like me, and openly queer, and loved the theater, and was just a cool guy, and he had cats, and he was really nice. Very not into the club scene and all that stuff that I thought of as the ‘gay community’. It’s because we were in Cedar City, but he wasn't into drinking or drugs or anything, which was really cool for me. He was directing my show and I had told him I loved him a few times and he had said it back, but we weren't together, which feels so stupid. Then after the show closed my antidepressants were not helping anymore, and they started making things worse. After Chrysalis, I had gotten a job back at the university food program and I was working catering, but no one was on campus anymore because everyone had gone home for the summer. It was just washing dishes by myself and I hated it so bad. I only worked there for maybe a week and a 39 half, but I was just spiraling. The show had closed, I knew our director didn’t want to be with me, all my friends had moved home, I had done poor academically that year, and I was working this crappy job that I hated. It was all just really bearing down on me. It just felt really shitty. Then my meds stopped working. This is kind of heavy stuff, but I have dealt with suicidal ideation for a long time, just on and off thought about it. I think about death a lot, in a safe and healthy way now, but for a lot of my adolescence, it would just pop in my mind. I feel like that's the experience for a lot of young queer people where it's just like, “This sucks. I wish I wasn't here.” It came to a head in July of 2021, and I was doing like not well at all. I would go to my stupid job washing dishes that I hated, and then I would come home to my messy room, because when I'm not doing well, my room is so gross and I don't take care of myself at all. So I came home to this shitty room that was full of stuff that I didn't want, and then no one was there, and it just sucked. I just wanted to die. It’s so sad to say out loud now, but I didn't want to be there anymore. I felt like my parents hated me because I had failed college, I was just a disappointment, and none of my friends cared about me—all that stuff that depression makes you think about yourself, even though it's not true. This is kind of triggering, but I feel like I need to talk about it. I remember the day was July 10, 2021. I was taking dishes up to this event for catering at my job and I was at the top of the science building, across the street from my house. There's really easy roof access in that building, which maybe there shouldn’t be. It was great for me at the time. It was not actually great, but like in my mind I was like, [laughs] “Sweet.” I took the dishes up there and then it was the end of my shift, so I was just going to go home anyway. I went out on this ledge and I just remember standing there in this dirty apron and a shitty uniform I had to wear with sneakers that I hated. Just standing on the end of the roof of the science building and looking 40 down on the grass, and it's a few stories up. I was like, “Damn, I don't want to be here anymore. This all sucks. The world's ending. I'm not going anywhere. I'm not doing anything with my life. No one really cares about me. I'm a burden.” Which isn't true, but in your brain, you think it is. I was just standing there for a long time, staring down. It sounds so overdramatic and cliche, but it's what happened to me, and it was really shitty because I'd been thinking about suicide and not being around anymore for a long time, constantly over the past few weeks leading up to that. All that stuff I mentioned was coming to a head and I was alone. It just sucked. I just remember standing there wishing that I could throw myself off, but I knew that if I did, that my mom would have to come down and clean my room because it was dirty and I wouldn't be able to, which is so stupid to worry about. I mean, not really, it saved my life, but that thought really crossed my mind because I love my mom. I'm kind of obsessed with her, even though we have a very cliche ‘gay boy and his mom’ relationship. I'm her biggest fan, but also she's my biggest enemy at times. It's so weird. I was like, “If I kill myself and my room is filthy, my mom's going to have to come clean my room while I'm dead. I'll already be dead, which she won't like, and then she'll have to come clean my super messy room and I'll be so embarrassed and it's so not nice of me.” So I did not jump off the science building. Woo-hoo. I went home and I called my mom and I was like, “I need to come home for the weekend or something.” She's like, “Okay.” So I took the bus up north the next day and I came home for the weekend and I was just numb and so not in a good place and just silently crying the whole time I was up there. Just dead inside. My mom knew and my father knew and my 41 mom was like, “What do we do?” Looking back, I feel so bad for my mom and my dad having to deal with that weekend and seeing me in that state, because it was obvious I was not doing well. We came to the conclusion that I should just come home and say ‘fuck it’ to Cedar City. I'd been going there for two years, and it was not going well. There was no sign that it was gonna get better and I wasn't happy. Why would I keep going? I wasn't in debt, so it was a good time to stop. I went back to Cedar City and packed up my room in a day and a half. My dad drove down and we packed my stuff in the truck and drove home. I just texted my job—which, my friends from the Chick-Fil-A job were my managers there and they were really understanding, but I was like, “I'm out. Sorry for the late notice. I can't do this.” They're like, “Okay, let us know when you're doing better.” I was like, “Thank you so much.” That's really awesome that they did that. So I moved home after my sad time and I switched meds and it helped a lot. LR: All right. So that's your college experience. SY: That's the sad part of college. That's such a bad college experience compared to other people. KJ: It's subjective. LR: Yeah. It's what happened to you, so that's neither good nor bad. It's just what it is. So you are now home? It's towards the end of July. I'm curious when you decided to start doing your drag shows. SY: I didn't do shows until December, but I had started doing makeup and stuff in July. I have pictures. This is exciting because this makes me happy and is light and fun. So, L was still in Cedar City, but she was working full time at Chrysalis, doing something that I didn't do. She wasn't getting beat up, so she stayed at her job. [Hands Lorrie and Ky a photo] This was the first time we did drag. We went to the 42 D.I. and I found that corset and I was like, “How can you not buy a leather strappy corset for $10?” I bought it and we went to L's apartment. I’ve liked drag content and RuPaul's Drag Race since I was in high school, just watching clips on YouTube because I wasn't allowed to watch it. I've been just increasingly obsessed with drag and drag queens and all that stuff since I was a teenager. And [referring to the photo he handed Lorrie and Ky] that's the first time I ever did makeup, besides stage makeup. But honestly, it went downhill from there for a little bit. I don't know how it looks so good, but that's my real hair because I didn't own a wig. I'm wearing flats, really ugly boat shoes. It was not cute. We went to Applebee's because we didn't have anything to do because it's Cedar City. I got in drag, and me and L and two of her roommates went to Applebee's and got halfoff appetizers. Me and SP had talked about it, and I was like, “I love drag and I love queer art, but I could never do it. My parents would die, and I don't think I'd be very good at it,” which wasn't true. I thought I'd be good at it, but I just knew that it would not go over well with my family. I also worry about—not as much anymore, but it's just crazy how fast the stigma against fem-presenting queer men in the gay male community and drag queens in general has changed, and how they're received in society. Drag Race has changed the landscape of that forever. I was just like, “Fine, screw it, why not? Just get in drag makeup.” So we did that. At that point I didn't have a name, ‘cause I was just in makeup for fun. Then I started doing it once a week, just getting in drag at L's apartment and her taking pictures of me. I wasn't performing. I didn't have an Instagram or anything. At that point my name was Midge Summer Nicedream, which was a joke about Midsummer Night's Dream because I felt the fifties was my vibe. I just loved vintage 43 stuff and I always have. [Hands Lorrie a photo of Sam and L] I think I was still Midge at that point. I tried crazier makeup and L got in drag with me. LR: [Pointing to photo] So this is L? SY: That's L, my best friend and sister, even though we're not really related, but our siblings are married. We would get in drag and then go to Swig or Applebee's and just eat and vibe. It was really awesome and it made me feel much better. This overlapped with the suicidal stuff, but everything overlaps in everyone's life. My name was Midge because I felt early fifties, but then I bought a wig for the first time—a red lace front wig—and I was like, I don't look like a Midge, I look like a ‘Summer’. So then I was just Ms. Summer Nicedream, which I thought was funny, but these are the early days of drag. Then I moved home, and a Salt Lake queen named Annaleigh Cage reached out to me on Instagram and she's like, “Hey, if you're in town and you ever want to perform, let me know. I book for this show at this bar called Sun Trapp in Salt Lake.” I was like, “I would love to, thank you so much.” I got booked for my first show. [Shows another photo] This is probably one of my favorite looks I ever did at L's house, which is a pair of my boy pants, one of L's belts, and a gold tiger I bought at Ross. It's not that glamorous or pretty, but a lot of drag, especially on Drag Race, are very beautiful young girls just being beautiful young girls. I, not to toot my own horn, am gorgeous, but I'm not thin and beautiful. I'm more of a funny theater person, so hence all the Shakespeare joke names. LR: Right. When the queen reached out to you, when was that? SY: She reached out to me when I first started doing it. I made an Instagram in July before I moved home, and I started posting pictures of myself in drag. She DM'd me in July, and then I moved home. In early August, I was like, “I would love to perform 44 sometime if you have an opening.” They had an opening on December 2nd, which was a long time to wait for a gig, but fair. I needed the practice. So I got booked at my first drag show ever. It was on a Thursday night. No one was there. [Laughs] I have to find this one photo. I made the costume myself, which I am pretty proud of. [Hands Lorrie the photo] I bought a D.I. dress and totally stoned it and cut it up and made it myself. I did the “Sparkling Diamonds” medley from the Moulin Rouge movie because Nicole Kidman in a red wig is my everything. Since then, I've started doing drag more often. I've gone through spells of not doing it that often because I did Comedy of Errors at a theater up here in Ogden in January, so I wasn't really doing drag because I was busy doing that. I went in drag for Halloween this year. I was Little Red Riding Hood and I went to work and I won the costume contest, which is wild cause I work at a very conservative company. [Hands them a photo] That's another costume that I made myself. It's a bunch of flannel shirts that I made into a skirt. I was Little Red Riding Hood. Then I got booked at this other show at the Sun Trapp, and I did “Dark Lady” by Cher. That's when I think I started really diving into the structured black lip that I do now, because I don't think I look good in any other color. I just do like a dark, dark lip, and it's kind of every look I do now. Then there was this competition for drag in February at this bar in Salt Lake called Why KiKi. It was Thursday nights, and it was a lip sync battle royale, so it was a bracket of queens. I signed up and it was February, so not a lot of people signed up. It was half what they usually have, eight queens instead of sixteen. I signed up for that and I won my first round, and I had done a makeup test for it, which I had never done. The first song that they assigned me and this other queen was “I Kissed a Girl” by Katy Perry. I made the costume myself again, meaning I buy stuff from the D.I. and modify it, I don't really sew. So I bought this outfit from the D.I. It's basically that one [points at photo from 45 earlier], the pink one, the Midge. I made a reveal with a little pink slip underneath that I ruched and stuff under like a day skirt. Throughout the number, I would take off the blouse, and then the skirt, and I was in this pink slip and bra that I made. I made the bra a tear-away, so I pulled a thing and it flew away. I was wearing pasties that I made of two lips on my nipples, which I think was genius. I won that round. Then I went for the second round the next week and I won that one and it was “Like A Virgin” by Madonna. I did it as Little Red, and it was really fun. I revealed into a bejeweled jockstrap for that number and pulled dirty stuff out of my basket, and at the end I had a wolf tail on, which I'm really proud of. That's not important information, but it just makes me smile. As you can tell, drag means a lot to me and saved my life. LR: Well, I was going to ask. So between the end of July to December, knowing you have a show coming, did that help your mental health? SY: Yeah. It really did. God, that's so lame, but looking forward to performing and doing it, even in drag, was so cool and so awesome. LR: Did you feel more authentic? SY: I did, because I was living more authentic. Even in college, I was trying to be someone I wasn't. Even me thinking that I was being a more masculine person was not a masculine person at all. I was not wearing makeup and not wearing what I wanted to wear during the day, which is fine, you can't always look gorgeous. But no, I felt much better. I felt much more myself. I'm not a trans person; I don't identify as a trans woman or anything, but I feel so powerful and so myself in drag and it's just so cool. It is really awesome to experience. I wear red hair 90% of the time in drag because my favorite characters growing up were Starfire from Teen Titans and Daphne Blake from Scooby Doo. 46 Daphne Blake from Scooby Doo is everything to me. She means so much to me, which is so dumb because she's a cartoon character, but she's just so beautiful and gorgeous, and in newer stuff, she's resourceful and independent and she reclaims her femininity and makes it a strength. She doesn't have to pretend she's butch and cool to be respected. She's a beautiful girl in pink tights, and she'll kick your ass. It means so much to me, and just putting on a red wig and looking beautiful and then making hilarious jokes and doing silly tricks on stage makes me feel stronger than I've ever felt. I just feel so confident. LR: So you won your second battle? SY: I did. I won my second battle, and then I went on to the final. So it was me and this queen named Nancy Raygun, which is hilarious, for the first and second spot of the month. It was just super awesome because it was a bunch of really talented queens and I had never really hung out with drag queens before. We didn't hang out, but I spent time with them and it was super exciting and I felt really proud of myself for getting really far. It was just a silly little thing that meant nothing, but it was really affirming to me that I was good at what I was doing. So the finals came and a Ru-Girl was touring through town. It was Silky Nutmeg Ganache, and she's a lip sync legend. She won six in one episode, and she was guest judging and giving opinions and stuff. Me and Nancy were the last battle of the night. The song that we got told to do was “Dancing Queen” by ABBA, which is a good song, but I don't think it's a great lip sync song. It's kind of low tempo for what I wanted to do, but I was like, “I'm going to go literal, I'm going to go queen.” I wore a gown from my theater and glued my lace-front, which I had never done before, and just felt gorgeous. I did this trick. [Referring to a photo] I'm holding a fan in that. I pulled one fan from my sleeves at the beginning of the number and fanned myself, and halfway 47 through the number, I pulled a slightly bigger fan out of my breasts and fanned myself. Then at the climax of the song, I was wearing a hoop skirt, so I hitched it up, and I have this fan that's like four feet wide. I had stuck it in my corset and pulled that out and it was just huge, so it was just like increasingly bigger fans. Nancy is, I think, 6'6' out of drag. She wears huge shoes and she paints very different than I do. I am very real girl, natural makeup, for drag. I use a natural skin tone, I don't do crazy, I use my own eyebrows now, it's very toned-down for drag makeup. Nancy paints clown-white with rainbow colors on her face and has thin eyebrows. She looks amazing. It's not what I do, but she's very tall, and she had a dress that lit up, so she was like seven feet tall, white face, lit up from the inside. You can't not look at her. I did not win, but Silky Nutmeg Ganache was giving notes, and I know this verbatim. She's like, “Miss Samantha, you serve a fantasy, and not a lot of girls can serve a fantasy. You know who serves a fantasy? BenDeLaCreme,” who is one of my drag race icons because she's like a funny theater person. I was like, “Thank you so much.” It just felt so awesome. Ru-Girls are just girls, they're just other drag queens, but they're drag queens who have been on the Olympics of drag and they're really good at what they do. She just made me feel so proud of myself that I did so good. I did not win, I came in second, but I felt really proud of what I did throughout that competition and it got me more bookings. So I started doing shows at Why KiKi. [Pointing to different photos] That's a show at Why KiKi, this is me with Sally Cone Slopes, who is kind of the resident emcee at Why KiKi. She's like the main host there, she's awesome. Those are from a few separate performances. I've been booked there semi-regularly since the battles, which is super cool. [Shows another photo] This is a show I did with no wig. 48 I just didn't want to wear a wig and the club owner came up to me and was like, “Where's your wig, girl? Half your job.” Fair, but also, it looks fine. This is love life stuff, so it's not drag, but I started dating my boyfriend six months ago, and that's when I started doing gigs, pretty much. We met eleven days after my first drag performance. [Shows photo] This is him and me after a drag gig at a 7-Eleven. That's AL. I love him very, very much. He lives in Salt Lake where all my gigs are, so I go to his apartment and I get ready and we go together. He's like my biggest supporter and my biggest fan, and that has been really important to my drag career. He's out of town this week and I had a drag gig and I had to go to my first drag gig without him. It was still fun, I was performing, and I was in drag, and it was awesome. But it was not as fun. I had no one to go home with after, I just drove home and it was really boring, but it was okay. [Shows another photo] This is from Night of a Thousand Chers last week. I did Dark Lady again. I made that costume, not the bejeweled part, but I made the robe that went over it. I just feel really awesome about drag and it makes me feel very powerful and vindicated in my queerness, which is so hoity-toity to say, but it's a queer-based art form, and it's performance, and it's everything I love about theater and more. It's creating a character. It's doing all this stuff. It's meant a lot to me and I want to go everywhere with it. I want to do so much with drag. I have so many ideas that I want to pursue later on, I just don't have the funds right now, because who does? I went through a few different drag names. I was Midge Summer Nicedream, Ms. Summer Nicedream. Then I was Iambic PentameHer, which AL said I should change because the drunk twinks at the club won't get it. He is right, but the lesbians of the club always get it, which is my target audience. Then I was Samantha Jane because my boy name is Samuel James. So it's like [funny voice] 49 “It's funny, it's almost my name.” Then I realized people in the club don't know my boy name. They don't care, it's not funny. So now it's Samantha Stratford, which, Samantha's just my name, and then Stratford-upon-Avon is where Shakespeare was born. It gives old Hollywood, Greta Garbo kind of vibes. I'm an actress, so that's what I wanted to go with. I love coming up with drag names. That's one of my favorite things, even if it's not for me. I just love the art of a punny name. My favorite one is Vivian West Hollywood. I came up with that one myself. I think it's very genius. Yeah, that's basically drag. I love drag. It's so cool. It's just people in wigs, but it's so fun. LR: That’s great. So that's kind of it? SY: That's basically up to now. I'm doing drag, I have my day job. LR: Your day job is…? SY: I'm a shipping clerk at a small company in Ogden that my dad works at. He got me that job when I moved home. LR: Do you still live at home? SY: No, I haven't lived with my parents since college. I was like, “Love ya. I want a boyfriend,” and I'm not allowed to date while I'm there. I moved into this apartment with a friend from community theater. We had done a show together in high school or something, and he was another gay guy, and I was like, “Awesome. I've never lived with other queers before. It'll be cool.” It was him and two straight college girls and it's like, “Okay, cool.” I didn't meet one of them, and then when I did meet her, she's a menace and is literally a sociopath, I think. She's so awful, and I have a whole Google Drive with all the evidence we had to compile to go to the landlords. I lived there for about a month and then moved out, which was a whole thing. 50 Then I moved into this apartment in South Weber, and then I moved to an apartment in Ogden on 40th, which was a pretty nice apartment and it was okay. I had roommates, I've never lived without roommates. I moved out of the previous apartment because the girl had called me a fag, which no one had ever called me before. It’s a silly thing to call someone because, I guess you're right, but what of it? So I moved out of that because she was crazy. Then I could hear my landlord calling people ‘faggot’ on the phone while at home at the new apartment, which he wasn't calling me a faggot or anything, so like, it’s fine, but I was like, “This isn't really the vibe.” So I moved out of there in January. Then I moved into this house with P and LE, a gay couple, who I met on KSL; they had a posting there. I live in their basement. It's really awesome. I want to live with AL, but we both have leases in Salt Lake and Ogden. We're going to buy a house in a year. LR: Comparing Northern Utah to other places that you've lived, how does that compare for the LGBTQ+ community? SY: I mean, I've only ever really lived here and Cedar City. Cedar City was worse, which is wild. I lived in Layton growing up and then Cedar City and now Ogden. Layton was pretty okay. It was very Mormon and very conservative in a nice, nonaggressive way. They voted for Trump, but they're not going to drive down the road with a flag and call you a fag. In Cedar City, they will do that, and they do. There were Trump parades for a year and a half down Main Street where half the town would get in their trucks with flags and block all of the traffic for hours. It was not really fun to live there. Cedar City sucked. On campus was pretty okay, it was pretty accepting of queer people because it's a huge theater school, and theater draws gays. Ogden's great; I love Ogden. I mean, it's not New York or San Francisco, but comparatively, it's weird how much more accepting it is. I spend a lot of time in Salt Lake doing drag and hanging out with AL, so Salt Lake's really accepting. 51 LR: What advice would you give to your younger self, or the younger queer community? SY: They asked this question on Drag Race, the finale, every season, they're like, “What would you say to your younger self?” which is hard to answer. I would say to younger queer people and to young myself, that especially here in Northern Utah, where I grew up and where people who are reading this are probably growing up, it's really hard. At times you're going to feel like it's not really hard because other people have it worse, which they do, but that doesn't make the things that happen to you and the struggles you go through here any less real and any less hard for you. I want them to feel validated in the struggles they have, and I just wish that the younger queer people have someone safe to talk about the unfortunate things that might happen to them, or talk about the great things that are happening to them as a queer person. I would say that being queer and being gay is not a sin like they tell you it is. It's not a struggle you have, because they always say you ‘struggle with sinful thoughts’ and stuff. It's not a struggle, it's just who you are. It's not inherently wrong at all. It's actually a big strength because when I was younger, I wished that I was straight for so long and just wished I was like everyone else. I'm still young, but I can't imagine being a straight person or wanting to be like everyone else in the sense of, “I don't want anyone to notice me and I don't want everyone to see the weird stuff that I do.” If you're a little boy who wants to wear a pink jean jacket every day in school, wear your stupid pink jean jacket, because if it makes you happy, it's worth it. You deserve to be happy, and you will be happy eventually, even though it's hard. LR: Well, thank you for your willingness to share. SY: Of course. 52