Oral History Program Roary Hollace Interviewed by Sam Young 10 June 2022 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Roary Hollace Interviewed by Sam Young 10 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: Hollace, Roary, an oral history by Sam Young, 10 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 Roary Hollace on June 10, 2022 at the Stewart Library by Sam Young. Roary talks about growing up in Layton, Utah as queer and coming to understand his sexuality as he navigated his environment. He shares his love of drag and how that has shaped his experience. Also present is Kyle Jackson. SY: Today is June 10, 2022, around 11 AM. We are at the Stewart Library on Weber State campus doing an interview for the LGBTQ+ Queering the Archives project. I'm Sam Young conducting, I use he/him pronouns. I am accompanied by Ky Jackson on the camera, he also uses he/him. Do you want to say your name and pronouns? RH: Yeah, my name is Roary Hollace and I use he/him pronouns most of the time. I do drag, so when I'm in drag, then I use she/her. SY: Fabulous. So just like we said, please feel free to ask to take a break, and you don’t have to answer anything you’re not comfortable with. It’s just whatever you want to talk about. That being said, when and where were you born? RH: I was born in Driggs, Idaho in 1982. They didn't have a hospital there, it's a very small town. So I was born in a little ski lodge where they help people who got injured when they're skiing. SY: So did you grow up in Driggs, then? RH: Oh, no, I moved to Layton, Utah, when I was three. SY: Gotcha. So what was growing up in Layton like for you in the eighties and nineties? 1 RH: It was very nice. It's a mid-size Utah town, which means it's a small town in the world. It was very peaceful. Lots of kids in the neighborhood. It was pretty good. SY: Did you grow up in the LDS church? RH: I did. I grew up in the LDS church, and I was very firmly in the church. Very, very strong believer all my childhood. I liked a lot of things about the church. I have a strong inclination, I like ceremony and I like ritual, and so all those things were nice. SY: Gotcha. So do you remember where you went to elementary school? Do you have any special memories from childhood? RH: I was a very carefree kid. Like, I didn't have a lot of stress. I was a very effeminate child, which did open me up to a lot of ridicule, but it didn't bother me very much because by the time I got to junior high, I started making a very concerted effort to act more masculine so that people wouldn't make fun of me. But when I was young, I was very oblivious to it all. I used to like to dress as a girl when I was a kid, and I would do it and people would say it was weird, but I didn't like it didn't bother me that they thought it was weird. Around junior high it started to bother me, and that's when I started to make a real effort to masculinize myself in a way that still lingers on me today, because even though I feel very secure in my gender identity now, there's still a subconscious monitoring of my behavior in the way I move, and the way I talk, and things like that. SY: Totally. So you mentioned in junior high, kids started making rude comments or whatever. What was your family dynamic growing up in regards to your gender expression and being a different kind of kid? 2 RH: My parents are really great and were always very supportive of things like that. There were a few things; I wanted to dance when I was a kid, and my parents wouldn't let me take dance classes for girls. They said, "If we can find a boys’ dance class, you can take dance." But none of the dance studios have classes for boys, and you can't take a class with the girls. So that was one thing. But otherwise they were pretty supportive. My dad works for the Boy Scouts and so the Boy Scouts have a very strong “we need to teach boys to be men” sort of thing. I remember there was always kind of a devaluing of feminine things, like there was a very strong, “Don't be girly, don't be a girly man.” Like, ‘girly man’ was an insult that people used a lot in my family and in my social circles, “Don't be a girly man, don't be a girly man.” That was hard, but it wasn't that bad, and looking back on it, that's fine. SY: That makes a lot of sense. What was your first exposure to queerness, do you remember? RH: Yeah, it was a movie. It was the movie To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar. Me and my cousin watched a horror movie called Copycat, but it was on a VHS recorded off of TV, and the movie that was recorded on the VHS after was To Wong Foo, so we had no idea it was coming or what was going on. It just started, and Patrick Swayze's naked in the beginning. [Laughs] That was a memory. It's about three drag queens who travel across the country and get stuck in a small town. I didn't understand why I was obsessed with it, but I was and I watched it over and over again. I have the DVD collection now, I don't know. But that movie was my first thing, and I kind of clung to that for a long time. 3 SY: Totally. Yeah, To Wong Foo’s really a big thing for a lot of drag queens, so that's really cool to hear from other people. Was that your first exposure to drag as an art form as well? RH: Yeah, yeah. I didn't realize that I wanted to do drag at the time when I watched it, but I loved it. I loved that idea of people being comfortable and acting and doing whatever they wanted. SY: Gotcha. Let's just find a good question. What challenges would you say are faced by LGBTQ individuals in Northen Utah? Did you experience anything that sticks out to you, growing up in Layton? RH: Yeah, when I was in high school, the word ‘gay’ was just a synonym for ‘bad’. Anything that was bad was gay. Kids still sometimes use that today, but not very often, so there was a lot of anger directed at myself for being gay and very much trying to hide it as much as possible. There was this weird double layer where the church teaches to be loving of everyone, but also teaches that homosexuality is really bad. I kind of had the idea that being gay was like being a drug addict: it was something that you did, but you could refrain from doing. It wasn't really a thing that you were, it was a thing that you did. So that was a hard thing for me, and I think there is still a lot of that attitude in Northern Utah. SY: Do you feel like you traditionally came out at any point? When did you start transitioning from Boy Scout Mormon kid to fabulous drag queen? RH: It kind of went in phases, and some of the phases were better than others. When I was a teenager, I didn't have very much interest in romantic relationships or sex or anything. So if you would have asked me in high school if I was gay and like 4 you had the lasso of truth on me, I would have said no and not been lying. It didn't occur to me to think about it. When I was around 18 or 19 is when I started really realizing that I was gay and that it was a big problem. This might get a little heavy. The first time I ever told someone I was gay was when I was called to be a Mormon missionary, and I went to the MTC, the Missionary Training Center, in Sao Paulo, Brazil. The first few days, they do a lot of textbook behavior modification stuff, so they make you go without food and they make you feel like you're really tired and very emotionally raw. They put us all in a big room and we watched some videos; most of them were about Jesus being tortured to death. Then they tell you things like, "You know why he's being tortured to death. It's your fault because you sinned so he had to be tortured for you." They had us raise our hands above our head, and then they came around with a nail and poked the nail into our hands. They told us, "Okay, all of this torture that Jesus went through, it's all your fault and you have to confess all of your sins." Then you go into a room with a guy and you have to confess your sins. So the first guy I told him that I had ‘homosexual fantasies,’ so I had to go in for a second interview with the president of the MTC. Not everybody did. Everybody confess their sins, but homosexuality is one of the things you had to talk to the mission president about. Those were the first people I ever told I was gay. The first time I ever said it out loud, the first time I ever even thought about it clearly in my head. The president of the MTC put me through this really very, very awful situation. He asked me really, really detailed questions about my sexuality and 5 about all my sexual fantasies, about the way that I would touch myself. He wanted me to go into this humiliating, specific detail about everything, and the whole time he's just sitting there staring at me. I would say it was very abusive. It's not a thing that a person that age should have to go through with an adult man in the room judging you and telling you that those things that you did led to the suffering of another person. So that was the first time I came out, but like I said, I was very dedicated to the church. I was a very true believer, so I thought to myself at the time that it was a good thing that I had gone through. I did the rest of my mission, everything was fine. I had one friend on the mission who came out to me and told me that he had been gay, but that he had repented, and we sort of bonded over that. I had a lot of romantic feelings for him, and I didn't tell him that I was also gay, but he knew, he guessed. But I was a very good Mormon boy for a while. That was kind of Phase One of coming out. That was my first time I ever told anyone. Second phase of coming out was when I went back to Brazil to go to school. I did a foreign exchange through Utah State and I went to Brazil and I still was very Mormon, but a lot less when I was in Brazil. I had a lot of friends who were not Mormon. There was one other Mormon boy at the school from Utah also, but we weren't really friends. I met some gay people. I got invited one time to go out dancing at a club, and we went out, and then I realized it was gay night. I danced with some boys and that was the first time I ever kissed a boy, and I freaked out. I remember I ran to the beach and sat there until three or four in the morning feeling bad about 6 it, but not bad enough to not go back. I went back the next week and met with the same boy and we made out again and it was beautiful and wonderful. I haven't seen him since. So, ironic thing at the time. My dad works for the Boy Scouts. I had worked for him at Scout camp during the summer as the aquatics director before, and his aquatics director at the time I was in Brazil had been outed by his roommate. His roommate found stuff on his computer or whatever and outed him as being gay, so my dad had to fire him because it was against the BSA policy to have gay leaders. So he called me and he asked me if I would come home early from Brazil so that I could take the job because he had just fired someone for being gay, and I had just had my first gay experiences. I said yes, and I came home and went as far into the closet as I could. I talked to my church leaders in Logan, where I was going to school, and they referred me to a psychologist who does conversion or reparative therapy or whatever. I never went. He's like, "You can go,” and I was like, "I won't go." So I didn't. That's when I started leaving the church little by little. I would drive home on the weekends and tell my roommates that I was going to church down here. Then I would drive back to Logan on Sunday and tell my parents I was going to church up there. But I was trying sincerely to repent as much as I could, and I confessed to my bishop and everything, and then I went through a year-long process of repentance. I was doing pretty good. It's humiliating in its way too, because you have to go to church but you can't take the sacrament when they give you bread and water, and you can’t have callings and things. So everybody 7 knows that something's wrong with you, but they don't know what it is. It's a lot of shame, but I went through it all because I really wanted to give it one more try. At the same time, I also dated a few girls who I really liked. What pushed me to finally come out was a couple things. First, I had done the entire year of repentance, and I went in and the bishop was like, "Okay, your full church membership rights are restored,” and I remember not caring. Like, I went through all of that, and I am not excited about that. I don't want to be in the church. I also had been studying Latin American studies at Utah State and realized that the Book of Mormon has no real historical basis at all. It's a joke about how inaccurate the Book of Mormon description of early America is. The final thing was I was dating a girl who was so wonderful and beautiful, and we got along so well. We had so much in common, and I was not in love with her. I loved her, but I wasn't in love with her. When she said, “I love you,” I would say “I love you too.” But I knew I didn't mean the same thing as her, and so I knew I couldn't take it. I had thought for a long time, like, “I'll just fake it and force myself to be straight my whole life.” But I knew I couldn't. So I broke up with her, I didn't tell her why, and I moved to California. I didn't think that I could be gay in Utah. I didn't know there were other gay people in Utah. I knew there were some gay people in California, so I went to California and I lived with my friend and his husband and I worked in a gay bar. That was how I was going to come out, and it was a great experience. I remember going to the gay bar, and I didn't drink; I was still too Mormon. I wasn't 8 looking to meet up with guys or anything. I just remember going to the gay bar and just feeling so relaxed, a relaxation that I hadn't felt since I was a little kid and I would be effeminate and I didn't care, and then I went through those years of repressing it. I remember going to the gay bar and like, I could do this with my hand [limp wrists], and I didn't have to worry about doing that with my hand. People who met me would automatically assume I was gay because I was in a gay bar, and I remember thinking like, “I have been trying to not let people know I was gay forever, and now they just do know I'm gay, and it's okay.” So I would just go there and feel like I could be myself, and it was wonderful. I had one semester left of school. I was going to come back and finish the semester of school and then come out to my family and then move back to California. That was my plan. But I came back and I was like, “Okay, I can't live here for six more months if I don't have any gay friends.” So I looked up on Facebook if I had any gay friends, and there was one boy I kind of knew in high school. If I would have seen him on the street, I would have been like, "Hey, didn't we go to high school together?" but I don't know if I would have remembered his name. We were friends on Facebook and it said he was gay, so I messaged him and I said, "Hey, I'm trying to come out. But I need gay friends." He said, "Okay, well, we can be friends,” and so we went out on a date. I didn't really even consider it a date. I just wanted a gay friend. We hung out on September 14th, I remember, and then he came to my birthday party on September 18th, which was four days later. Then I saw him every day until we 9 got married, pretty much. Well, we moved in together. Marriage wasn't legal at the time. We got married as soon as it was legal. SY: When was this, if you don't mind me asking? RH: That would have been ten years ago; I was 29. So it was 2012 when we met. SY: So three years before marriage equality was passed. RH: Yeah, yeah. I proposed to him the first time marriage was legal in Utah. It was legal for a few months, and then it was illegal again. That's when I was going to propose to him. I bought a ring and everything, but then it became illegal again, so I was kind of waiting to see what happened. Then I proposed to him and we were just going to go to California to get married, anywhere that it was legal, but they legalized it just a few months before that, so we got married here. SY: That's really awesome. So you move in together, you get married later. RH: Yeah. I kind of used Matt, my husband, as a coming out prop. I would just take him places with me and introduce him as my boyfriend, and that's how people found out. I dated him for about a month before I told my parents, so I dated him in secret. I was still pretending to be Mormon. I remember I would wear my garments and then I would take them off and go on dates with him and then come home. This might be a little bit weird, but I started wearing his underwear after our third date, ‘cause I didn't have any underwear, so I just asked him, "Hey, could I borrow some of your underwear [laughs]?" SY: So while you were dating Matt the first time, you were living with your parents? RH: Yeah. And he was living with his parents, too, so it was weird. SY: Did he also grow up in the church and stuff? 10 RH: He also grew up in the church, but he never believed in the church. He left the church; by the time he was 14, he was gone. He came out when he was 17, which was pretty impressive. I used to get made fun of for being gay all the time in high school because I was so flamboyant, but I was in the closet. Matt was on the football team, very straight-passing, but he came out when he was 17. I don't know, he's very strong willed. He always does the things he wants and so it was great. He went to the prom with a guy, which back then, like when I was a junior in high school, there was a girl who was suspended from Weber High for kissing her girlfriend on campus. The same year when I was a junior in high school, the Utah State Legislature passed a law saying you couldn't have any gay clubs in schools, which is insane. The law got overturned, I think, but they passed it. It was amazing that he came out when he did. Anyway, I looked up the date before- it was in October. It was the day that the Brigham City Temple was dedicated. My whole family was going to go to the dedication, and I knew I couldn't go because I didn't have a temple recommend anymore. It expired, and so I knew I wasn't going to be able to go. I knew that was going to be the day that I had to tell my parents. I was living at my parents’ house because it was between living in California. So then I remember the morning came, and I knew I was going to do it. I had already come out to my sister, she was one of the first people I came out to. I have a sister I'm really close to; in fact, the first time I went out with Matt, we went on a date together with my sister and her husband. She would let us come over to her house and hang out. 11 So I was laying on the couch. My mom said, "Hey, you got to get ready to go." I said, "I can't go because I don't have a temple recommend because I'm gay." She looked at me and then no one said anything for about 20 minutes. We just sat and watched the TV. Then she said, "Okay, I'm serious. You gotta get up and get ready." And I said, "I'm serious, I can't." Then she got up and went to the bathroom and cried. My dad, I think, knew it was coming or was expecting it or something. He just looked at me and he said, "Well, that's fine if you are, but if you're joking, that's a mean joke." And I said, "I'm not joking." He said, "Well, I think you should be monogamous. That's the best way to avoid disease." I was like, “Okay.” That was his concern, was that being gay would be a difficult life for me to live. He wasn't upset at me being gay, he was worried that being gay would be a hard life for me. So those were my three stages of coming out as gay. Coming out as a drag queen happened later, but I was less nervous to do that. SY: So when did you start doing drag? Were you doing it in California at the gay bar? RH: No, I didn't do it. Like I said, I didn't know I wanted to be a drag queen. I knew I loved drag, and I did go to so many drag shows when I was in California. So there was a drag show in Salt Lake that was just starting up. It ended up being 12 an almost weekly show, and I went to it and I saw it and I loved it, so I asked if I could get hired as a stagehand or a stage crew. The director of the show said, "We don't have a budget to hire people to work on the show, but we are looking for other drag queens, if you want to do drag." I said, "Okay, I'll think about it." I called my sister, who I'm really close with, who’s always really supportive. I said, "Yeah, he asked if I wanted to do drag, but I don't know if I really want to." She said, "I think you want to." And I said, "Oh my gosh, you're right. I do. I want to very much do it." So then I started on that show and I did that one for a while. Then I met other drag queens. I got a little bit disillusioned. I thought that when I met the other drag queens and other queer people in general, we would all just be best friends and help and support each other. But that's not the case. Queer people can be really mean to each other, and drag queens can be mean to each other, so it took me a while to find my drag friends. But now I'm in a lot of regular drag shows. I perform at least two or three times a month and it's really fun, I really like it. SY: When did you start? Do you remember the year? RH: It was 2016. I remember it was the year when Trump got elected because I taught high school at the time. I don't teach high school right now, but I taught high school, and I was worried about doing drag because part of being a drag queen is that you have to advertise yourself. You have to have a presence, and 13 so I was like, “Well, my students will find me and find out I do drag. I don't know if I can do that.” But when Trump got elected, I remember thinking like, “Oh, okay, I guess nothing matters. I guess you can do whatever and still be the president of the United States. So I can be a drag queen and be a high school teacher. I'm going to do that.” So that was 2016. SY: Do you have any questions, Ky? KJ: Yeah. You mentioned you were a high school teacher. As someone who's graduated high school fairly recently, I had a lot of high school teachers who were really influential to me, especially as a queer teen. Were you able to be kind of a queer advocate without outing yourself as a teacher, or were you out at all? RH: Well, I had two different experiences; I taught in two different high schools. I did my student teaching at Morgan High School, which is a very small rural town. I remember asking my mentor teacher, like, "I'm gay, should I let the students know that?" She said, "It's okay if you do, but I think they'll make fun of you." I was like, “Okay.” So I didn't plan to come out to my students during student teaching, but one day a girl said to me, "Hey, I really like your shirt." I said, "Thanks, it's my boyfriend’s." I just said it very casually. The next day, parents were taking their kids out of my classes. Four kids at least got taken out of my class. One parent even wrote me an email which had the weirdest phrasing. She said, "We're taking our daughter out of your class. We want you to 14 know that it has nothing to do with your lifestyle choices. We just think that she needs a more experienced teacher." I was like, “Oh, well, great that's a lie.” After that, I was under a lot of scrutiny from the parents. I got in trouble for a lot of things that I said or did in class that I don't think I would have gotten in trouble for at all if I hadn't been gay. They were out to get me. I read a satirical essay called “A Modest Proposal”, which I read in high school and is in the English textbook that they used at that school. We read half of it one day and we were going to finish it the next day, and I showed up to school and they didn't even let me go to the classroom. I had to go to the principal's office. He's like, "Parents are so mad. I can't believe you read this thing. It's about eating children." We also read a poem called “I Am From”, and then I had the students write one of their own. The person says, ‘I am from…’ and then talks about things that happened in their past. One of the lines is like, “I am from my first kiss under the apple tree.” And the parents were like, "He's reading sexually explicit stuff." I was like, "They kissed" and they're like, "Yeah, well, kissing leads to sex." So I got in trouble over and over again at the school, but not until I was out. It made me so mad. Then I started learning more about queer culture and I started learning things like- Oscar Wilde was my favorite writer growing up, and not only was he gay, but he died because he was gay. They sent him to two years of hard labor, and then he died after that. I remember thinking, like, “I can't believe that they kept this a secret from me. I can't believe that no one when I 15 was in high school ever mentioned being gay or that there were gay people in the world. Because that is what made me feel so alone and made it so it took me years to come out when I could have come out in high school. I feel like they robbed me of my childhood. Sometimes I'm so mad about it.” So when I started teaching at my next school, I was like, “I'm just going to be so gay. I'm going to be the gayest teacher in this whole freaking school so that every gay kid who comes to the school knows that they're not alone and they know that you can grow up, and being gay doesn't mean you can't have a normal life. It doesn't mean you have to move away from your family and go live somewhere else.” So I had rainbows in my classroom. I tried on the very first days to just say something like, "Yeah, my boyfriend," to let them know that I was gay. I mean, I taught English and creative writing, which tends to be a place where gay kids end up, I guess, because they can work through their emotions. There had been a GSA at that high school, but there wasn't one when I started working there. So I started the GSA and to varying degrees of success; some years it was good, some years it kind of petered out. It just depended on the students and what kind of effort they wanted to put into it. It was so different than my high school experience because I wasn't even the only out teacher. There were so many queer kids. When I was in high school, there were other queer kids. In fact, I was friends with a lot of them. A lot of my friends have since came out as queer in some way, but we didn't come out to each other when we were in high school. We found each other because we sensed something about each other we had in common. But we didn't come out. No one came out except 16 Matt, my husband, because he's so brave. But no one came out and no one talked about being gay and gay meant bad. Now, in the high school, there were so many queer kids. Even if you had asked, I wouldn't have even known what a trans person was when I was in high school. If you would have said, “What is a trans person?” I'd be like, “Oh, like a drag queen. I know drag queens from this movie I saw.” But I have trans students, I had non-binary students, I had lots of gay students. There's a weird phenomenon in high schools now where there's cool gay kids. I remember thinking it was weird because, first of all, they were super cool, especially the gay boys. All the girls want to be their best friend because all the girls want a gay best friend. They dress really snazzy and then they're mean to everybody, and that bothered me so much. I'd be like, "You guys should join GSA.” They're like, "No, GSA’s for the weirdos." It made me so mad not that long ago, you don’t know how hard it was and how hard it is still for those kids. You are socially accepted now, so you are just like, done. You don't want to help the rest of us who are still ostracized. That phenomenon made me mad. It's kind of the opposite of my high school, but there's still good and bad about it. But a lot of us were really good. The GSA was very supportive to each other, and these kids, like, I'm so glad that they know things. I had a girl give a presentation on all the different types of flags. I was just blown away because I learned a lot. When I was a kid, I thought that there were gay people, there were lesbians, and there were drag queens, and that was the 17 only way of being queer. She just knew all these different things, and so it was so cool. KJ: That's awesome. You said that you aren't teaching currently. Is that just because it's summer, or did you leave teaching? RH: There's some weird experiences. It's not related to me being gay or anything, but my husband and I were planning to have kids and we were very on the cusp. So I quit my job, and I was going to stay home, and at the same time COVID hit. My dad, who is also a high school history teacher, didn't want to go to school because he was very high risk for COVID and for COVID going bad, so he needed a long-term substitute. Our plan for having kids also was falling through at the time, so I took the job teaching for that year. But substitute teachers don't make any money, so I started working part-time at a dance studio I also took classes at. This goes back to the beginning when I wanted to be a dancer. It's called Kairos, and they do acrobatics and they do dance. So I started working part time there, teaching a few classes, and then also they have an apparel company. It's the same person that owns the studio and the company, so I started working for her and then slowly that just started taking over. Then my dad got vaccinated and he wanted to go back to school, and so my thought was, “Okay, well, I guess I'll also go back to teaching high school,” but I was just really liking my job at the studio and so I just kept doing that. I don't make much money, but my husband does. He was like, "Well, why don't you? If you like it, just keep doing it until you don't like it anymore." KJ: [Laughs] Do they have boys’ dance classes there? 18 RH: They do, they do. There's not a lot of guys that go there. It is mostly women, but it's queer-owned. The owners are queer and it's a very inviting space. I remember at the beginning of class, we always ask names and pronouns, and people are sometimes blown away by it. Sometimes they're like, "It was so great to have someone ask me for the first time." I teach a pole dance class in heels, so we wear nine-inch heels and we dance on the pole. We always try to be very sassy and all of that feminine energy that I have. This is just a little story. There is a trans boy who comes and he's very young; in fact, I think he goes to Weber State. He did ballet his whole life, and so he's a very good dancer. One day he was the only one in class, it was just me and him, and we were dancing in our heels and just, like, feeling all of our energy. I remember thinking, both of us spent so much of our life trying to reinforce our masculinity, and now we get to come here and just let go and just be however we want. All the gender confusion in that space was so great, I just loved it. KJ: That's fantastic. So does that kind of bring us up to like right now? Is there anything else kind of significant going on in your life that has to do with this? It's kind of a big question. RH: Even though the school I taught at was a pretty inclusive space, I do think I was under more scrutiny than other teachers. I see that very much now with the law in Florida and everything about not being able to talk about yourself to your students. I said I was like the gayest teacher, but I was as open about my sexuality as the other straight teachers were. I talked about my husband a lot; so 19 do the other straight teachers. I talk about celebrities that I think are cute; so do the other teachers. But I do think I was under more scrutiny. I had a formal reprimand one time. SY: At the second-high school? RH: Yeah, this is the second high school. I taught the concurrent enrollment English classes, which are actually through Weber, and one of the things that they did in the class was a presentation on some sort of issue. They had to have a position on it, and then they had to give their presentation and argue their side of it. One girl did her presentation on transgender bathrooms in schools, which was a big issue at the time, because there was a lawsuit in Idaho about a trans girl who the school wouldn't let her use the girls’ bathroom and so she was suing. The girl did her presentation on it, and one of the things that she did, which comes up in the debate sometimes, is that she just showed pictures of very passing trans people. A couple of the pictures were of trans men with their shirts off, and they're all big and muscular because that's the argument she was making, like, “Why would you have this person go into the women's bathroom when he clearly looks like a man? That doesn't make any sense.” From a transphobic point of view, I showed pictures of women with their shirts off because the trans men had their shirts off. They looked very passing as cis men, but that’s what the parents said, was that I had showed pictures of topless women in my class. So I got in trouble for that and I was upset about it. So then I had had my students read this other science fiction story, and I'd had to read it for a couple of years. It's actually part of a collection of short 20 stories, and in one of the short stories, there's an alien planet where the men can get pregnant. There's a boy, like 17 or 18, and he gets pregnant in the story. We had already read that story before, and other teachers had read it, but then they called me in and they said, "Look, we told you you couldn't talk about this transgender stuff, and now you have this." I'm like, "This story's not about transgenderism." But I got put on administrative leave anyway. I had to talk to the union representative, I almost lost my job, but they let me stay on. I had to get this formal reprimand and I had to sign stuff. That was just another thing I thought to share: even at that school where I was allowed to be out and I was allowed to have a GSA, there was still a line. I think that people still are trying to argue about where that line is. SY: You said you and your husband were thinking about having kids. Would you go into that process of what you were trying to do? You don't have to if you're uncomfortable. RH: Yeah, we were. It is kind of personal, but I've always wanted to have a lot of kids. That was another reason that I stayed in the closet and tried to date women for so long. Actually, one of the reasons I finally came out was my friend who I lived with, him and his husband lived together. I just remember being like, “I just really want to have kids someday.” He said, "Well, you can be gay and still have kids.” I have always wanted to have kids. I taught high school; I really like kids. So we went through the training to be foster parents. I was unsure about being a foster parent. We had talked about using surrogacy, we had talked about trying 21 to adopt babies, but we thought we would go through the foster care thing. My husband wanted to be a foster parent; he didn't want to go through the trouble of surrogacy or any of that. But the training had an opposite effect on us. The training made me really like, "Oh yeah, foster kids. That's what we want to do," because we learned about a lot of the trauma that they go through and about how hard life is for them and about how much they need someone, and about how a lot of kids in the foster care system are queer in some way. That's lots of times part of their trauma. It made me really want to, but it really scared my husband, so when we finished the training, we just decided to wait a little bit longer until he was ready. That's kind of where I'm at. SY: Thank you, I didn't mean to be invasive. RH: Oh, no, no. SY: Me and my boyfriend are also looking at children in the future, and I never knew anything. RH: Yeah, it's a tough thing. Every couple, I guess, has to work out when and how many kids they want to have, which is interesting. We're just still working on it SY: Yeah. How do you think it's different growing up LGBTQ? You've talked about this kind of through your teaching experience and seeing the newer queer generation of kids in high school. But how do you think it's changed from when you were in high school to now? RH: Oh, it's so different. Like I said, when I was a kid, the word ‘gay’ just meant ‘bad’. Literally all the time, people were just saying being gay is bad. It was every day. And the grownups were very secretive about it. Their idea was just like, we never 22 talk about it when we talk about history. Achilles and Patroclus were just best friends. Oscar Wilde had a tragic life story. They would never talk about it. Then in church, it was just a taboo topic. We didn't have a lot of direct instruction, like outright ‘being gay is bad.’ It was very quiet, and often talked about as like a mental illness. They called it SSA, same-sex attraction. “I suffer from SSA,” that's something that you could hear people talk about. They did have a very small pamphlet. I think it was titled something ironic and stupid, like ‘God Loves All His Children’ or something. Then it was just about how being gay was the same as adultery, and adultery is the sin next to murder, so if you're gay, you're basically a murderer and you're sick and there is help. From what I understand- I haven't been involved in the church for a long time, about ten years- now they don't teach that it can be cured anymore. It was very much ‘you can cure yourself’ when I was young. ‘You can be cured.’ I don't think that they teach that anymore. It was very expected that one of the things you can do to cure yourself is marry a girl, and your love for her will just cure you. I do have a few friends from my same generation who are gay and who are married to women and are open about that. They just say, "Well, I am gay, but my marriage and my faith are more important than my sexuality." I don't know, sometimes they seem to be happy. But I know of a lot of queer people who are divorced after a lot of heartache, too. So, I don't know, that's a different thing. I don't think that the church encourages people to be cured or to get married, which is sad because I think that the prescription now is just that you have to live your life alone and celibate. 23 SY: I think that's pretty much along the lines of what I got taught here. Have you seen Northern Utah evolve in the relationship, beyond just the high school situation, with LGBTQ people? RH: Yeah, I think visibility is a big one. Like I said, I didn't know there were any other gay people in Utah, and now they're everywhere. Pride is huge. I think the gay community in Northern Utah tends to be really intense because the Pride Festival in Salt Lake is huge. It's one of the biggest ones in the whole country because it's the only one in Utah. I mean, we did have a Davis Pride this year, though. I performed drag at it and my mom came and saw me. It was the first time my mom’s saw me in drag. Sorry, I forgot what the question was. SY: The evolution of the relationship with Northern Utah. RH: Yeah. Since I was young, gay people are now very visible, vocal, and so people don't feel alone. I think that people are still encouraged to feel guilty about it or to be embarrassed about it, but it's not a secret anymore. Kids know that there are trans people; kids know there are gay people. So, yeah, that’s a step forward. It tends to be isolated though. Like I said, Morgan is not very far from here, and at Morgan, they're still taking kids out of the classes if they have a gay teacher. Salt Lake, the schools are not that way. So the affirming queer community in Utah is small and concentrated, but then there are a lot of places outside of the cities that are still really homophobic. SY: We've noticed a big difference. A lot of people are from Layton, but they leave Layton later in life, and they're like, “Even in Ogden, there is so much more.” 24 RH: I mean it's still small, Ogden’s not huge. I just got back from Atlanta and I remember looking up gay bars or gay places in Atlanta, and there were dozens. Salt Lake still has three or four, and Ogden- I don't think Ogden has any like officially queer spaces. SY: There's queer-owned places, but there's not like a gay bar. RH: Yeah, there are some bars that do gay nights, and there are a couple drag shows that run into Ogden, but I don't think they have a specifically dedicated space, which is weird for a city the size of Ogden. SY: Yeah, it is very weird. [To Ky] Do you have any questions before we wrap up? KJ: We have two final questions. One of those is, what would you say to your younger self? SY: [Laughing] It’s like Drag Race. RH: Oh yeah, I've been asked this question before. I have a lot of mixed feelings about my younger self. If I was to talk to my elementary school self, I would say, “You know what? Just be you. You're wonderful, don't let people get you down.” If I was to talk to my high school self, I would say, “Why are you so stupid?” ‘Cause at that age, like I said, I made this real effort to masculine myself, and I remember it led me to also be very homophobic towards other people. I didn't like other boys who were effeminate, and I remember being very mad at girls who were too masculine. My high school self was a mean person. He didn't think he was. He thought he was a loving, caring person, but he was actually very mean. So I just want to shake him and be like, “Snap out of it. Stop being a jerk, accept yourself, 25 and it will help you accept other people and be kind to yourself. I'll help you be kind to other people. You're going to date these girls, and you're going to put them through so much heartache for your own selfishness because you want the life that you want, and you are not caring about what they want. You're going to get the life that you want, and they're going to end up with a husband who's not in love with them. So don't put them through that. Don't.” So, yeah, I would talk very nicely to my young self, and I would speak more harshly to my teenage self. Tell him not to do that. SY: Is there anything you want to say to others going through a similar situation to what you did, growing up in Northern Utah? RH: You're not alone. [Emphatically] You are not alone. That is a big thing. I remember the first time I went to a drag audition, I thought I was going to blow everyone away by being like, “I used to be Mormon. I went on a mission.” I remember saying that to the DJ and he was like, "Oh yeah, I used to be Mormon too. Cooper used to be Mormon, he went on his mission." It blew my mind when I realized I wasn't alone and that my experience wasn't… I mean, it was unique and everyone's experiences are unique, but there's so many people who went through the same thing and who can relate to it. A project like this is really great because other people can see things and be like, “Oh yeah, that's how I feel. That's like me.” So, you're not alone. That would be what I’d say. SY: Is there anything else you want to share? RH: No, I think that that's pretty much it. 26 SY: Awesome. Are you willing to be re-interviewed 5 to 10 years in the future? RH: Sure. KJ: Great. Well, thank you for your time. That was really fantastic. RH: Of course. Thank you for working on this project. 27