Oral History Program Jamie Eason Interviewed by Ian Orme 28 July 2022 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Jamie Eason Interviewed by Ian Orme 28 July 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: Eason, Jamie, an oral history by Ian Orme, 28 July 2022, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. iii Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Jamie Eason conducted on July 28, 2022 by Ian Orme. Jamie shares his childhood and what it was like growing up gay in Utah. He talks about his love for the arts, being apart of various bands, and his work with Channel 17 in Ogden. Jamie also discusses his screenplay, Pain Within, its production and showing at the Sundance Film Festival in 2007. IO: It is July 28, 2022. We are here in the Stewart Library interviewing Jamie Eason. I am Ian Orme. My pronouns are he/him and I am a gay man. Could you introduce yourself as well? JE: My name is Jamie Eason and I'm 53. I'm also a gay man, he/him. IO: We are here with Faith, who is on the camera. Faith, please introduce yourself as well. FC: I'm Faith, and my pronouns are she/her/hers. IO: Perfect. We’d like to start out with a baseline question: when and where were you born? JE: I was born in Flagstaff, Arizona in 1968. It seems like forever ago. Valeen Etterlein is my mother and Richard Eason is my father. That makes me 53 years here on this planet. I was born into a family of nine other children, so it was a big family. Do you want me to keep going from that point? IO: Yeah. Feel free to keep going. JE: Okay. I'll just keep rolling with this. I was born into a family of nine children and loved it. I mean, it was mayhem, but I loved it. My parents ended up divorcing when I was five, so my mom kind of took over. There were six of us when they divorced. Then my mother remarried, had another child. My dad remarried, had three more children. Big family, we all kind of grew up together, so it was like we were just brother and sister. But it was crazy, and it was a lot of fun. 1 IO: I want to talk a little bit more about the family dynamic growing up. You had a lot of siblings and half-siblings. JE: Six sisters, three other brothers. IO: All right. You said your parents divorced when you were five? JE: Approximately five. Who remembers that far? IO: Anything more about your family dynamic growing up? Was it a very conservative household? Was it more relaxed? JE: I love that question because it really does fit into a lot of who I am. My father was very religious and LDS, and my mother, she was more relaxed. So we kind of had both. I learned how to just chill and be me and accept who I am. I also learned that at times, you have to put your foot down and really focus on that. I think that it really helped a lot with me progressing with certain things in my life. My dad, he remarried. He had three other kids, and he's still solid with that. My mom got remarried to her second husband. He was a real estate agent, so we would live all over the place in Ogden. We would buy a house that was broken down and fix it up and he'd sell it; we'd move to another house that's broken down. We lived in broken-down houses, learned how to fix things up. I think that a lot of times it puts a lot of character in the person, due to the fact that you're learning that something broken can be fixed, so you can move forward. I'm one who likes to think of the positives. It was crazy, it was fun. IO: When did you move to Utah? JE: I was about six months old. I honestly have always had some kind of connection with my birthplace. I wanted to always get to know people there and such, so I'm actually on their Pride Facebook as well, to talk to them and to keep in touch. Every once in a while, I go back to visit. I love it. I always tell people I was born on a mountain because that's where it was. 2 IO: Right. At what point growing up did you start to feel different? JE: Feel different? Like in the sense of being gay? IO: Yes, but also in general, if there was that sense. JE: Puberty? No, that’s different. I did have a sense of feeling apart or ‘alien,’ I guess you could say. I would joke around when I was growing up to other people that my parents found me on the corner or something, because I just don't fit in there. In all reality, I do, but it's fun. When I started realizing that I like guys was in junior high. I was actually jealous of my girlfriends. They would be getting boyfriends and I'm like, “What?” That's when I kind of realized it. I know that others have had a hard time with it, and I've never really been through that kind of experience with it. I've always accepted who I am, and if others didn't like it, put me back on that corner because I'll find my way from there. When it comes to me feeling different, that's kind of where I go with it. IO: Growing up, like, what were you taught about gender roles? JE: My dad, of course, being a strict Mormon, he would teach me. You just didn't see him crying. Men are not supposed to cry, and it would embarrass him if I did. He grew up in that kind of a household, too, where men don't hug. You just don't hug, and that's all, and it made him very uncomfortable when I started hugging him. I think he's gotten a little over that now. But that's about it. I have always enjoyed going fishing and that’s what we keep in common regardless. Again, I am who I am. I am attracted to men, that's me. If you don't like it, you don't need to look at it. You don't need to see it. But I am here and I'm still going to move forward. No matter what, I'm going to find people who are like me, who will relate. Honestly, I've never had an issue with being who I am. It's funny. I think that you just need to accept it yourself, and once you accept it yourself, you'll start finding people around you who you relate to. Of course, you want to relate to your 3 parents. I understand that, and I understand that I am different when it comes to that. I am very different because I will relate to them, whether they like it or not. It's not up to them what I do, it's up to me. It's up to me and how I feel about me and how I feel about them, you know? If they don't accept what I do, I still love them. I still want them to be around. I still tell them things that they might not want to hear, but I'll remind them, “You're my parents, you're gonna hear it.” So I've never had an issue with that much. God bless those who do. I mean that. I wouldn't even call it an issue. I would just call it ‘fear,’ maybe, something about not being accepted. No one should feel that way ever, so take this mentality. Use it. IO: Following along that line, what were you taught specifically about sexuality growing up? JE: My dad was never comfortable talking about it. I learned most of it from my brothers and sisters. I was a middle child, so I would hear it from both ends. Of course, we went through our junior high sex ed and such. I never really paid much attention to it. I figured when I find someone to be with, then let things happen. IO: That's nice. When you first filled out the form to sign up, you mentioned a childhood injury, I believe. JE: Yep. I was about six or seven years old. I laugh about it now. I was a kid and enjoying myself. I was out with a couple other siblings, and we went to the big Ogden Library down there. We were up on the top floor. I was just running around with my siblings there, and one of my siblings jumped on the banister and slid down. Well, I want to do that! So I went to jump on the banister, and instead of jumping on the banister, I accidentally went over the banister, and hit the back of my skull on the banister below. It knocked me for a loop, cracked my skull, and I hit several other things from what my mother has told me. Ended up in the hospital. I 4 was there for probably a couple of months, at the most, and I had to learn how to walk and talk and eat and such all over again. Basically, I had to just go from that point to start growing again. It has affected me throughout my life. I remember going to so many doctor's appointments for my ears and such because it really affected my equilibrium. I have balance issues to this day. I have to watch myself. Matter of fact, I busted my head the other day. [Points at head] You probably see that little shave there? I had to shave it so I could put a Band-Aid on it. But yeah, I have balance issues. It's affected me too. I have grown up with brain fog, where it doesn't happen all the time. Some days, I wake up and I'll just be in a brain fog like the whole day. When I was younger, I didn't understand a lot of what I was going through. This is where it was really difficult for me because it's affected my learning skills and such. I have a really hard time reading something and actually moving forward with that. I have to read it several times, probably two or three times more than most people before I actually start to realize what I'm actually reading, and it actually registers. “Okay, this is what that word means.” It's affecting me that way, learning skills. I didn't know what was going on when I was a child. Again, my mentality was just, this is this is me. I remember my dad and my stepmother taking me to the child psychologists and such, because they're not understanding why I'm having such a hard time in school. Again, I recall being there and thinking to myself, “I don't understand these questions that you're asking me. Why are you asking these questions, and where are we going with this? What is going on?” Because my parents didn't really open up to me about why they were taking me, about what was going on, until later in life. There was just something wrong with my learning abilities at the time, and it was all affected by that fall, and they didn't understand it. It didn't register to them because the doctor's appointments had been long-gone, and so on 5 and so forth. I was doing fine, I was living, I was being raised. At that point they were just wondering what was going on in my head. I pretty much had to learn to deal with my anxieties and my panic attacks and my brain fog and everything that has been affected. My balance. Thank God I have the mentality I do, because I just would look at it and say, “Okay, this is something that I have. This is me. I am going to love who I am, regardless of what people do, or how they look at me, or how they react to me. I'm going to learn how to live with it.” I’ve never had to take any kind of medications. They've never pushed any kind of medication on me, which is nice. To this day, I have watched a few of my siblings deal with medications and the effects of what medications can do nowadays. I'm grateful that I didn't because a lot of them could have hurt me in many ways. To this day, I still don't really believe in taking any kind of medications for any kind of my anxieties or anything like that. I know what I'm going through now because I've figured it out myself and I've learned how to live with it. I know that tomorrow will be a new day, and it's going to be better. It's going to be fine. I know in the future, I'm going to go through more days like this. This is just my stride. I probably didn't mention it, but another effect that I have is my mind gets exhausted easily, probably easier than most. A lot of this stuff I figured out by talking with people and such. “Yeah, this is what happened. This is what my effects could be.” I don't use substances or anything like that, other than coffee. Oh, give me coffee. I've learned that it’s the effect from the fall, that I become mentally exhausted easily. A lot of times, I'll be doing a project, and I'll be doing fantastic on the day that we start. Then the next day, I just hit the ground. You have to recoup from that one day. But anyways, that's where it's all been with my fall. 6 IO: I'd like to know, did actually going to the psychologists help at all? Because that kind of medicine has changed a lot. JE: When I was younger, no, I wouldn't say that they did. I think that it was more for my parents to try to understand, because they were at that point in their life. I was at the point where I was like, “Who cares? Let's go to the zoo. That's what I want. I want to go to Lagoon.” But then at their age, they're like, “What's going on with my kid? What's going on with him?” At the time, I just figured that I'm talking to someone, and I didn't think anything of it. So I would say no, it really didn't affect me because I didn't see any changes. I was still who I was. IO: Faith, do you have any questions so far? FC: No. IO: All right, let's keep going. What was your first exposure to queerness? Was it an internal thing, once you realized it about yourself, or was it anywhere external? JE: My first experience to queerness, or being gay? IO: Just exposure or knowledge of it. JE: When I was in junior high. When I realized I'm actually jealous of my friends who are girls who have boyfriends because I wanted boys. I was always falling or having a crush on some guy. It's like, “I want to be hanging with you,” but that was, I think, my first realization. FC: Did you have any outside examples, or role models, or maybe representation? JE: Of people who are gay? No, no, I really didn't. I loved my sister. One of my sisters was gay. Well, I would have to say bi because she liked men too. But when I was a little bit older, I would say in my twenties, I would hang out with her and go and do things with her and her friends. A lot of them were gay and bi. I wouldn't say that that influenced anything because I already had a realization that I wasn't attracted to women, I was attracted to guys. So that's where I was at the time. 7 FC: Has representation changed? Do you see more examples of yourself in the media and around you? JE: Oh, absolutely. Everybody is more accepting of it than when I was growing up. People are actually coming out of the closet more than they used to, or I'm just more focused on it right now, because those are the kind of people that I relate to more. It's just people trying to say, “Hey, look, this is who I am. I want you to understand who I am, and that I bleed red, too. Not everything is the way that you feel that it has to be.” IO: We've talked about growing up, through junior high. Was there anything notable that happened to you in high school? Family dynamic or even your own identity? JE: No, honestly. I just went through school wondering how I'm going to do in this class and what's going to happen there. I don't know if it really plays into it. I was in a lot. I was in some singing groups when I was in high school. I had specific things that I was interested in, and that's hard for me. It's something that I'm really interested in, especially when it comes to schooling and such. I always had a hard time with schooling, and my dad wanted me to play football from the day I was born. Oh that poor man. There's just no way. He tried. Even at that time, I was kind of amazed because he said, “No, you're going to get out there and you're going to play.” I was like, “Oh, okay. Well, he's my dad. You know I'll go.” So I went out on the field and I started training with them. I was like, “What am I doing here? This is not me. I don't want to do this.” Even though I'm big-statured and such, I went to my principal and I said, “What I want to do is I want to get into the pool. I want to swim.” He just looked at me, and he said “No.” That was it. He's like, “Bye.” I'm like, “Yeah, why? You're kidding me.” You're telling some kid, “No, you just can't.” 8 There are some of those out there who are not supportive. They didn't know that I knew that I was gay. I don't even think that they knew that I was gay because I didn't really go out and show people until later on in my life, or really express it. I didn't feel like I needed to. It was none of their business who I slept with, or who I knew, who I married or had kids with. It's my life, again, Put me back on the corner, I'll go from that point. There's always going to be someone who's going to push you to do what they feel you should be doing. To this day, I have people doing that. Just gotta say, “I love you. Enjoy your life.” IO: Through high school, did you feel like you could date men? JE: To be honest with you, I had some interest in it, but I ended up just finding I didn't exactly know what to do or how to go about it at that point. I would just make friends, but the majority of my friends weren't gay, or if they were, they didn't tell me. I didn't focus on trying to find a boyfriend. I focused on just living that day, and what's going to happen today. I did have a lot of fears when I was growing up, and it had nothing to do with being gay. It just had to do with, “Am I going to be able to get through this day? What am I going to screw up today?” I think those were my worst anxieties. My selfesteem was very low when I was growing up. I don't even know if it would be selfesteem, just my confidence level wasn't there. Maybe it was just the pressure that I was feeling from people around me, you know, teachers, parents, so on and so forth. I felt like I just wasn't able to get anything done or do anything right. So when I would mess up something because I'm human, it would be that much more because you're thinking, “What, am I screwing up today?” I am a positive person, but I do have my insecurities. IO: I was wondering, you present yourself very confident today as well. JE: That's years of practice. 9 IO: Did something change specifically? Is there a moment? JE: Yeah, just being accepting and telling myself that the negativity is not right. If I'm thinking negatively, then that's something that is not supposed to be there. That's just cut and dry. I have my difficult times too, you know. Sometimes growing up, even though I was very accepting, I don't know if I really had that mentality of, “I accept who I am.” I'm growing up, I'm learning who I am. But I did have a lot of insecurities. Growing up, I remember going to several acting auditions where I would just mess up my whole read. I was just devastated. Oh my gosh. Just years of learning and accepting and stop accepting any kind of negative around me. If there are negative thoughts, there is always a way to push that out and put something in there that's positive. IO: I think that transitions really well into your art career and other work that you've done as well. JE: Yeah. I live in Ogden, Utah, so I don't make a lot of money with my art. Right now I work for Citibank, and it's a home office. I love it. It's a great place, with good people. It pays my bills. I'm on top of what I love to do outside of it, which is my art. I've been into many genres of different arts. Let’s see if I can remember these dates. Excuse me. It was ' 91 that I met up with some people who had a band together. I've always loved to sing. and I've always done some writing and such. So I would write lyrics for the band, and I would sing as their front man. It was great. That was probably my first real experience with any kind of artistic work, really working together with someone. I loved it. We were such screw-ups and we had so much fun. IO: What was the name of the band? 10 JE: Raincrows. It was our bassist's last name. He was Randy Raincrow. Since passed away. He’s a great guy. It was just a blast. We were putting songs together. I think there are two things that I like to say about our band that I tell everyone, because I'm so proud of that. Number one, I believe that we were the first band in Utah, if not everywhere, to do Pink Floyd covers. That's my favorite band as well. The second thing that I love to tell people is that every place that we played, we closed it down, (LOL!). We weren't that great, but we had a lot of fun. We did write some originals. I always wanted to do originals no matter what kind, no matter who I sing with, so on and so forth. I would always go, “Let's push to write some songs ourself and move forward with that.” The art in my life has always been my life. I have never had a real focus on any kind of career. I don’t know any true artist out there that actually has a career or believes they have a career, unless it's in the arts somehow, and then that is a career to them. Even though my mentality is, “Everything that you see, everybody's an artist in one way or another. Our art is all around us.” After that, I kind of moved into theater. Did the majority of my theater acting at the Terrace Plaza Playhouse in Washington Terrace. I did a lot of theater there and strung off from that. I ended up getting into another singing group, which was called The Wild Angels, with a family of people. We played around a lot of the city fairs. Most of what we did were covers. I believe after that kind of started, I really burned myself out with theater. After burning myself out there I was like, “I got to move on. I've got to try some other things,” because I was in four productions at once, and that's very time-consuming. Plus, I was in and out of jobs trying to pay rent and do my art at the same time. So I moved from that point, and then I was kind of lost for a little while. I didn't really know what I was going to do or where I was going to go. Then I saw this ad in the 11 paper. It was about this new station that was coming up and it was Ogden's Channel 17. [To interviewers] I don't know if you guys have ever heard of that. No? All right. I believe that this was back in 2003 when I hooked up with Dave Jones. He was the general manager of Channel 17 at the time, and it was just up-and-coming. They were just getting it rolling. We would meet at a little building down by the dog food factory there, and we would try to put some productions together to have on this tv channel. One day I was there helping him out and he got this call from the Ogden City mayor. The mayor said, “I want someone on 25th Street tomorrow interviewing all of the restaurants. I want that show to be on Channel 17 within the next couple of weeks.” I was there helping Dave and he told me what just happened, and I said, “Well, I can get in front of the camera. You know that that doesn't bother me.” Next day, we were on the street and I was in front of the camera and interviewed all these places. It was called “Dining on Historic 25th Street.” Funny story about that is that we would get calls—and I don't know why it was never fixed, but it was one of the only shows at the time, along with city events and such on Channel 17. They would show it like three or four times a day. It was like an hour long, and they did it for almost six months, and so my face really got out there. But when your face gets out there, it's your fault if something happens. People would call me and also stop me on the street and say, “Did you know that it actually says ‘Dinning’ on Historic 25th Street instead of ‘dining’?” (LOL!) I'm like, “Oh, you're kidding me.” But I would tell them and nothing would happen, so it was “Dinning on Historic 25th Street.” Yeah, that was fun. Dave came up with a show called “At the Movies with Dave and Jamie.” We started that show. Basically, what it was, is we would go in and review movies that 12 are coming out, kind of like Siskel and Ebert type of show. We would give our thoughts on the movie. That wasn't long lasting at all. After about two or three episodes, he decided that he was going to not general manage Channel 17 anymore and handed it off to someone who wanted to do it. I think he had family things that he had to get done. So I decided, “I'm going to take this concept, and I'm going to give it to some other people and see where we can go with it.” We took this concept, and we made it “At the Movies with Jamie and Spot.” Spot was actually my co-host, and no he wasn't a dog. People called him Spot because I met him while doing theater, and he would always run the spotlight. We did several episodes together and we kept it the same genre. We kept reviewing new movies, and our sponsor was Tinseltown down there at the Newgate mall. They would let us come in and watch movies before anybody would, so we can review it and have it on our show. We would also do spoofs. We would make fun of movies that were big hits. Star Wars and Psycho, we'd have those kind of spoofs. It was probably one of the funnest times in my life, doing that TV show. That was probably from 2003 to 2005. I remember while I was in the band, while I was doing these shows and such, every once in a while, I would sit down and I would be writing a screenplay. I was writing a screenplay in 2005, yet I finally got it to a point, and I sold it to a production company. I was trying to look them up the other day. I don't know if they're around anymore, but I know that I sold it. They produced it in Pennsylvania—I believe it was Philadelphia, somewhere out in that area. It aired at the Sundance Film Festival. They have different sections of Sundance, like the music part and such. It actually was accepted to be shown due to the music in it. Rawn Hutchinson was the one who owned the production company. He worked with me. First of all, it took 17 years from the time that I started writing it to 13 the time that it was actually produced. I did a lot of changes through the rewrites and so on and so forth. He was interested in the story. It ended up being a psychological thriller based around child abuse and how it affects people when they're older and how it gets carried along with them in their life. No resemblance. Honestly, when you're writing something, it's amazing the things that you've experienced, not personally, but even just seeing or hearing about things that you can incorporate. I think that's the reason why he had a hard time selling it himself, because of this genre, what it was based on. It doesn't really get graphic. It's just the fact that people don't want to touch on child abuse. That's kind of sad to me, that people don't want to talk about it more. He kind of worked with me a little bit on it just before he actually committed to buy it. He wanted to move forward with something of that effect, and he said, “Let's see what you can do with this. Give me something like this.” Or “You know what? We need a little bit of a stronger ending to it.” So I came up with something. He liked it enough that he said he wanted to buy it and move forward with it. I'm just happy that I actually did something with it after 17 years. [Slides DVD of the movie across the table. Movie is titled Pain Within.] It was an accomplishment, one of my best accomplishments in my life. It was my baby. I watched it grow. We actually got together. He invited me to a showing where all the actors came into the Warner Brothers studio in California. I got to meet all the actors. IO: When was it released? JE: 2007 is when we aired it at Sundance. IO: Yeah, that's amazing. JE: I enjoyed it. It was great. I always use my middle name. So it's Jaimie Edward Eason. 14 FC: Yeah, I saw it was Jamie Edward on the DVD. You can always show it to the camera, too. JE: Oh, yes. [Shows DVD to the camera] Push my movie. [To interviewers] So that's part of what I do. I've also written some screenplays that I haven't really gotten out there yet. Eventually I will, I believe. [Shows interviewers more DVDs and videos] IO: [Referencing a DVD] Can you talk about what this one is? JE: It's just a demo of my TV shows that I just explained to you. It’s for you guys to keep, if you want to, to take a look at ‘em. FC: Yes, we want to. JE: It was a lot of my film and TV that I did some commercials because I also moved into directing. I have produced, directed, written, and acted in a lot of different things. Any projects that actually come up and that I'm involved with, that kind of just depends on what they need and how we can best work as a team. IO: [Referring to the Pain Within DVD] Did you say that we could keep this copy or would you like to? JE: I have to keep this. IO: Okay. Is there a place we could watch that, though? JE: [Referring to demo DVD] I believe the trailer’s on this, that I'm going to let you if you ever want to watch this. There's no place to actually watch it unless you want to grab some popcorn, come on over. FC: We might take you up on that. JE: Anyways, I can get in touch with Rawn and I can ask him if there's any place that he's placed it that I don't know about. I can see about getting a copy too. FC: I'd love to at least take a photo or like a photocopy of the cover. JE: Absolutely, you bet. FC: Can we have that to go with the CD and the trailer? 15 JE: Yeah, absolutely. [Shows a piece of paper] That is a recommendation letter from the city on Channel 17, working with them, telling me how great I'm doing. Anyways, there you go. From that point, I've written other things. I moved to Eden. I lived in Eden for about ten years. I loved it. I fell in love with the place and the people. Some people couldn't understand why I'm so far away. A lot of times I can be either an introvert or an extrovert, but it depends on the situation. Depends on my mood, everything else. I fell in love with it. I had a nice little condo there that I was renting. At the time, I was working with the Mavericks up there, and I thought, “I need to get closer.” In winter, going back and forth, up and down the canyon was just horrid. I finally got a place up there, and I was there for about ten years. I was sad when I had to move, but I couldn't end up buying a place there if I wanted to because property tax was just too much. So I moved back to Ogden. I had a beautiful place up there overlooking the lake. While I was there, I also joined up with a couple of other people up there. We were doing some experimental music and writing and such. Seeing where we can kind of go with that. I have some of those as a CD of those songs as well, if you want to see that. FC: Absolutely. JE: Oh, okay. I don't have it with me, but I'll get it to you. Again, keep in mind, they're experimental. FC: It's still your art, though. IO: Did that group have a name that I could write down? JE: Not necessarily. I believe we had a couple of them. One that I can remember is Spirit Wave. We were going to work on that, but most of it was just at someone's house putting songs together, and it really didn't work. You know how you can work with people sometimes, and the elements that were around me just didn't work for 16 me. I just ended up stepping away from it. But in reality, it was a learning experience and I enjoyed it. We did do something. From that point I ended up moving back into North Ogden, buying a place there. This is where I'm at. Now I'm talking to you. I'm happy that I am. IO: So, working through your art career, has your sexuality and your art career ever interacted? Have they ever clashed? Or is there a way that you've expressed it through your work? JE: I have actually. The shirt on my back is a piece of my art. It is a pattern that I created. A lot of my art, as you can tell, is visual. You gotta see it. I've always loved photography. I've never been really great with electronics. I've been more along the lines of seeing the shots and saying, “This is what we need to get.” I try my best to get out there and take pictures of things that I have seen that are interesting to me. I think maybe it'll be interesting to others as well. A lot of my work right now is still art. I will send you the links to it so you can see it. I take a photo and I fuse graphic art with it. Graphic design colors, so on and so forth. Some of it, I just make a pattern like this. This actually was a tree stump that I took a photo of. Some of it, I will take and I'll create a story around it, with the photo and graphic art. You'll kind of see the difference between those. To me, a story always has to have some kind of human element in it, because that's what we can relate to. Things like this could tell a story if some people see it that way. But to me, it's just a pattern. Some of my art is just patterns, just things that I think, “Oh, that's really interesting,” and I hope other people enjoy it too. That's what I'm doing now. I do sell a lot of my patterns on shirts and pillows. I'm just online and that's it. That and Citibank. But yes, when it comes to my still art, I have fused my sexuality with it. 17 IO: So we have it directly in the transcript, do you have something that people can look up, like the name of your shop? JE: It is a Society6 shop. You can also see it at Jamie Edward Art on Facebook. I know that there's a direct line to it, but I don't have that. Again, I'll send you the links if you want me to. On Society6, it’s society6.com/smileyj163. IO: All right. Before we move on from art, do you have anything more you would like to say? JE: No, not in the art genre. IO: All right. So let's see. You mentioned that growing up, you had an LDS upbringing. I'm wondering if you'd like to talk about your faith journey, how it interacts with your sexuality, and any relationship you may or may not have with the church right now. JE: I still consider myself LDS. I believe in God, and I talk to Him all the time. He'll tell ya. But I personally believe that no matter what, no matter who you are, it's important to believe in something. There's more to this than just what you see in front of you. I think that has been a big part of my life, why I haven't gotten really in danger with myself, or even contemplated any kind of suicide, which is a huge problem with a lot of people. I believe that it has a huge impact on why I didn't go there, because I believe that tomorrow will be a better day. I believe that I can make it a better day. When it comes to going to church, accepting my dad as who he is a big part because I want him to accept me. Why wouldn't I want to accept him? You have to be accepting if you're going to be accepted. I've never understood the battles between people and religion and what they're going through. I don't know how they grew up. I don't know what their upbringing was. What was it like for them? All I can do is just talk for me, and not what I don't understand. I'm not a big churchgoer, I can't get through service or anything like that. It just drives me nuts. For some 18 reason, I think I have to keep active, and my mind goes from here to there. I go nuts. “Okay, it's been 10 minutes. Okay. Later. I got to go.” In general, I think it's been important for me to see both sides and understand it. Does that answer the question? IO: Yeah, it does. JE: Oh okay, great. I'm doing okay. IO: How would you say the prevalence of the LDS church in northern Utah has affected you, as a gay man? JE: It's not something that they want to hear, that they want to have a discussion about, as much as I've told them, “This is who I am.” I've had a bishop that I was really communicating a lot with and talked to a lot. Even though I didn't go to church, he still decided that he wanted to communicate with me. We talked, and he was helping me out a lot. I would explain to him that this is who I am. I'm a gay person. I went through a rough patch and actually worked at DI for a little while. They all knew that I was gay because I was very open with it. I explained to him, “This is just who I am,” but you don't find them wanting to actually go into a discussion about it. I figure they just don't want to, so we'll just leave it at that. But I was very open, and so it really hasn't affected me in any way. Again, I don't care who you want to be, who you are, that's great. I'm going to try to accept you as much as possible. As long as you're not out killing people, then you're probably going to be accepted within my mind. I don't think it really affected me much. IO: Have you ever lived outside of northern Utah? JE: I did. I lived in New Mexico for a little while. It was an odd job, but I lived there for a little while. I also lived in Washington for a few months. I wanted to live there. I have siblings who move there and they've created a life there in Washington. So I moved 19 there and I tried to establish a life myself. One of my siblings took me in. When I moved there, I found out that there are a lot more people than jobs. I wasn't in a very good situation. I was running out of money faster than I was being able to make any kind of ends meet. I've always told myself, “If I am calling my parents to help me, that means something's got to change in my life.” So a few months in, I figured, “This is not going to work. It's taken too long for me to get any kind of work out here. I can Move back to Utah and have a job within a week.” So I did. I moved back to town, had a job in a week. Where else? I lived in California for a little while. I tried it because people kept saying, “With your kind of work, you need to be in California.” New York’s actually far away. Have you guys ever been? It's a great place. IO: I was there for like a week. JE: Even if it's just a visit, it's awesome. But I moved to California and I thought I'd give it a shot. It was difficult. Again, it was just not my bag. I just couldn't really get in and relate to the people there. FC: Were the cultures and dynamics different than Utah? JE: Yeah. It was pretty different. I just couldn't really relate to any of it. So I came back again and I figured if something's going to happen, it's going to happen from here. We have enough ways to communicate that you don't have to be in a specific place. IO: Do you have examples of how northern Utah and Ogden are different from those other places? JE: This is something that I didn't really focus on. Like you said, the dynamics, the feel, the culture, and the art is different. That's what I love about Ogden, though. I love Ogden. I really do. It's not just the scenery and such here, but I love Ogden because of what people bring to it. Like you guys, doing something like this because this is just amazing. I just love it. You know I gotta be involved, 20 somewhere, somehow. That's what I love about it. It just seems a little more tight community. Even though you get people here and there, you're going to get it everywhere. To me, there's more overpowering community acceptance and helping one another than there is anything negative. That's the reason I hesitate to really move. People have asked me, “Do you need to move? You need to go there.” A friend of mine just moved to Oregon on the coast. Beautiful little place. He has this little rundown apartment, but it's right on the coast. One block away, he’s on the beach. It's a beautiful little place called Rockaway. It's gorgeous because of the coast, but I miss these mountains. IO: [To Faith] I think we are getting close to the wrap up questions. Do you have any questions before we move on? FC: I know you talked specifically about the culture and community. Talk about how that's specifically different in Ogden than other places. I know it's a loaded question. JE: Again, I think it's the way that people treat it. I think it's the way that people perceive it and how they work with one another. I think in general, that's what it is. That comes out in everybody's art in their murals. Blew my mind when I started seeing these murals, I was like, “This is so awesome. I just love it.” I can't get enough of the farmer's market, and so forth. There's so many different things, too. It's not all just church or this or that. You see people out there selling things that you wouldn't normally see because we're in Ogden. FC: We're kind of asking everyone because it's happening right now. How do you feel about Roe v Wade? JE: That is a personal thing that, especially when it comes to me, I'm all for. If that person feels they need to have an abortion, then yup, then that should be allowed. They're adults. They can make up their mind, and we live in a free country. 21 FC: How do you feel about it from an LGBTQ perspective? I know that they were kind of rehashing gay marriage. Utah did good. We had that unanimous pass to let it go further. JE: It’s just ridiculous that we're still discussing it. I mean, that shouldn't even be a discussion. It should be in general. Again, you're talking about adults. You're talking about people who can make up their own mind and live in a free country. What is it going to affect anybody in any way, especially politically? It's not going to take any money out of their pockets whether a guy marries a guy or girl marries a girl. I'm not big on politics, to be honest with you. I don't really follow it a lot. Common sense. FC: We just like to ask ‘cause it's a current issue right now. JE: Oh, that's a great issue. And, and it's but it's not something that I can really dig deep into other than my common sense because I don't follow it a lot. FC: That's perfectly okay. IO: All right. Last little slate of questions. Is there anything that you would say to your younger self? JE: That's a great question, too. Don't be so afraid. You are enough, and you're loved. Just existing here makes you enough. I think that's probably what I would say. IO: Similarly, anything with people who have gone through a situation you've gone through, whether that be art or growing up gay in Utah or even a childhood injury. Is there anything you would say to them? JE: I would say, be who you are. It's as simple as that. Don't make things too difficult. Accept who you are. Once you accept who you are, then it doesn't matter who accepts you. You're solid. You can join me on my corner. Just accept who you are and love who you are. No matter what you go through, you can move forward from it. That's what I would say. IO: Perfect. Anything at all you'd like to add or share with your story? 22 JE: Thank you. That's what I would like to add. Thank you for allowing me to share my story. FC: Thank you for coming in. JE: I think this is the first time that I've ever had someone say, “We want to hear your story.” So thank you very much for that. We appreciate it, and I see this doing a lot of awesome things. IO: We don't know exactly what this project will turn into, but if it keeps going, would you be okay being re-interviewed in five or ten years? JE: You bet. You bet, given the fact that I'm still around. Or you can get a Ouija board. IO: That would be an interesting oral history. That would be fun. 23