Oral History Program Kimberly Baker Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 21 February 2025 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Kimberly Baker Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 21 February 2025 Copyright © 2026 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: Baker, Kimberly, an oral history by Lorrie Rands, 21 February 2025, 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 Kimberly Baker conducted by Lorrie Rands on February 21, 2025 over Zoom. Kimberly shares her experiences growing up aromantic and asexual in Florida and Utah and how she’s navigated figuring out her own path. She also discusses the ways she’s found belonging throughout her life. Also on the call is Emma Kirby. Note: Active listening, transitions in dialogue (such as “um,” “so” “you know,” etc.), and false starts in conversations are not included in transcription for ease of reading. All additions to transcript noted with brackets. LR: Today is February 21st, 2025. We are doing an oral history interview with Kimberly Baker for our Queering the Archives project here in Special Collections and University Archives. My name is Lorrie Rands conducting, and Emma Kirby is on the Zoom call as well. Again, thank you for your willingness, and I will begin with how I relate. So, my pronouns are she/her, and I am a lesbian. Who wants to go next? KB: I can. My name is Kimmie Baker, my pronouns are she/her and they/them, and I'm aromantic and asexual. EK: I'm Emma, my pronouns are she/her, and I'm also aromantic and asexual. LR: Awesome. Thank you very much. Kimmie, do you prefer she/her or they/them? KB: I don't mind either way. Most of my friends tend to default to they/them. Most people in my family, she/her. Doesn't super matter. LR: Okay. I just want to make sure you’re comfortable, so that's why I'm asking. I will do my best to do they/them, but if I forget, I apologize upfront. I appreciate your understanding. You prefer to go by Kimmie, right? 1 KB: Yes. LR: Okay. So, Kimmie, let's start again with when and where you were born? KB: I was born in Orlando, Florida, 2002. So, you know, great time to be in the South. Yeah, Central Florida. That's kind of it. LR: I'm going to treat this like I don't know anything. Did you grow up in Orlando? KB: I did, yes. Until I was 12. LR: Okay. You mentioned what a great time to grow up in the South. What did you mean by that? KB: Well, you know, it was that post-9/11 period. People like to say that Florida doesn't really count as a part of the South, but I would argue that it does when you get out of those pockets of metropolitan areas. Especially like, you know, Miami is very much like a party spot and Kissimmee is very much Disney. But you get these pockets and belts of just pure rural area where everybody's flying Confederate flags and it's very much like, “Yeah, America. Yeah, this is the South.” It's very much the dangling part of the Bible belt. It's very much still the South, very much still, like, conservative values, less conservative dress. LR: Okay. What is your family dynamic like as you were growing up? KB: Could you clarify what you mean by that? LR: Were you living with one parent, both parents, siblings? KB: I lived with my mom and my stepdad. For a little bit, it was just me and then my two step-siblings when they were over for the custody exchanges, and then two half-siblings when they came along. Then I would go to Tennessee for visits with my dad. 2 LR: How often would you do that? KB: Well, custody exchanges with my dad, when he lived in Florida, they were more frequent. But once he moved up to Tennessee it was more just, like, weeks out of the summer, so it would just be like once a year. LR: Gotcha. How old were you when the dynamic changed with your stepdad and your step-siblings? KB: I was, I think, eight when my youngest half-brother was born. I want to say I was like six or seven when the two of them got married, but I think the stepdad’s been in my life for almost as long as I can remember. They worked together at the office, and they were friends before they got married. They were kind of in similar situations, raising kids and working at this office, and they just kind of got close. Then, despite the difference in their ages, they just kind of grew together and then friends and then got married, and, you know, they had a kid and then a second kid. Yeah, I was probably about eight. LR: Okay. Let me ask this right. Before your mom married your stepdad, was it just you and your mom? KB: Not really. We would switch between living with my grandmother—my Meemaw, her mom—and staying with my dad's parents. We would go from Miami-Dade County or Orange County, mostly living in Orange County. LR: When you started school, were you in one spot at that point, or were you still kind of doing that juggle? KB: We were in one spot. We stayed in Orlando at that point. LR: Okay. What were you taught about gender roles growing up? 3 KB: It was a little funny, actually, because a lot of the gender role reinforcement I was taught came not necessarily from my parents but from the religious structures around us. You know, it was very much a Southern thing that everybody goes to church. It was a really big thing in all of our lives. My parents are LDS. My stepdad used to be a Jehovah's Witness. My mom grew up Lutheran. My dad's a Baptist. Even my grandpa, he used to be Jewish, and he filled his life with religion after he stopped attending any of the practices that he used to. Everybody had something in their life, and all of these things had ideas about like, what I was supposed to be doing. All of those ideas were like, “You're going to sit here and you're going to ready yourself for children and marriage and, you know, a life that isn't for you.” It's a little thing. I was seeing women in my life who were like, they were math teachers or like running their own cleaning business or paralegals. Like, they were out living these big lives and still coming back and saying like, “Yeah, but you still need to go get married and have children and serve your husband and do all these things and still have dinner on the table and still do all of these other things to serve every other person in your life. That's something that you need to be prepared to do throughout your life.” It's like a weird, subdued sort of flip on it. LR: Did you ever feel a sense of confusion with, as you said, different ideas from different people on what your gender role was supposed to be? KB: Yeah, I did. LR: When you're that young, how did you—when were you able to find a sense of your own identity with gender? Does that question make sense? 4 KB: I think so, but could you clarify it further a little bit? LR: Okay, with the confusing ideas you're getting from so many different places, at what point, if ever, were you able to find a sense of your own, like, “This is who I am. This is how I identify within my own gender. This is how I see myself. This is the role I want to have. This is the path?” Does that make a little more sense? KB: I understand. I’m writing it down so I don’t get lost again, sorry. LR: No, you're fine. KB: I think I kind of came into it a little later than I wanted to, because I took a lot of like, weird zigzag steps to it. There was a period in time where I started wearing pencil skirts to school, like these floral pencil skirts and bright pink shorts, because I wanted to really live up to that. I wanted to like, be the girl. I don't know why that registered in my head as like, “Oh, yeah, you have to wear this tight pencil skirt to school. You’re in fourth grade and that's what you gotta do.” Like, I zigged really hard to that, and then I zagged really hard in the other direction for a couple years where I was like, “Okay, well, I don't care about any of this. I'm not going to do any of that.” I think it was sometime in my later teenage years where I realized that like, womanhood doesn't have to be this cage where you are constrained to thoughts of marriage and childbearing and constant service. It doesn't have to be everything I was told it was, where you're smiling through these godly horrors that have been thrust upon you. I think I would’ve been somewhere between 15 and 17, just like, I slowly started to realize that I didn't have to live my life that way, that I could start to form a life of my own. 5 LR: Awesome, thank you. Going along with gender, what were you taught about sexuality growing up? KB: I was taught kind of the same thing. It's kind of funny, a little bit, because in later years it would come out that most of the people in my life were not straight that were, in retrospect, a lot more accepting than they had made themselves out to be. But I kind of went through, you know, I went through a lot trying to like, pick apart—this was the point, mostly from 12 onward, where I was realizing that I had been told that I would have to get married. That was such a daunting and terrifying thing, because I was realizing that I was utterly incapable of falling in love, that I was utterly incapable of having the feelings that I had been told that I had to have. It was something I couldn't wrap my head around, that I just didn't have the capacity to do this thing that I had been told that I had to do. I didn't feel bad for not being able to do it, I didn't feel that I lacked anything, I didn't feel broken. It was just the way that I was made. It is the way that I [am] made. Who cares? It's not my problem. But like, here are all of these things around me telling me that this is my purpose, this is the thing that I'm made to do, and if I can't do it that I need to just suck it up and do it anyway. I didn't want to do it, you know? There was this constant teaching that God's greatest gift was the family, and the foundation of any family is the love that man and wife have for each other. If you can't have that, then how do you build a family? I think, you know, the answer is that, very simply, that's too restrictive a definition of love. But, you 6 know, I just kind of had to look that in the face from 12 onward and sort of push against it a lot. LR: How old were you when you were able to come to that realization, create that foundation for yourself of what you were taught was too limiting about what a family was? KB: It started at 12. That was when I realized that I was aromantic and asexual. Like, I’d always known that I didn't like anybody. It's kind of obvious to me that I didn't. The classic story of making up crushes and stuff on the playground and whatever. But, you know, it was a process over the years of like, writing things out and reflecting. I'd always been a very reflective and spiritual sort of child. I really liked to pick apart verses and go in line by line and find out what they meant. So, it was a process over the years. I want to say sometime between then and 14, where I was like, “Wow, this is really not working, and I'm going to get in an argument with every single spiritual authority in front of me about this. This is something I cannot stand with.” I was a nightmare. LR: Okay, I can appreciate that. As you're interacting with your world, going to school, going to—I'm assuming that you went to church often with your family. As you're interacting with this world growing up, before you turned 12, the question is how were you interacting? Because you said it was a process you just began to notice that you were different growing up, that you didn't really have those playground crushes or things like that. So, what was that experience like for you in elementary school and going to church those early years? 7 KB: It really doesn’t match up a lot with the kind of classic stories you hear in these situations. In some ways it doesn't, but in others it does. For a lot of it, I didn't know that I was supposed to be having these schoolyard crushes, those little like, dewy-eyed child, valentine sort of crushes. But there were a couple things, like I had a sleepover with this step-cousin of mine, my youngest aunt's boyfriend's kid. She and my sister and I were talking about crushes, and I was like, “I don't know what you guys are talking about. What are you talking about?” I slowly started to realize it more and more as like I read books and watched shows and things, that people were experiencing this and reading this, and I just wasn't. I honestly thought they were making it up. Like, I thought that this was something that was being dramatized for effect in people's personal lives and in fiction, everywhere we were going. That like, it was a joke they were all in on and I wasn't. I felt so crazy about it. It was wild. It was just wild. LR: That's super interesting to me. I'm really grateful for your willingness to share, because I'm realizing for myself, not feeling that way, never having had that experience, it is so interesting to hear that flip side, right? I'm super grateful. You're only the second asexual individual and aromatic who's been willing to share their story, and it's just so fascinating to me. So, I'm really grateful. I'm going to ask two more questions kind of in the childhood little area before 12. What was your first exposure to queerness? KB: I love to think about it, because there's an answer that's true in retrospect, and then there's an answer that's true in the time period. The answer that's true in retrospect is I had this cousin, this second cousin, my mom's cousin, but I've 8 always called them my cousin. I grew up with them being this role model, and this was something that I wanted to mention earlier, but I knew I was rambling and I wanted to rein it in. They served kind of as like a counterforce to a lot of the messaging I was receiving about the place of women. They don't identify as a woman now, but in that period of my life, they did. They were this figure in my life who was this beacon of what life could be. They didn't date anybody and they were a firefighter and they worked on my great aunt's farm and they were so cool. They wore a shirt in the pool, and that was the coolest thing to me. I was obsessed with that fact that they wore a shirt in the pool, and they didn't date anybody. And like, that was, in retrospect, my first exposure, because they came out later. Like, they married the woman I called my aunt. Again, would have been my second cousin, but not. The things we call people are not always one-to-one with what they actually are when they're related to us. The actual first one, I was in fifth grade. It was the day of our graduation, and one of my best friends came up to me and came out to me, and I had never heard what gay people were. He was like, “Kimmie, I think I'm gay.” I said, “Yeah, that's cool,” and I continued to eat my donut and he walked out and I never saw him again ‘cause we went to different middle schools. LR: Well, okay. Obviously your elementary experience was… I'm not quite sure what the right word is to describe it, but if you were to describe it, how would you describe it? KB: Like a negative formation. 9 LR: Oh, I like that. Okay, I like that a lot. You mentioned that at age 12, that's when more self-realization started happening for you. Was there something that figured that, or was it just moving to a different school? Oh, you also said that was when you left Orlando, too. If you’d be willing, walk us through that that time period, what happened? KB: It was actually like a combination of those things. When I was 12, yes, we moved from Orlando to Utah, and that summer was a bit of a blur. But when we finally settled here, it was new school, new people, and I kind of settled into two different friend groups that overlapped in some places, but didn't others. It was one group of very artsy theater kids and another group of what we called like, the emo corner. If you ever interacted with emo kids in the late 2000s, early 2010s, you know that like they read a lot of manga and they sat all over each other. That's kind of what I fell into, and that's kind of what life was for a couple years. We talked about clowns a lot and we drew a lot of really bad art, and that's kind of it. But, you know, through that, I got exposed to a lot more than I had before. I learned a lot about, you know, I learned the word bisexual. I had a friend who thought he was bisexual, and then he's like, “Oh, no, actually, I'm gay.” We all wrote together, we auditioned for plays together, and that was a really good year for me. I had friends that I retained for more than a couple months, and it was good. Throughout that time in my life, I stopped wearing pencil shirts to school, so that was good. I started to realize that I still had this lack. I hadn't really thought about it for that year of middle school that I had, ‘cause I was born in 10 August, so I would have been at the beginning, like I would have been the youngest in my grade every year. Twelve was seventh grade, and I had a year of middle school before I came up here for junior high. After that first year of junior high, I went to go see my dad for a summer. I was talking to a friend I had over the internet who lived in Tennessee, and she said something about being aromantic and asexual and then explained just like the basic blurb of what it means. I was like, “Oh God.” I didn't say oh God because, you know, little Mormon kid, I said, “Oh gosh. Oh golly gee willikers.” Then I shut my Nana's computer and I went upstairs and did a bunch of watercolor paintings in the bathroom sink. From then on, I just kind of knew. It was a truth about me that I knew. I didn't have to do much more self-exploration after that. It was just kind of the final shift of machinery into place. LR: Okay, I have a couple questions here. KB: I hope they're about the emo corner ‘cause it's all I have. LR: I actually understand that reference. My youngest is a year older than you, so I get it. Okay, when you moved to Utah, what prompted the move? Was it like your mom and stepdad wanted to be in Utah, or was it job related? KB: It was mostly job related. My stepdad was a truck driver at the time. One of the major trucking companies in the United States has two major terminals in the country. One is in Tennessee, where my dad lives, and the other is in West Valley, and rather than move to Tennessee, they decided to move out here. It was just like a big change, spur of the moment kind of decision. That summer was just kind of a really convenient time for them. My dad was getting deployed 11 again, it was the end of the school year. He had the chance to move out and relocate here and dispatch from there. It was just a good time for them to do it, so we just kind of packed up and came out. LR: Where at did you move to? Was it in West Valley? KB: We were going to go to Salt Lake originally, and that didn't end up working out. We lived on somebody's couch for I want to say like a month, and then lived in a motel for a couple weeks, and then ended up finding a place in Springville, and we've lived here since. LR: Where is Springville? KB: So, if you think of a top-down map of Utah, or just like the Wasatch front, Ogden, then Salt Lake City and then Provo. There's a little curved row of towns branching off Provo that goes like Provo, Springville, Mapleton, Spanish Fork, and it's like that little nook there. It used to all be little farmlands and stuff, but Springville’s been growing recently. It's a little annoying actually. LR: No, I get that. Thank you. That area, I get confused, so I appreciate that. KB: Everyone's always trying to hit me with cars. LR: All right, when you finally settled and started interacting with a new school, what are some of the differences that you noticed between Florida and Utah? Mostly culturally? KB: It was way less diverse. Way, way less diverse. I was coming from a place that was—okay, I'm pivoting the sentence, sorry. I mentioned earlier that I was coming from the South, and when you think of the South, typically most people's thoughts, I think, would be a lot of, like, white people, Southern belle kind of 12 debutante ball, that chunk of America. But the truth is that the South is actually incredibly racially diverse, and in Orlando especially it's very like, white majorityminority sort of status. The schools that I went to, white people were like… they were the majority population, but they were 40% of the population, if that makes sense. It was like 60% racial minority, 40% white. Going from that to a place where it's like 90% white, at least 85% LDS, versus a place where it's 40% white, 2% LDS, and that 2% is me and my sister, it was a bit of a culture shock. We come here and everybody's at least in the same stake, if not the next stake over, and there's more than one stake per school. Everybody goes to church and honestly hates it, and nobody knows what a Catholic is, nobody knows how the Mormon/Catholic beef started, and all these different things. It was so odd. Nobody had heard of a prayer box before; that was the big thing. Like, my meemaw had a prayer box on this table behind her front door where you would put your hand on the table while you were taking your shoes off, and she had a little prayer box there for our cousin. I would say it was one of those things, like, yeah, my friends had a picture of Jesus taped up in their shower, my Mormon friends did, and my meemaw had a prayer box. Those are very normal religious things to have. It's like the little Jehovah's Witness pamphlets that are on your pap pap's kitchen island. Those are normal. People would be like, “What's a prayer box? I love your accent. What's a prayer box?” “What do you mean, what's a prayer box? That's normal. You're the weird one; you have Jesus in your shower.” 13 LR: It really sounds like your time in junior high and high school were really, for you… What’s the word? I can’t remember the word I’m looking for. Like, building upon these truths that you had you had discovered about yourself, and you're kind of settling into who you are. Is that an accurate description? KB: Yes. LR: You also mentioned that theater was an important part of that time period. What about theater was compelling to you? KB: I’m not even sure. I'm not good at acting. I have this thing where I can't get my face and my body to necessarily comply with the things my voice is doing, which is kind of an issue when you're on stage. I'm very good at projecting. I'm very good at the voice aspect of it, and I did fairly well at, like, stage directing sort of things. But, you know, acting was always kind of not the thing for me, so that's not what drew me to it. It was more the community aspect, I think. It's not that it was something my friends were all doing, ‘cause I did it before we moved. I was in a bunch of plays, I recited poetry. I was always very drawn to the stage. I think I more just liked having something to do with people that we were all working on together, that we were all excited about doing together. I didn't care what I had to do to be a part of it. You know, I just liked being there and I liked helping, so if I couldn't act I would do prop work, or I would paint the walls, or I got really into pit orchestra. I play the French horn. It's actually like six inches from my foot right now. I got really into the orchestra. LR: During this time, as you’ve kind of figured yourself out, did you feel any dichotomy with your family and religious organization? I'm not quite sure how to 14 frame that other than that. Were you able to fit in, or were you finding it a little bit strange? If that makes sense. KB: I’m not sure if it’s the kind of answer you’re getting at, but I’ve never really had an easy time doing that anyway. I don't click super well with it, you know. LR: Yeah. Did you ever feel the need to actually come out to your family? KB: I tried. I did try, and my mom told me, “I don't believe you.” LR: Okay. Do you think that she might have had an easier time understanding if you were maybe lesbian or bisexual? I'm just curious. KB: That's the thing. I told her when I think I was 14. I know I was 14, ‘cause I had this thermal shirt that she hated. I had a thermal overshirt and a pair of work boots that she despised. I would wear them almost every day, and I know I was 14 ‘cause this is the time that I accidentally stabbed myself in the arm with an ink cartridge, and I was wearing that shirt when I did it. That's how I have to form timelines in my head. I know it's not the best way to do things, but I digress. I was 14, and I told her, “Hey, Mom, just so you know, I'm aromantic and asexual. I'm not gonna be able to fall in love or anything like that. I just thought you would want to know.” She said, “I don't believe you,” and she left it at that, and I went off to mutual, to a youth group, and that was that for a couple years. I think I was 16 when she brought it up again, and she looked at me and she's like, “You know you could tell me if you were lesbian, right?” I looked at her and I just, I didn't know what to say. I could not figure out what to say in that 15 situation, ‘cause I had already told her that I wasn't. It was a dance that we did like a thousand times. Like, I'm not. It's not a bad thing to be. I have a thousand friends—not a thousand. That's a lot. That's so many people. But like, I have so many friends who are lesbians. My best friend in the world is bisexual. You, my darling mother, you've dated women. I know it's not an issue. I'm just not. It's fine. It was just so baffling every single time, and then I think by the time I was 19, she finally, finally, finally accepted it. LR: As you mentioned, when you moved to Utah, you finally had some steady friend groups. Were you able to be yourself with them, or were there times when you thought you had to hide? KB: More a combination of the two? Like being yourself and then rapidly pulling back. I find that I'm often too much for people, which is kind of a sad thing to feel. I'm trying to undo that feeling recently. There were some harsh, harsh experiences at different points in my teenage years that really, really harshly impacted me. They were both tied to my identity and not tied to it. So, it's just been a long journey of poking my head out of that cardboard box again. LR: Would you be willing to expand on that a little bit? Or if you’re not comfortable with that. KB: No, I'm totally comfortable. I think I alluded to it earlier; I have a really hard time with things like social cues and social norms. It's a really big struggle for me, and I wasn't given a lot of grace for it as a kid, and as a teenager especially. It was really hard. It was hard to make friends, it was hard to keep the friends that I 16 made, and it did not serve me well. Now that I'm an adult, I'm trying to just figure things out. I'm trying to learn how to do those things I should have been able to do when I was younger but couldn't because I’m not built that way. And it's okay. It's not a failing on my part, and it really wasn’t a failing on theirs. It really wasn't. It's just, you know, you see someone who's a little weird and annoying and keeps doing things that they really should have learned a long time ago not to do. That's somebody you're gonna kind of malign a little. Or you have somebody who really doesn't know when not to hug people, or, you know, ingratiated themself into a friend group a little too quickly and acts like they're your friend, but doesn't get that you don't want to be their friend. That's somebody you're gonna snap at. That's just the kind of thing. I don't think that I'm expanding on this correctly. I got a little lost, I’ll admit. Yes. Yes, yes, yes. LR: You’re doing a great job. I'm following you completely. KB: Okay, sorry. LR: No, you don't need to apologize. It makes complete sense to me. As you're continuing your high school, were there places that you felt like you could be yourself that you felt safe in? KB: Yeah. I feel like there's a stereotype about band kids for a reason, and the clarinetists didn't like me, but that's because they're rude. That's a joke. There's just this one guy, and he has to remain in my life ‘cause he's like my—he's one degree removed from me now. He didn't like me because I hit a wasp with a shoe one time. Long story. But the band program was, you know, it's filled with like 17 these loud, boisterous people, and when you are a loud, boisterous person, that is a fantastic place to be, because the only time anybody is going to tell you to be quiet is when it's time to play. That was a really fun place to spend a lot of my time, and they're always short on horn players, so I know they're always going to need me. They can't get rid of me. LR: Were you encouraged to continue with your education after high school? KB: Yes, very much so. Absolutely. I wasn't really given a lot of instruction on how to do it, but I was told to do it. I keep hearing all these things these days about like, “Yeah, you should have been doing it back in junior year.” I didn't start applying to college until I think my senior year of high school, and I got into a couple places like, very quickly. My grades are always really good. I was one of the sterling scholars from my high school. I was part of the Chinese language program. I was in all the highest classes I could be in. Not to brag, but I was like, really smart. No, but like, I did very well academically, even if I couldn't do well socially. It's very good. I had one sports-related extracurricular and marched. Like, I did okay enough to get into places, so that was squared away. It was more the process of how to do it that eluded me. I wasn't the first person in my family to graduate, contrary to what the paperwork might indicate. My grandmother, my mom's mom, she has a master’s, so she teaches math. She actually teaches at the university level sometimes. Her brother, her twin brother, also graduated. He is a university wrestling coach. They both graduated, so it's not like I'm the first person. I'm just the first person out of all of my parents and then three-fourths of the family. 18 LR: Okay, that makes sense. What year did you graduate from high school? KB: 2020. LR: Oh. KB: Yeah. LR: Okay, so you didn't get to walk. KB: No, we drove. LR: How? Okay, let's talk about that for a quick second. The last part of your senior year, all of a sudden, like literally three months from graduation, you're told, “Okay, you have to stay home.” KB: Yeah. LR: What was that like for you? In the sense of, you know, all of the norms that you had grown up with, like, “This is going to happen,” were taken away. KB: I didn't really care about walking at graduation. Like, that was something I didn't super care about, but I really struggled academically after that, because the rug had been pulled out from under my feet. I also shared a room with my sister, so I couldn't really concentrate. I didn't have a desk to sit at. When it came to taking tests, I had to do them in the living room and my whole family had to clear out. I had to take my AP tests in there, and it was impossible to concentrate because, again, no desk. I was taking them on like, a TV tray dinner table, like an old one. I ended up singing The Sound of Music to myself over and over again to try to get through my AP calculus test, and then I failed and it was a nightmare. 19 I also didn't get to do any of my senior year performances, which was the bigger let down, because I had been preparing for those for a really long time. Those would have been like the jewel on my crown, you know. But yeah, we got through it and it was fine. Survived, nobody died. Went to a lot of ghost towns. LR: When did you decide to start college? KB: What do you mean by that? LR: Did you take a year, or did you just start immediately after you graduated? KB: Yeah, I just started that fall semester. LR: And where did you go? KB: I went to Weber. LR: Okay. Why did you choose Weber? KB: They had a forensic science program that I really liked. I wanted to study forensic science for a really long time. I didn't want to go to UVU. UVU was my fallback school, and, you know, this was the place that I wanted to be at. It was a really good choice for me, because the program was small and very hands on. I really enjoyed it. That choice proved to be the best choice for me, because in the middle of me studying here they introduced the queer studies program. Which, I think the moment I heard about it, something lit up in my brain and I like immediately gathered everything I could to try to figure out how to be a part of that. Half my bookshelf is just books from that. It like took over my life. LR: What was this program again? KB: The queer studies program. LR: Queer studies. That makes sense. Did you decide to live on campus? 20 KB: I did, yeah. LR: Okay, so going from Springville, which wasn't very diverse, and then you come up to Weber State, did you feel like it was a little bit more diverse than what you had lived in for a while? Almost like you'd gone back home, in a way? KB: A little bit, yeah. LR: Okay. What are some of the activities and things that you did while you were on campus? Besides your schoolwork. KB: I stayed in my room for a while, mostly because of COVID, and then because I just didn't know how to get involved with things. Then I started exploring a little more because I had to take this photography class where he made us take a lot of outdoor photography shots. That meant that I was spending a lot of time walking around on campus and off campus, and that really forced me to get out there and walk around in places and familiarize myself with the space around the city that I could get around, ‘cause I didn't have a car and my bike was too tall for me to ride. Like, the actual post of the seat was too tall and not adjustable, so I couldn't ride it. I had to walk everywhere and I couldn't go too far away, so I was confined to this space of like a couple blocks, about like a mile and a half. I got really familiar with it, and then slowly I started to like branch out socially. I started attending things like the GSA. [I] started socializing with my cohort more when we started like really cementing that sometime in like the last half of my second year of the CSI program. They set it up so that we would get to know each other more; we would all graduate together around the same time, and that really helped. Then I started volunteering at the Women's Center as 21 well, so that made me get involved. From there, I started getting involved in student government for my last year. LR: Right. In high school, where are some places that you felt like you could just be yourself? KB: In high school? I played a lot of tabletop role-playing games. I've always done that; I still do that. I wrote a lot, so I had a writers’ group that I was a part of, and then I would join other people on their interests. Like, I would listen to them talk about video games. I'm not a big gamer. The only games I can play are like, I really like tactile board games like Scrabble and Catan. That's the kind of game I can play. The only video games I really know how to play are the Super Nintendo versions of Tetris, Dr. Mario, and The Pagemaster. That's it. That's all I've got. I guess Minecraft, but everybody can play Minecraft. I'm really not a gamer, but I like listening to other people talk about gaming. So, that's kind of where I found myself a lot, listening to other people talk about, I don't know, Luigi's Mansion. LR: Okay, the tabletop role-playing games, were you involved in a group, or how did—I don't know tabletop role-playing games as much as I know like, D&D. How similar to D&D is that? Or not similar? KB: D&D is a kind of tabletop role-playing game. In high school, I played D&D, but I also played a game called Monster of the Week, which is based on two six-sided dice. It's a system called Powered by the Apocalypse. It's just you roll two sixsided dice, and instead of it being like a one to twenty, good versus bad, it's like failure makes success success. It's more narrative and role-play based than 22 randomized encounter and combat based. It's more trope and narrative than war combat simulator. These days I play a lot of still Monster of the Week, but I've added a lot of Pathfinder, which is the more rules-heavy version of Dungeons and Dragons. There are a couple other ones which are a little more niche. I play Orpheus Protocol, which has even more rules. Goodness me, love some rules. Then I've started playing something called Impulse Drive, which is also based on 2d6, has way less rules, which I'm not keen on. LR: You like your rules, gotcha. KB: I like rules. I think they're fun. LR: Makes sense. Okay, kind of shifting a little bit, but what prompted you to get involved in student government? KB: It was mostly just that they needed somebody. I was already involved in the Gender and Sexuality Alliance, the GSA, again, because they needed somebody and I was there. They just didn't have anybody to fill the LGBTQ senator position. I had expressed interest previously, and nobody had filled it in the time between when they had expressed a need and when I asked again, so I filled out the application and they swore me in and that's how I got involved. That's really just kind of it. From there, I just kind of got pulled deeper and deeper because people weren't volunteering for things. LR: We're not going to go a lot into that, ‘cause we've already talked about that in your previous interview. I just wanted to kind of tie that in a little bit. So, when did you graduate with your bachelor's? 23 KB: In April of 2024. LR: Okay, and what are your career aspirations now that you have your bachelor's degree? KB: I would love to get a job working in forensic science. I have a real passion for chemical fingerprint development and for genetics, but I'm lacking in like a molecular biology requirement for genetics. Okay, I can't do that. I was looking over my fingerprinting slides again recently and I [thought], “God, I love fingerprinting. God, I love fingerprinting.” I would love to do something with that. Mostly, it's just get in there and get working and really help people by working for the science and making sure that things are kept to the professional ethic level. LR: Awesome. Now that you're out of college, are you able to find places where you feel like you have a sense of community and belonging? KB: Not where I live necessarily, but I have friends and I belong with them. LR: Before I finish up with the final questions, is there anything else you'd like to add about your story that we haven't covered yet? KB: I don’t know. I'm not sure. LR: Do you have any questions, Emma? EK: I don’t. LR: Okay, thank you. As you look at where you're living at currently, your community, what do you think the community around you can do to be more inclusive? I know we're not supposed to use that word, but to be more open to individuals like yourself, where, you know, I almost envision that like, you're in the spectrum, but does anyone really notice? Am I making sense with my question? 24 KB: Yes. I think just not being so quick to anger helps a lot. Just treating everybody with a baseline kindness and respect. I would ask people, like, would you treat your children that way? But I kind of know the answer for some people. But like, you know, treating everybody, especially people who are still learning how to be people, with baseline empathy and grace and respect, it goes a long way. If everybody's doing that, then, you know, you're going to get what you're giving back. I think that does a lot to make the world just a little better to live in. LR: I forgot to ask a question. In 2022, the overturning of Roe v. Wade, what was that like for you when you heard about that? KB: I would say enraging, but it's really hard for me to get angry. Like, the elements have to be super, super right. It was more like extreme frustration and bafflement, ‘cause I was watching things I was studying the semester before get undone in real time, ‘cause I had just been studying constitutional law. That was a case that we studied in a class I had just taken, and we’d just gone over how important the arguments made in that case were, and how due process worked, and how Griswold v. [Connecticut] led to Roe v. Wade, and how the arguments made in that were foundational to all these other cases. I was just pacing in my room for days just out of my mind about it. Like, are you serious? Are you absolutely serious? This is insane. You can't be doing this. Because that kind of backward motion means that they could look at other cases and decide that they also weren't worthy of existing. That was something that was so—it was like pure crisis mode. Just absolutely, absolutely baffling. 25 LR: With the current political climate, how do you find a sense of just… The word that keeps coming to mind is centering. How do you find your own sense of stability? KB: I make a lot of collages. I know I should have a better answer than that, but that is the answer, that I make a lot of collages. LR: Oh, that's great. The final question I have is this: if you had the opportunity to talk to the coming up queer individuals or your younger self, what advice would you give? KB: I would say don't put yourself in a frenzy trying to change yourself for other people. There are things about yourself that aren't going to change, and that's fine. Yeah. LR: Is there anything else you'd like to add? KB: Without making it weird? I could get into it further that. The way I think about it is like a constant metamorphosis is inevitably going to be a dead-end road. You're going to have to turn around eventually, but then you're going to find yourself at a forked path again, and you can either keep going on the path you were headed on originally, or you can turn around and go back on that dead-end road again to continue on your constant metamorphosis. That's just going to be a self-defeating cycle. If you stay on that path, constant metamorphosis to change yourself for other people, you're just going to stay in that loop, working yourself up over and over again. You're going to have to break out of it eventually. It's easier to just not start. LR: I like that. That visual. I just want to say thank you for your willingness to share. I love the opportunity to continue to learn, and I feel like that's what this has been 26 for me. I really appreciate what you've offered for me in this last hour and a half. So, thank you for that. 27