 helps because I'm super nervous about this. I don't know how practical the end of this talk is going to be compared to last year because this is a deeply, deeply personal talk. I want to thank all the speakers that have come before me because I had to rewrite this talk last night to incorporate some of the things that were said. This talk in particular is going to touch on some of the topics of inclusion and things like that that we have already talked about. I have, this is my story, this is my personal history, this is my truth. It's not an easy truth and it's taken me a long time to get here and I'll see if I don't cry too much. So there is a content warning. I can't go through my history of my truth and express what it's like to be an outsider and having to try to fit into the world without talking about the trauma that I suffered. So I try to keep it really high level but there is mention of all sorts of abuse from sexual, physical, emotional, self-harm and suicide as well. So if that's a problem, it's okay to leave. If I could leave my own talk right now, I probably would. So please bear with me and hopefully I'll try to keep it really high level and not too detailed. When Jeremy first approached me, I'm like, well, what do you want me to talk about? And so we kind of had a little conversation back and forth and I came up with this concept of really exploring identity, how I came to my own identity, spending 40 years trying to figure out who the heck I am. I'm still not entirely sure but I'm much closer now. And when I sat down and I started thinking about it, it was this title popped in my head because the idea of a Venn diagram, all these overlapping things that in the center they come what they are now. Who here, a little audience participation, who here can think of five things they want to be identified as? Have you ever tried to put together a Venn diagram of five things? It doesn't work. You get to three, maybe four and then all of a sudden it's just a mess. And so after the talk, I will be taking accepting ideas for doing titles because this one doesn't work in case I actually do get brave enough to give it again. There is two points I want to make. Society. When I see society, I'm using it as a single term. It is not a single term. It is a pyramid scheme of terms. We have small societies that build into bigger societies and build into bigger societies and build into bigger societies. As a whole, it's broken, not necessarily the individual communities. Like this community really isn't that broken. In fact, I have to think of something hard in order to say that this group would be broken. Once we get outside of this, once we get into this neighborhood and the parties that are going on this weekend and we get into the city and then we get into the state and then we get into the country and we get into the globe, that's where things break down. We have the option to fix it, but fixing it is not easy. In order to fix it, we need to understand people around us, and that's what I'm doing here today. I'm presenting myself as a way to build a little bit of empathy. You are not like me. I am not like you. Some of you are very different than me. Some of you are closer to me in the things we relate on. I hope that if you understand my story, you can be a little bit more empathetic to the next person you meet and take time to understand their story. The other thing that I want people to do is I want to find their own truth. There are facts out there in the world, but most of the things that we call facts are society telling us this is what you must do. These are the rules. Don't question them. Fuck that. So I hope you all think these photos are as cute as I do. I'm maybe a little biased. So my story doesn't start at the age of five. Nobody's story does, but the memory is kind of a funny thing, and I have a really good memory. I've got one of the best. It's so good. It's so great. But even I don't remember much before age five. So there's some really hard words in this, and I try not to say all of them, but some of them I do want to warn people that they're triggering for me. They may be triggering for you. I was in the first week of kindergarten when I started to hear these words. I was getting punched, pushed, kicked because of the way I talked, the way I behaved, the fact that I didn't want to play sports, that my favorite superhero was not a boy, still in love with Wonder Woman. I totally want to be Linda Carter. So it didn't take long for me to figure out that I was, for me to understand that the world was telling me I was broken and that I needed to be fixed. I wasn't. It's really the world that wasn't ready for me. This is why I rewrote it last night. I very quickly, I wasn't even six years old and I'm learning to hide the things of who I am. I'm trying to act tough. I'm trying to be something that I wasn't. I was wearing a suit of armor. I continued to get bullied and pushed around. Because I got bullied, I bullied other people. Because I got pushed, I pushed other people. For years, well into my teens, I didn't have any real friends. I had people that I sucked up to because they were the image of what society said was okay. I would do anything to be accepted by them and they knew it. That didn't really go all that well. By the time I got to fifth grade, things were really starting to change. Boys notice girls. Girls notice clothing. There's a certain, you know, puberty is hitting and everybody's like, oh, wow, hi, right? One particular young woman in my class really developed early. We're talking really developed. And all the boys were constantly wanting to know, wanting to get to know her, get close to her. She was really an awesome person and I was just jealous of the way she looked. But all the boys just saw a pair of breasts. Middle school really started a nightmare time in my life. I was struggling with being jealous of the cute things the girls could wear. At the same time, I had crushes on them. I was being called fat and husky and dumpling and gross and I didn't understand why this didn't look the way I felt inside. I also started to notice some cute boys. I actually at first just told myself that I was jealous because of the attention that Kevin got. But no, I liked the way they looked. It would take another four years for me to understand that feeling. But the bullying continued. Gym class was the worst. I wasn't good at traditional sports. I played on the soccer team, but even that got laughed at because it was soccer, not football, not baseball, not basketball. I had started skateboarding. I was the first in my school to actually learn to snowboard. And I really embraced those. And with that, I discovered punk and started to feel a little bit better. But in an attempt to blend in and be part of that culture, I was just wearing baggy clothing all the time and flannels and rock shirts. Everybody called me slob, gross. They thought I was a delinquent because my t-shirts had guns and roses, fugazi, anthrax. I had straight A's. I went to school every day. I didn't skip. I didn't get into trouble. In gym class, my people started to seal my clothes while I was in the shower. Sometimes they throw them into the shower so they'd be soaked all day. There wasn't anything that I could do to blend in. I got pushed into lockers, punched, kicked. I was told I was going to be shot. In school, at the age of 12, I had an older student pull a hunting knife on me. What did I throw? Because I was queer. And I didn't even know what it meant. I just tried not to be queer, whatever that was. High school really didn't get any better. The best part is I continued to get made fun of by all the kids around me for the way I dressed. And then they started modeling the way they dressed after this little band called Nirvana. And I'm like, well, wait a minute. That's what I've been doing for three years. I avoided most of the kids in school. There was a few that I hung out with. I spent all my time in the art room creating things. It's the only place that I felt safe. That wasn't until my art teacher complained to my parents about what I was drawing, what I was creating. My art was filled with horror depictions, death, metal, Satanism, zombies, stuff that's really popular right now. I guess I'm a little ahead of my time. You know, most of what was done in black pen on white paper and with a red pen or a red coloring, you know, some red coloring thrown in. So I went to a therapist. The therapist actually told me that I was broken. These weren't healthy things to create. I might be deeply disturbed. It was scaring my family. And to be perfectly honest, where I was at 14, a number of years later, I could have easily been one of the kids, one of the shooters at Columbine. I was that close. I had no access to weapons. Everybody thought I was going to hurt someone and I was going to scare them. So I stopped doing my art and created happy things. I hid underneath another layer of societal norms. I tried to be Kevin. Some people still think I'm Kevin. I don't know what they're seeing. And a few weeks after being cleared of the therapist, I tried to take my life twice. Over the course of my life, I would attempt eight more times. I even failed at that, thankfully. Most recent was a little over a year ago. At 16, I fell in love with my first boy. I had known gay people existed for a little while. I even knew one. It was my own family. My cousin had come out of the closet that year. It felt different to me. We didn't have Tumblr. There was no queer community where I lived. I didn't understand that love isn't binary. Not only was I in love with his boy, but I was in love with his girlfriend. And that was really, really confusing. I tried to hide it. So throughout high school, I was a serial dater. Never more than a couple of weeks with any one particular person. We didn't even have any out gay people until a couple weeks before graduation. And I was not one of them. I would never confirm to the people that were bullying me that I was not like them. My teenage years filled me with trying to do things that I saw boys doing movies and TV shows. And if I could go back, I would slap the shit out of myself. I embraced toxic masculinity. It was the only way I could survive without being bullied constantly. And it was horrible. And I felt horrible. All the abuse that I suffered and all the abuse that I inflicted was boys will be boys. And that's wrong. It's taken me a long time to learn that, but it's wrong. It didn't feel right then, but I didn't really learn. I did it because it's what people told me I was supposed to do. And I didn't know enough to question. I was depressed, anxious, nervous. For decades, suicide was always the next thought. I, from there, began decades of abusive relationships. I was the victim. Some of them were friendships. Some of them were romantic. Some of them were sexual. One of them I even married. I hated myself, but I figured if I can make somebody else happy, then I'll be happy. I had no internal validation, but I also had no external validation. I've had sexual encounters with at least 20 women. I know for some folks that's a lot. For some folks it's not a lot. This isn't a judgment about how many people are with because what you need to understand is that 15 of them were either physically forced, coerced, intoxicated, or drug involved. 11 of these women were repeat occurrences because we were in relationships. I had felt coerced or forced into being intimate with them once or twice and then felt I was obligated. Just three of these relationships were actually consensual sex. Just three of these relationships didn't resort to emotional abuse or beatings or death threats. I felt like a failure because none of this felt right, but this doesn't happen to men. We weren't allowed to talk about it. As I was going through college and entering my 20s, I had a plan to move out to Colorado and be a snowboard bum that's going to work at the hills and just kind of, you know, be fancy free, careless, and I saved up a whole bunch of money, at least a lot of money for a 22-year-old. Instead, that money was spent getting an apartment, getting married, having a kid. By 24, we had two. At 25, I was living 400 miles away from my family. So, beer depression had taken hold. In my mind, I was a complete failure because a successful man was a father, a caretaker, the breadwinner, the rulemaker, husband, lover, fixer, beer drinker, meat eater, homeowner, and marriage was forever. This is what I had been raised on. White picket fences. 25 started a pretty deep spiral. 28 had been divorced. I began drinking a lot, drinking the blackout. I spent thousands of dollars at strip clubs just trying to fit in, trying to find some sort of relationship that would validate me. I drank until I blacked out. In 2007, I awoke from a night of drinking and I had carved up my body without even knowing it. I quit drinking immediately. I realized I was in trouble. I didn't have anything alcoholic to drink for two years and I immediately sought therapy. I would go through seven years trying to find the right therapist. This is what kept me knowing. My kids, every day, if there was no other reason to get up, it's for these two. They're amazing. They're so funny. They're so smart. They're so witty. I absolutely adore them so much for not crying. I tried to be the best parent I could. In return, my parents, my kids let me be who I was. By the time they hit their tweens, it was pretty clear that they were on a nonnormative path and they were struggling with their own identities. I couldn't put into words what I was going through, so I wasn't sure what they were going through. But I just said that I needed to create a safe space. I needed to create an environment where they knew they were going to be loved no matter what. I taught them to seek their own truth. I taught them to question me, to question society, to question their teachers. I get letters written home. Your daughter mouthed off at us today. Well, what did she say? She challenged my answer. Was her right as my daughter entered high school. She was dealing with a teacher in the health class that was dividing the class up, boys and girls. They weren't talking about, they were talking, he was being quite racist. She started a letter writing campaign. I encouraged her. I didn't have all the answers. And I let them know that I did not have all the answers. And it's okay, and that we'll find them together. At this time, I started to understand how much I liked the way women's clothing looked. And I wish I could wear things like that. I wanted to be pretty. And to me, pretty meant being feminine. My daughter taught me that it was okay to love men or women or people that aren't either. My son taught me that it's okay to not love anybody, not want to be intimate. Two years ago, my son wore a dress to school. The world I grew up in, this wasn't allowed. You'd come home bloody if you came home at all. I was frantic all day, waiting for a phone call from the school for a breach of dress code where they'd gotten into a fight. When he got home, I asked him how it went. Did anybody hassle him? Nope. Maybe, just maybe, it might be okay for me. If he can do it, maybe the world's ready. Still take another six months before I would buy anything from the women's department. I bought a skirt. I only wore it in the house. Fortunately, I worked from home. I wore it in the house when nobody else was around for about three months. And then the kids got home from summer and I couldn't deal with not being able to wear it in the house. So we talked about it. It wasn't until September of that year that I actually started wearing that stuff out in public. Friends have been telling me for a while that you don't have to be this queer to be part of the community, but I wasn't ready for it. And then last October, on this stage, I had made some last minute edits to my talk without really thinking about them. And without planning it, I came out. A new friend that night dragged me, kicking and screaming, hi, cat. Cat dragged me into the queer community. And I found a home. I found people that validated me for being me. And so that allowed me to start validating myself. So last year has been an absolute rollercoaster. Emotionally. I question everything that I do. I let myself shine through. And I've really explored with who I am. I still get together with myself every Sunday and talk it through. It's a great conversation. A little one-sided. I had a lot of body issues. I was always afraid to let people see what I actually looked like underneath my clothing. So I decided it was time to customize. I didn't get to choose this. But it's what I have. You didn't get to choose the skin that you're in. But it's what you have. And if you don't like it, just like you would go and decorate your apartment, decorate your car, decorate yourself. This could be haircut. It could be glasses. It could be clothing. It could be piercings. It could be tattoos. It could be other upgrades and modifications. I feel good about myself now. People compliment me on my hair, my tattoos, my style. And it reaffirms that it's okay to be me. I still fight suicidal thoughts and depression and anxiety. But instead of it being a constant thing that it was for decades, it's much smaller waves. And when big waves come rolling in, I've got friends and family, loved ones and community that I could say, hey, I'm having a really bad day. And they let me talk about it. And they helped me through it. I'm not broken. You are not broken. It's okay to not know where you belong. Just find your own truth. Question. Everything. Definitely question authority. Society. The schools. Religion. It's okay to question science. Certainly should be questioning the government. Question your peers. They've got different experiences than you. And it may shed light. Because if you don't ask questions, you don't hear all the possibilities that are out there. I certainly didn't. And I've spent my entire life up until this last year in pain, agony, depression, and trying harder than you can imagine to be a Pikachu. And I'm not. And that's okay.