January 2. 2019 :: News and Culture

20 19 CO LO R A D O'S LG B TQ M AGA ZINE | F R E E

WE'RE HERE, WE'RE QUEER

DENVER TATTOO ARTSISTS | QUEER CLIMB NIGHT | THE MISSING

CONTENTS JANUARY 2, 2019 VOL42 NO18

6 THE IMPACT OF THE AFFORDABLE HOUSING CRISIS ON DENVER’S LGBTQ HOMELESS

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12 FINDING YOURSELF ON THE SHELVES: DENVER PUBLIC LIBRARY 14 CALENDAR 16 BEHIND BOY ERASED: AUTHOR GARRARD CONLEY TALKS THE BOOK, THE MOVIE, & CONVERSION THERAPY 24 COLORING QUEER LOVE IN THE MILE HIGH CITY 30 THE MISSING TRIGGERS TRAUMA AND CONVERSATION

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34 THEATRICAL MUSTANG WOODZICK IS PAVING THE PATH FOR ARTS INCLUSIVITY 42 DUELING WITH DEPRESSION: BEAT BACK THE DARKNESS

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The Impact of the Affordable

Housing Crisis on Denver’s LGBTQ Homeless

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W

hile the real estate market continues to thrive in Colorado, the amount of affordable housing for working-class families and individuals dwindles. However, the effects of the affordable housing crisis may disproportionately impact LGBTQ people— especially queer youth. LGBTQ youth are already 120 percent more likely to experience homelessness than non-LGBTQ youth, according to a 2017 study by researchers from Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago.

In the Denver region, three organizations have addressed poverty and homelessness among this very vulnerable population for many years by specifically providing programs and services to either youth or transgender individuals.

The Gathering Place is a daytime drop-in center that serves women, their children, and transgender individuals who are experiencing poverty. The Delores Project provides shelter and personalized services to unaccompanied women and transgender folks experiencing homelessness. Urban Peak is an organization that provides various services to youth ages 15 through 24 experiencing homelessness or at risk of becoming homeless.

LGBTQ Homelessness Urban Peak CEO Christina Carlson said that the three major predictors for youth that may experience homelessness are family instability, involvement with the juvenile justice system or child welfare, and self-identifying as LGBTQ. Researchers from the Williams Institute, in collaboration with the True Colors Fund, estimated that roughly 7 percent of youth in the U.S. are LGBTQ, but 40 percent of youth experiencing homelessness are LGBTQ. The most common reason for LGBTQ youth to experience homelessness is running away from home after being rejected due to their sexual orientations or gender identities.

Carlson added that youth experiencing homelessness are already a vulnerable population to risk factors such as sex trafficking and mental health issues, but these risks are exacerbated for LGBTQ youth. A 2011 study found that LGBTQ youth between the ages of 10 and 25 experiencing homelessness are 70 percent more likely to engage in survival sex.

By Ruben Gallardo

“Sex trafficking happens within the first 72 hours,” Carlson said. “There is a vulnerability for youth, and when you add on LGBTQ, particularly if they haven’t been accepted by their families or have been told in their lives that who they were isn’t OK, it opens up another level of vulnerability.”

Transgender youth experiencing homelessness are the most vulnerable of LGBTQ subpopulations.

At the Gathering Place, 2 percent of members identify as transgender and gender nonconforming individuals. They also visit the daytime drop-in center almost twice as often as cis women, according to President and CEO Leslie Foster.

Similarly, 2 percent of clients at Urban Peak identify as transgender but, based on a 2016 survey by the Williams Institute, only 0.6 percent of U.S. adults identify as transgender.

For transgender people experiencing homelessness, a number of issues can occur when looking for safe shelter, including humiliation and physical or sexual victimization at shelters where they are often forced to stay in quarters and use restroom facilities based on birth sex.

For elder, transgender individuals experiencing homelessness in the Denver region, the Delores Project is the only shelter that is outwardly welcoming and celebratory of transgender people and trans identity.

“We hear a lot from [the transgender community] that we are the only safe shelter for them,” said Gaelen Hafen, shelter manager. “So, when we do not have space, that’s really difficult as there are not a lot of shelter spaces for those folks to go to.”

Affordable Housing Crisis in Colorado The economic process known as the “boom and bust cycle” succinctly describes the development trajectory of the Denver metropolitan area. In recent years, the Denver region has experienced an economic boom thanks to a population growth rate of 13.55 percent from 2010 to 2017, according to estimates by the U.S. Census Bureau.

According to researchers at Shift Research Lab and the Colorado Futures Center, despite the economic boom in the Denver region, there is a growing gap between jobs with wages that can afford housing that costs under $250,000 and housing inventory.

For example, in 2014, 57 percent of workers could only afford housing that costs under $250,000, but housing under $250,000 represented 47 percent of the total housing inventory.

As a result of growing housing prices, renters have also experienced an upward trend in rent prices. The average rent in the Denver Metropolitan area for a one-bedroom apartment increased from $800 per month in the first quarter of 2011 to $1,234 per month in first quarter of 2017, according to the “Denver Metro Apartment Vacancy & Rent 4th Quarter 2017 OUTFRONTMAGAZINE.COM

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Report” published by the Apartment Association Metro Denver.

According to the directors of all three organizations, the affordable housing crisis has made it more challenging for clients to find safe and stable housing. Interim Executive Director of the Delores Project Laura Rossbert said although many of their clients have a full-time job, they are not able to afford rent prices in the Denver region.

Additionally, the Delores Project has three extended stay programs in collaboration with partner organizations for individuals receiving case management.

“We believe in bringing a non-judgemental approach to service delivery, so individuals can name what they need, and we can connect them to those resources,” Rossbert said. “We can’t tell people what they need; we provide access to those resources so they can move forward in their own path.”

To address the lack of affordable housing, the Delores Project partnered with Rocky Mountain Communities (RMC), an affordable housing developer, on a project called the Arroyo Village. Rossbert said that the Arroyo Village will include a new shelter facility, 35 units of low-income, permanent, supportive housing and 95 units of affordable housing for working class families and individuals, all in a city block.

In addition to supportive housing, Urban Peak also organizes street outreach five days per week to meet the basic needs of homeless youth by providing food, hygiene materials, and weather-appropriate clothing, as well as providing basic services at a daytime drop-in center, operating a 40-bed shelter, offering case management to help youth access supportive services, and running a thrift store.

“The Delores Project and RMC own a whole city block where RMC previously had 27 apartment units, and we had the shelter,” Rossbert added. “So, the executive directors of both organizations decided to explore what it would look like to utilize our space in a better way.”

“We have this continuum of services, but if you focus back on what it's all about, it’s about self-sufficiency and stabilization,” Carlson said.

One of the services offered at Urban Peak also involves providing supportive housing to youth who are ready for stable and independent housing at one of the 68 units operated by the organization in three different apartment buildings.

“Urban Peak also has a fair amount of community housing,” Carlson said. “So, typically we have somewhere between 100 and 115 [youth] that we are providing supportive services, if not the housing itself.”

Holistic Approach to Homelessness The programs and services offered at all three organization may address different needs of vulnerable populations experiencing poverty or homelessness, but they all share a similar goal of helping clients reach their own potential by offering a wide array of services.

The Gathering Place is a daytime, drop-in center that allows members experiencing homelessness or poverty to have a safe place to be during the day so they can use that time productively instead of losing time to street survival, Foster said. In addition, the Gathering Place strives to treat members with a trauma-informed approach and fosters choice whenever possible as one of the key approaches.

“We believe that everyone that comes to the Gathering Place has experienced some kind of trauma, so chief among those philosophical approaches is choice,” Foster said. “If you are here at the Gathering Place, you may choose to do nothing and sit on a chair, or you may choose to participate in every, single program we have.”

Unaccompanied women and transgender individuals experiencing homelessness may seek emergency shelter at the 50-bed shelter of the Delores Project for up to a week.

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According to Carlson, without Urban Peak services, it is likely that 30 percent of the youth served would become chronically homeless, which would cost the city of Denver almost $40,000 per year per person as a result.

“We are doing really important work for that one person who comes to us, but we are also transforming what this community looks like today and tomorrow,” Carlson said.

Investing in Solutions Carlson knows that every solution should ultimately aim to break the cycle of poverty while also acknowledging other issues that affect marginalized groups such as systematic racism, homophobia, and transphobia.

“Getting someone into affordable housing is great, but is that the end?” Carlson said. “In the work that we do, we need to talk about education, employment, relationship-building, mental health services, so you can really break that cycle.”

Based on a set of guidelines called the “National Recommended Best Practices for Serving LGBT Homeless Youth,” the future prospects for LGBTQ youth experiencing homelessness depend on implementing research-based practices at shelters serving this population such as identifying LGBTQ individuals to assess their mental health, substance use, and HIV risks.

The Center for American Progress recommends that government agencies recognize the special needs of LGBTQ youth.

There’s one thing that these three Denver-based organizations agree on: creating more affordable housing and jobs with wages that support the needs of every individual is one of the many solutions.

“I sometimes think that we humans make things complex that are not complex, and what people need is housing that they can afford with services that meet their needs,” Hafen said.

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DENVER PUBLIC LIBRARY

FINDING YOURSELF ON THE SHELVES F rom the time she was 15, 23-yearold transgender woman Ana* knew she was different—she just didn’t know how.

angry at her questions, the answers she got from them didn’t seem complete, so she starting searching the library’s catalogs of materials.

“It’s the kind of thing that always sat in the back of my mind,” Ana said. “But I never really had the vocabulary for it.”

Once she figured out what she was looking for, Ana got a friend from high school, the only one who knew about her feelings, to drive her to the Spicewood branch, even though she knew the downtown branch had a larger selection. She wanted to search away from her local area where nobody knew her, and she wouldn’t chance running into her family.

She’d been a frequent user of her public libraries around Austin, Texas since she could remember, going with her mom for books and movies, for schoolwork as her elementary school’s in-house library closed for renovations, and getting into classical music during high school through CDs she checked out and burned onto her computer.

And eventually, she discovered herself on the shelves.

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“I remember asking my parents, because I read it in a book or something,” she said. Although her parents weren’t

“I was kind of incredibly nervous,” she said.

At Spicewood, Ana learned more about what it means to be transgender through the library’s own materials and free access to the internet at a place where no one would question her search history or judge her browsing habits.

“Sometimes I find myself recommending these books I read before to people who are questioning themselves,” she said.

“I think they’ve definitely helped.”

“Public libraries are founded on a tradition of supporting minority communities,” said Clo Cammarata, 56, programs and partnerships manager at Richland Library in Columbia, South Carolina. “I’ve been a librarian for many years in different parts of the country, and I think that public libraries are very accepting to the populations who are around.”

Denver has its own tradition of tolerance through accessibility according to Chris Henning, marketing communications manager of the Denver Public Library.

A Denver native, he’s seen Colorado evolve throughout the decades. In the 80s, he saw the state’s ugly side as he experienced homophobia during his college years. He lived through the 90s, when Colorado was labeled “the Hate State.”

He’s watched the city boom over the last decade, becoming a forefront for queer tolerance and acceptance.

“I’d say it’s been more prevalent in the last 15 years, as Denver has become more progressive,” Henning said.

Along with keeping themed fiction and nonfiction resources up-to-date, Denver’s main location is focusing on growing its special collection of LGBTQ Western history, spotlighting personal objects, documents, and diaries as research tools for anyone interested in primary sources of LGBTQ life.

But, it doesn’t stop there. The Denver library furthers its message of equality to the community through programming and partnerships with LGBTQ events and organizations.

A favorite of Henning’s is the library presence at Denver’s PrideFest, where the library sets up a booth to talk to people about what it can do for them and connect with the activism that has been ramping up.

“We have a very dynamic LGBTQ work group of library employees,” he said. “We have a good time marching and showing our pride in our community and our library.”

Cammarata has also experienced cultural shifts in LGBTQ perception that have affected what libraries offer their communities, such as a major surge in the need for accurate, LGBTQ-specific health information during the AIDS crisis when she was working in New York.

“I think that libraries stepped to the forefront to make sure people had the correct info,” she said. “Libraries continue to really say, ‘Let’s look at the community, and what do we want to do to reflect acceptance, learning, and concerns?’”

Cammarata cultivates relationships with local LGBTQ support in Columbia as well.

“Partnering with different organizations in the community and seeing what their challenges are and what makes their members comfortable is a good way to make sure the library is a way of continually questioning what we can do and how we can do it better,” she said.

These partnerships are designed to help LGBTQ people like Dev Kumar*, a 35-year-old IT professional who grew up in India, a country where homosexuality was unconstitutional

until earlier this year. He didn’t have the options of the open discussions he discovered online, and when he came to the United States and as a consequence does not automatically think of his public library as an LGBTQ resource.

“I never really lived in a depression because of my sexuality,” Kumar said. But because of the law and stigma in his country, he never really came out to his parents and relatives back home, though one of his three sisters and his straight best friend have known since he has. He’s hoping the change to India’s constitution will help his LGBTQ community come into its own.

Cammarata and Henning both say that they have a lot of luck with ‘passive programming,’ a type of library service where materials for a program, such as art supplies or a themed display of books, are set out for library patrons to experience on their own time. This catches the interest of LGBTQ users like Dev without being intrusive, especially for youth groups.

“If they want to drop in, there’s board games and video games and places to meet with their friends and talk; we specifically make those times available,” Henning said. “We want the library to be thought of as a public, safe space where people are free to be how they are.”

Sometimes, just having the materials available isn’t enough.

That’s when libraries have to insert themselves into the community.

One way the Denver Public Library does this is by using a lot of social media advertising, which also happens to fit the library’s small budget. They’ve gotten a great response from their Drag Queen Story Time and other programs designed to bring together pieces of the community that may not otherwise interact.

“It’s to get people used to drag queen culture in a fun way,” Henning said. “It’s trying to get people comfortable with [drag queens] doing something that would ordinarily be done by someone more like themselves.”

In the wake of pushback against drag queen storytime in other areas of the country such as New York, Henning says he hasn’t experienced much, if any, outside objections to the Denver Public Library’s LGBTQ initiatives since he started working with the library five years ago. Still, Negative comments on the library’s blog posts that highlight LGBTQ materials are a rare example of one of the hurdles LGBTQ public library services still have to clear for full acceptance.

“If anyone pushes back, we always say it’s our mission to provide services to everyone regardless of who they love, what language they speak, whatever,” said Erika Martinez, director of communications and community engagement at the Denver Public Library.

Henning, and Cammarata both say that more active programming is the future of LGBTQ services in public libraries.

Ana said that she’d really enjoy more active programming for LGBTQ people such as herself.

“I feel like, especially for people who are in other cities that don’t have LGBTQ centers, it just makes sense for that to be the library.” *To protect privacy, some names have been changed.

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BEHIND BOY ERASED AUTHOR GARRARD CONLEY TALKS THE BOOK, THE MOVIE, & CONVERSION THERAPY

I

n 2004, Garrard Conley attended Love In Action, a fundamentalist Christian organization founded in 1973 in San Rafael, California. It promised to ‘cure’ LGBTQ people of their ‘sexual addiction.’

Over the next several decades, LIA and its umbrella organization, Exodus International, grew.

Love in Action, now called Restoration Path and led by David Jones, has buckets of blood on its hands. For years, Exodus International expanded across the globe, leaving many shattered queer people in the dust of its destruction.

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It peaked at 200 ministries in the U.S. alone.

In 2003, the Refuge program launched, which was designed to cure teenagers and adults with ‘sexual addictions.’

The following year, Garrard Conley was lodged into the belly of that beast after his Baptist pastor father discovered that he was gay. After nine long days, Conley was able to leave the program and eventually share his story in the haunting 2016 memoir Boy Erased.

The movie adaptation of his book, directed

by Joel Edgerton and starring Russell Crowe, Nicole Kidman, Lucas Hedges, and Troye Sivan, crashed into theaters and the hearts and tearducts of LGBTQ people.

It wasn’t long after the announcement of the movie adaptation that Conley’s inbox was flooded with emails from people all over the world. Most were similar to the fan mail he cherished.

You’ve talked about the two halves of fundamentalism: the logic brain and the God brain. Can you elaborate on why that is relevant right now?

“The only feedback I ever received would be in the form of an email about someone who was touched by it or had gone through something similar. It felt like a hug every time I would open my email inbox,” Conley said. “That’s not always the case anymore.”

Not long after the trailer for Boy Erased debuted, Conley received an email from a Honduras man who declared that the trailer triggered memories from his time in a similar camp. The man told Conley it was so triggering that he was planning to commit suicide. This opened up Conley to a new feeling, a feeling that his work could help some while hurting others.

He wasted no time reaching out to organizations like The Trevor Project to learn how to deal and help those who reached out to him in potentially dangerous situations.

“That kind of responsibility weighs me down a lot, because I started out to just be a writer, and you get a certain amount of anonymity.”

Right. As a writer you feel protected by the book.

More so with fiction. With memoir it’s different... I don’t think I’m going to write another one.

Well, you only have the one life.

Right, and let’s hope nothing else horrible happens.

One of the most striking aspects of the book is the relationship between you and your mother. Can you talk about that bond?

I have always been very close to my mom, so I had a certain amount of knowledge about her reaction to these things.

When I started writing the book, I was like, ‘This isn’t going to be a complete account unless I understand what my parents did and what the counselors did.’ I sat with Mom and did quite a few interviews to piece together her life. I wanted to show readers that the parents’ journey is, in some ways, as compelling as the person who’s been placed in conversion therapy.

I wouldn’t say my parents were victims, but the circumstances in which they were raised pretty much determined that they would say yes to conversion therapy; there was no other way of thinking.

I always knew I had to hold my mom accountable for what she did, but I also wanted to show that there were a lot of other factors.

I’m doing a lot of research into the origins of that kind of strain of Evangelistic thought that I grew up with, because it's fascinating to see how it’s morphed over time.

The assumption is that we’re all born sinful, and when you make that assumption, you can make a lot of logical leaps. There’s no questioning those fundamental building blocks; we’re born with sin, and you must be saved by Jesus Christ or you won’t get into heaven. Within that logic, there’s a lot of variation and a lot of creativity.

Someone else will have a total different set of answers.

There’s breathing room inside that logic, and you can pick and choose which verses apply to you and which version of God makes the most sense to you.

I feel like I have a superpower where I know how to talk to fundamentalists, like, ‘I get it; I know where you’re coming from; I get that you’re not dumb. Let’s take time to pick apart this idea that you have.’

How do you think this movie fits into the changing times?

The secular bans of conversion therapy have energized so many pro-conversion therapy people, because they’ve doubled down on labeling it as non-profit. The laws are only banning secular people. None of these bans would affect anyone’s enrollment in LIA. It’s an incredibly difficult battle to fight, because of the whole discussion around religious liberty which is being almost run exclusively by this organization and law firm called The Alliance Defending Freedom.

They did the Masterpiece cake case and won. They defended LIA in 2007 and won. They are aligned with Tony Perkins and Mike Pence and that whole crowd, and tons of Evangelicals are super excited about them.

They’re making it mainstream to say, ‘Parents have the right to choose what kind of therapy their kids undergo; they’re treading on our religious rights; we have the right to feel however we want to about homosexuality.’

It’s become sexy to be anti-establishment. Which is really scary.

Joel [Edgerton] from the very beginning designed the film to speak to parents who were on the fence or who had done something wrong to their LGBTQ children or relatives. It sort of speaks to them in that language that they can understand.

I see it as this: I have the book; we have a podcast coming out called UnErased, produced by Radiolab, that looks at the whole history of conversion therapy and goes in really close with survivors. The podcast does the history; my book does a personal, queer account, and the movie is a particular piece of activism designed for middle America in many ways.

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How did the writing of the book, and then the production of the movie and subsequent publicity tour, change your relationship with your family, especially your father?

What was it like walking onto the set?

Joel chose to shoot everything on location— Nicole and Russell actually stayed in the house together for a lot of the film; people were at the church that LIA was created at; they were there all day; everything was arranged to look like that was the facility.

You couldn’t tell that it wasn’t what the place was designed for. I wasn’t prepared for that, because the first day on set, everyone’s in their white button-downs with their handbooks sitting there, in character, talking to each other. I was just like, ‘This is too much.’ It was actually very depressing.

But I was overwhelmed and amazed by the amount of detail that Joel put into it and the expertise with which he approached the material; it was just like he’d absorbed it all.

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That’s tough, because Dad can’t really go anywhere without people saying something like, ‘Oh, I’m so sorry your son is gay and happy about it.’ And Mom has the opposite experience. Everywhere she goes people are like, ‘Oh, Nicole Kidman is playing you!’

They live in two different worlds, and I live in a different world now. And I care deeply about their representation in the book and movie. Joel visited my family’s house and ate their barbecue and stuff; we were all very careful.

Dad felt he could trust Joel. But now things have shifted a bit, and it feels like now that it’s a real thing, Dad is very unhappy, and I can’t continue to bend over backwards all the time for this person who sent me to conversion therapy and hasn’t apologized for it.

At this point, I make a bit of a mental calculation: what is my purpose on this Earth? And it seems like it’s to make sure this stuff ends and that people stop committing suicide because they feel hated. My dad’s discomfort pales in comparison to that mission.

Conley lives in New York with his husband and works as an activist and traveling speaker. He has a forthcoming novel to be published in 2020. His podcast, Unerased, debuted this fall and explores the history of conversion therapy.

Episodes are available now.

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COLORING

QUEER LOVE

IN THE MILE HIGH CITY

By Addison Herron-Wheeler Photos by Veronica L. Holyfield 2 4 \\ J A N U A R Y 2 , 2 0 1 9

Topher LeFleur models his tattoos by Ryane Urie

D

enver is a safe haven for queer folks looking to reinvent themselves in a new city. Many times, getting tattooed is a part of the process of forging a new identity, forgetting old traumas, and making new memories. For these people, tattoos are more than a simple decoration or adornment.

Because of the monumental importance of these marks on skin, it makes sense that queer folks would want to seek out tattoo artists who are also queer, who have made a big impact on the community, who are affirming and allied with the folks in Denver working for queer change.

Luckily, there is no shortage of amazing, LGBTQ-friendly tattoo talent here in Denver. Here are a few of the tattoo artists who are killing it and also showing support and inclusivity.

Ryane Urie Wolf Den Speciality: abstract and watercolor As far as she knows, Ryan Urie is the only queer woman who owns a tattoo parlor in Denver. In addition to doing watercolor-style artwork on queers and allies alike, she also runs Wolf Den, a studio where five other artists tattoo.

“I think it’s been awesome, selfishly. I don’t know any other queer artist owners, let alone I think there might be one or two women, so it’s been really cool to be a beacon for that,” she explained. “It’s kind of nice that I get to call the shots in that environment. Ever since I’ve owned my own studio, there have been more trans people that come in.

We work on making their scars look beautiful.”

Many trans folks who opt for surgery love their new bodies, but not the scars that serve as reminders of the trauma that dysphoria brings. Urie wants to make it clear that these people are welcome in her shop. She will do everything in her power to make them comfortable and help them either cover their scars or turn them into new works of art.

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Addison Herron-Wheeler models her tattos by Rebecca at Ritual.

Rebecca– Ritual

Tanner Minock– Tribe

Speciality: blackwork, dotwork, geometric, nature

Speciality: black and greywork, floral and geometry

After years of cutting her teeth in the Deep South as a female tattoo artist, Rebecca knows what it’s like to face discrimination.

Minock loves what he does and honors the process of adding forever artwork to the people who walk through the shop’s doors. When it comes to the queer folks trusting Minock for tattoos, he is especially respectful.

“When I actually got an apprenticeship, the guy was like, ‘I will teach you how to tattoo if you sleep with me,’ or I would get to a client meeting and someone would be naked in their hotel waiting for me,” she remembered. “[There’s] even clients or people liking the idea of you because you are a female tattooer, thinking you’re a Suicide Girl or easy.”

Now that Rebecca is an established tattooer with a lot of respect here in Denver, she strives to treat everyone equally, and most importantly, treat every tattoo as sacred and personal.

“That gets into my spiritual philosophy about tattooing,” she explained. “The physical and emotional transformation, being able to perform some kind of internal alchemy or transmutation, ideally you’re getting something that you like, seeing yourself in a more positive light. That’s why I’m always so grateful to my clients; because they feel safe enough and trust me enough to create something that significant along their journey and be a part of their journey. You’re permanently marking somebody, so it’s a big deal.”

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“A lot of times, the clients that come into my shop are looking specifically for a safe space, somewhere that they feel comfortable, which is why I really enjoy the shop I work at,” he said. “My boss and all the employees are really accepting and open; it’s somewhere safe that everyone can go to.”

He focuses on the importance of tattoos as symbolism for his clients as well as a way to express their aesthetics. And he realizes that respecting pronouns and individual expression is equally as important.

“I definitely think if the tattoo artist isn’t very familiar with the community, it’s important to educate about pronouns and terminology that you should and shouldn’t use, and I think the atmosphere in tattoo shops in general is something people can get uncomfortable with. Set a welcoming, open vibe and atmosphere in your shop; then people are more likely to tell friends and family they had a safe experience and recommend it to someone else.”

Juniper Wolf–Sincerely Speciality: American Traditional Wolf loves everything about tattooing, from the permanence of doing pieces on folks that they’ve been saving up for to the fast fun of flash pieces. But she hasn’t had an easy time in the Mile High City.

“I really love my community, and I have really good friends who are supportive, but I’ve also had a really hard time in the tattoo community just finding a place,” she admitted. “I’ve worked at probably 12, 13 different tattoo shops in Denver, and there is a lot of machismo and really just thoughtless attitudes in tattooing that are very prevalent still for some reason, so that has been really tough, but I’ve met a lot of really good people, and I’m happy to be working where I’m working.”

When it comes to doing a work of art on another human body, for Wolf, it’s all about respect.

“I personally always try and be really respectful of everyone getting a tattoo. I know having someone hurting you, for one thing, and having to touch you in order to do the tattoo, is a lot of trust that you have to have for someone, so I really appreciate that and try and have the highest regard for my clientes. I am the type of person who will ask people’s pronouns usually before I go into a tattoo appointment or things of that nature just to try and make it all as easy as possible for people, because I know coming into a tattoo shop isn’t always the easiest experience, especially as queer folks.

It can be really intimidating.”

Rene Cordero– Kitchen’s Ink Speciality: neo-traditional, color Lauded around town as a staple of the queer community and one of the most well-known tattooers of local, LGBTQ folks, Cordero loves featuring queer themes in his pieces, but he doesn’t limit himself to it.

“Sometimes I draw stuff like characters who are cross-dressed, two people of the same gender kissing, but not all the time,” he told OUT FRONT. “I’m very inclusive, and I try not to market myself to a certain type of individual; whoever wants to work with me is welcomed.”

His style is whimsical, and when he sketches, he thinks about how his baby nephew would respond to the pieces he is creating. If they are not colorful and exciting enough to hold the attention of a child, he moves on.

Most of all, even though Cordero loves tattooing fam, he makes it a point to treat everyone equally.

“I put the same love into everything; I feel as though, if I start favoring people and pieces, I will do better on certain pieces instead of best on everything.”

OUTFRONTMAGAZINE.COM

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Triggers Trauma and Conversation

T

he sound of rain opens the trailer for 2018’s platform game The Missing: J.J. Macfield and the Island of Memorie. The image of a blonde girl running through a stormy forest grows onto the screen before a voice calls out, “Emily, where are you?” Lightning strikes.

Japanese video game director and writer SWERY’s logo flashes on the screen and slowly disintegrates. The trailer continues with a montage of the titular character, J.J. Macfield, facing horrific harm—getting caught on barbed wire, being set on fire, running into a giant buzz saw, being electrocuted, drowning, getting sucked into a human-sized fan, being eaten by a spider, and being crushed by a cymbal-wielding toy monkey.

This damage is the only way to progress in The Missing. In order

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to solve puzzles and progress, the player must maim J.J. until she is in literal pieces. At the beginning of the game, it becomes impossible for J.J. to die. Instead, she can be torn apart and reassemble herself at will. This allows her to move through the environments of each level differently than how characters in other platformers do. Instead of figuring out how to avoid traps and obstacles, the player must drive J.J. directly into them, and then figure out how to manipulate her body parts to progress.

Playing through this type of gameplay ranges anywhere from a little troubling to completely emotionally draining. It’s even triggering, depending on your stomach for torture porn or your own experiences with trauma.

By Caitlin Galiz-Rowe

The Missing also triggered the queer, gaming side of Twitter. Games critic and podcaster Jackson Tyler tweeted, “tried to play the new swery game, but uh, i didn’t realise what the game actually was and i don’t think i am physically capable of playing it without severe, painful flashbacks which is a shame because it’s cool as f*ck.”

In the thread and over direct messages, they elaborated that because of the game’s exaggerated sound design (bone cracking, specifically), they had a hard time due to their own past experience with breaking a bone.

Tyler isn’t the only one who struggled with the game’s portrayal of violence.

Many who started the game—myself included—found the repetitive process of dismemberment, and the sounds that accompanied it, to be

and it powerfully resonates with folks who’ve made it all the way to the end.

At the start of the game, some queer themes are alluded to. J.J. is on the titular “Island of Memories” on a camping trip with her friend Emily. It becomes clear through Emily’s dialogue that the two are likely more than friends, and that J.J. is trying to work through those feelings. This implied queerness would honestly be enough to justify the further metaphor of tearing yourself apart to progress and survive in a world that is openly hostile to you.

**SPOILER ALERT** extremely hard to get through. This has likely caused many folks to put the game down without finishing it.

Geminiking3, a user on gaming vertical Waypoint’s forums, created a thread there to discuss their initial feelings of discomfort with the gameplay:

According to Art Director Wataru Nishide, the way that J.J. and the violence she experiences were crafted through art and sound design were specifically meant to affect those who play.

“On one hand, I find the characterization really interesting. As you go, you unlock text conversations with people, and I find that really cool. It’s my main reason for playing. On the other hand... oh boy do I find the actual gameplay fairly upsetting... the game isn’t as gory as it could be since you go into a silhouette after taking damage, but the SOUNDS are so rough.”

“Using silhouettes to express these instances in The Missing allows players to interpret what they see in their own, unique ways, perhaps sometimes averting their eyes, or sometimes covering up their ears,” Nishide told OUT FRONT. “The reason we made the art relatively simple and bloodless was to allow these depictions to better fit into the players' hearts and allow for freedom of interpretation.”

This use and stylization of violence sonically and visually was a direct choice that players were meant to notice. And we did.

Though folks across identities are plowing through this game, The Missing is striking a cord with queer folks. But the queerness of this game is indisputable,

The Missing doesn’t stop at allusions.

As players progress through J.J.’s story and come to its climax, you find out that she is a trans woman. J.J. has decided to live publicly now that she’s at university, despite her mother’s transphobia. Emily is someone who knows J.J.’s truth and supports and loves her unconditionally.

This revelation pulls The Missing further into reality, as trans folks often have to hide who they are, or experience physical and/or emotional violence in order to survive in our world, let alone progress and thrive.

Media in general, but video games especially, tend to struggle with depicting trans narratives competently.

The first Danganronpa game, Trigger Happy Havoc, for example, is notorious for its poor handling of a character who is revealed to be trans/gender nonconforming. Even more recently, the OUTFRONTMAGAZINE.COM

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time it takes to regenerate creating a sort of tedium, the casual violence, they seem to tie into the theme. That, plus the fact that the game is explicitly a horror game, it does feel pretty OK,” they told OUT FRONT via DM. newest Mass Effect game, Andromeda, was criticized for how its sole trans, non-playable character was depicted.

But, The Missing has seemingly managed to avoid this pitfall.

Emily, another user and moderator on the Waypoint forums, enjoyed the game immensely and found it to be extremely compelling. She could easily see a reflection of her lived experiences with J.J. “It’s not the most polished game in this mold, and the heavy themes definitely won’t be for everyone, but it spoke to me in a way not many games do,” she said in her original post on a thread about the game. “As a trans woman currently going through university, I found references in the writing to experiences that very closely mirrored my own. At times to the point that it was uncomfortable in its realness.

I think it absolutely shows that the developers at White Owls consulted with queer & trans folx while making the game.”

Emily is right in her supposition, according to director Hidetaka Suehiro, aka "SWERY."

where you need to damage yourself in order to solve puzzles, I thought deeply about what the most fitting theme, story, and main character would be,” Suehiro said of his approach to the game.

This kind of development approach may raise some eyebrows, as queer folks’ experiences and traumas are often used as frameworks for art by people who don’t fit into any queer identities, but Suehiro started with the intention to take this subject matter seriously.

“From very early on in the development, I was confident that it would never turn into a jokey kind of game.

“Even though the way we depicted a cute character getting grotesquely dismembered by a buzzsaw may look realistic, that isn't one of the themes of The Missing. The pain that J.J. actually experiences is mental pain, not physical. The realistic, brutal depictions are nothing more than that–mere physical depictions,” Nishide elaborated.

“I asked for opinions from not only trans people, but people from all sexual minorities, as well as professors of psychology, students of psychology, and acquaintances who work in areas of religion,” he replied when asked if any trans people were consulted during the creation of this game.

The intentional and targeted use of violence, combined with sensitivity towards the subject matter, gives the brutality a meaning that is more than surface level. After finishing The Missing and speaking with other members of the Waypoint forums about their thoughts and experiences with the game, Geminiking3’s feelings changed.

“I always think of games as mechanics with stories that would never be told if not for the player... after deciding that this game was going to be a game

“I think that after hearing everyone’s feedback, the basic framing was earned. I can definitely see how it reinforces the themes. Things like the

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These depictions of mental and physical pain proved to be an impactful way to drive home the message and themes of the game, but were ultimately successful because they didn’t lead into tragedy for J.J. Despite all the pain and trauma she goes through, J.J.’s experience on the Island of Memories (later revealed to be her own mindscape) helps her to come to terms with her mother’s anger and celebrate her own identity.

Having a game focused on queer and trans experiences that doesn’t end in sorrow is a rare event and one that hasn’t gone unnoticed.

“It was important to me that this story was not one purely about tragedy, and that by the end J.J had made peace with her identity and found the strength to embrace it,” Emily said in regards to the game’s ending. “So often stories involving trans characters (especially those written by cis writers) are, put simply, tragedy porn. It was refreshing to play a game that, while definitely violent and dealing with heavy themes, was ultimately about a trans character being able to love themselves and to go on living.”

Emily wasn’t the only trans woman who felt this way about J.J.’s story. In an article for Kotaku, games journalist Heather Alexandra expressed similar feelings.

“The Missing’s story, in showing both the sweetness and anguish of J.J.’s situation, helped me recall the trials and victories that made me the person I am. That’s a remarkable achievement for a four-hour-long, horror-themed puzzle game.”

CASA VALENTINA

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Woodzi PAVING THE PATH FOR ARTS INCLUSIVITY

K.

Woodzick is a multi-hyphenate creative wonder. They are an actor, director, writer, editor, producer, podcaster, marketer, feminist, and activist, for a start, but if that’s too much of a mouthful, you can just call them a theatrical mustang.

Woodzick is currently pursuing a PhD in theater and performance at CU Boulder, after originally moving to Colorado for Naropa University’s MFA program in contemporary performance. But making the move was a decision inspired as much by self-discovery as by creative drive. While working as a non-profit arts marketer in the Seattle area, Woodzick created the self-titled Theatrical Mustang podcast in order to amplify the voices of marginalized people making powerful art, while the popular press glorified art by cisgender, white males.

“To me, the podcast and my gender are inextricably linked,” Woodzick said, since it led to their coming out as non-binary and genderqueer about six months before starting at Naropa. “No one in Boulder knew me as anything other than Woodzick, other than they, them, and their. It was sort of wiping the slate clean, because until I came to Boulder, I hadn’t come to that realization about myself fully, and therefore I hadn’t created any work about that part of my identity.”

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By Chloe Olewitz

At Naropa, Woodzick felt encouraged to create work that both represented and investigated their gender identity. They created The Milo Triptych right around the time that Milo Yiannopoulos lost his book deal with Simon & Schuster, and Woodzick played Yiannopoulos in three segments that pulled from real public appearances and interviews.

they speak only for themselves, not for all trans or non-binary folks. And as a white person who was assigned female at birth; was socialized as a woman in the Midwest; and now identifies as nonbinary, genderqueer, and gender fluid; Woodzick is passionate about using their inherent privilege to advocate and educate.

“There is something incredibly powerful about taking the words of your oppressor and putting them in your own mouth and subverting them, giving them a different meaning than the purely hateful one they initially had.”

But, ambassador fatigue is very real.

While self-producing appeals to Woodzick because it affords them more creative control, they’re also clear that having an impact requires taking on more traditional roles and projects, too. Working as an actor or a director on shows at bigger institutions often means Woodzick is one of, if not the first, non-binary persons those theater groups have encountered, and that gives them an opportunity to make a lasting difference.

“I think more meaningful change happens sometimes when you’re a smaller fish in a bigger pond,” they said.

Whether they are teaching in a classroom or working in the theater, Woodzick strives to make it known that

Folks regularly approach Woodzick, either online or in person, with some version of, ‘What’s it like to be you?’

Woodzick assumes that folks’ intentions are, for the most part, good, that they want to educate themselves and are simply unaware of the existing resources that have been created by queer and trans folks.

“A lot of it is about active listening and giving folks the space to be vulnerable who actively want to ally,” Woodzick said. “But it’s also really important for cis folks who are asking for that one-on-one help, buy that person a meal or some coffee or shoot them a couple of bucks to their Venmo.”

Compensating the emotional labor required of ambassadors and advocates is one of the ways Woodzick hopes those who do want to ally will step up to the plate. The transaction doesn’t necessarily need to rely on a

ick cash exchange, but it should definitely exceed verbal gratitude. If allies can share a professional connection or open a door to a new opportunity, that makes a difference. Taking action to value advocates’ time and effort makes it that much easier for them to tolerate answering those awkward questions and to create safe spaces for allies to ‘fail forward.’

With their Non-Binary Monologues Project, Woodzick is tackling gender diversity in theater from within the worlds where its lack plays out. When their thesis advisor, Leigh Fondakowski (who was also the head writer on The Laramie Project), asked if Woodzick knew of any resources to serve the growing numbers of trans and nonbinary students cropping up in theater programs across the country, Woodzick decided that if the resource didn’t yet exist, they would just have to be the one to create it.

The collection started with a single, nonbinary monologue called Headstrong that Woodzick’s friend Daniel Byrne had written for them to perform at the Fort Collins Fringe Festival in 2017.

“Daniel was like, ‘We’re just going to make the character non-binary,’” Woodzick said. “Poof. You see how easy it was to do that? You just say so.”

As word about the project spread on social media, theater people started coming out of the woodwork to contribute their own research and to create entirely new, non-binary monologues for the site.

From original pieces to adapted, classical works, each monologue is listed with a brief, dramaturgical introduction and tags that make it easier for trans and nonbinary actors to find the right material for their audition or performance. Since then, the journey has been guided by a whirlwind of support and serendipitous connections.

The Non-Binary Monologues Project was featured on PBS Newshour, and soon made its way to the stage in Boulder and then at Denver Pop Culture Con. Colorado’s own Square Product Theater signed on as a producing partner, which led to a Boulder County Human Relations grant.

Since meeting Headlong Co-Director Amy Smith at a conference, they have been working to develop a partnership that will allow donors to make official contributions through Headlong’s nonprofit status as a fiscal sponsor. The database is still actively growing.

Woodzick hopes the Non-Binary Monologues Project will help theater communities push harder to break free of their old ways and take a stand for inclusivity.

“If you unpack that choice to cast a cisgender actor in a trans role, it perpetuates violence and hatred against trans people,” Woodzick said. They envision a three-step solution in which theaters are first, committed to telling trans stories, and second, are dedicated to telling those stories authentically, which means casting trans actors in trans roles.

Finally, Woodzick dreams of a world in which gender-diverse actors are considered for all roles in a play. “We are going to push back on the assumption that any role that is not designated as a trans role is by default a cisgender role.”

Until that world takes hold, Woodzick’s theatrical explorations of gender and identity are taking theaters by storm and blowing audiences away. When Woodzick rewrote classic cabaret tunes and love songs like “As Long as He Needs Me,” “I Don’t Know How to Love Him,” and “My Way” with gender-neutral pronouns for their Genderqueer Cabaret at the 2017 Boulder Fringe, it was the second-best-attended show of the entire festival. In directing their MFA thesis at the Made in Boulder Festival last year, the show sold out so far in advance that the run had to be relocated to the largest space the Dairy Arts Center could offer.

“I think that’s profound. It’s a profound statement that folks really want to see these stories,” Woodzick said. “Not only am I advocating, creating, and producing my own work that is exploring these themes of gender identity, but people actually dig it. There’s an audience for this that very enthusiastically wants and needs to see themselves represented on stage in a meaningful way.”

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ALCOHOLIDAZE @ GLADYS: THE NOSEY NEIGHBOR

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Pride as a Tool for Mental Wellness As a therapist who works primarily with queer people, I see day in and day out the effects of systemic oppression and bigotry on resilience. We are exhausted by society’s need for us to justify our humanity by constant misnaming, miss-pronouning, and misgendering, in addition to violence, hatred, and fear. The idea that Pride is a place where most of us feel accepted and no longer the outlier is not a novel one. But I’m thoughtful of how we rarely validate how essential these moments are to our mental health.

In my own story, I have found that being surrounded by heteronormativity and misogyny drains me. I often feel like I have this battery pack of energy that I can use to manage

those moments, and throughout the year people continuously take from it. What is essential is identifying the ways we can recharge. Is it volunteering at Rainbow Alley to give back to queer youth? Is it coffee with people in our community who we love and trust? Is it joining queer athletic leagues or social clubs? Or is it taking time out of your year to attend large gatherings of like-minded folks, such as Pride? This kind of recharge is what provides us with resilience to better cope with anxiety, depression, and other forms of mental illness.

So, my question to you is, where are your recharging stations?

Do you know? Are you aware of how and when your battery is being drained? If not, let’s find out.

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Dueling with Depression

Beat BACK the

Darkness

Photo & Column by Mike Yost

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I’m troubled.

Who isn’t troubled?

I’m back on meds.

Sounds like a silly thing to be troubled about.

I don’t want to be back on meds.

People with mental illness struggle with meds all the time.

I haven’t had to choke down those chalkywhite pills for over a year.

You’ve struggled with this for years.

Didn’t you flush a handful of Prozac down the toilet one time?

I just want to understand why some days feel like dragging a wooden cart with square wheels through ankle-deep mud.

Do the meds help?

Well, I’m sleeping again. Chalky-white pills make my eyelids slide to the floor.

Then what’s the issue?

I’m no closer to understanding why all this darkness constantly seeps into my thinking, into my perspective, into my bones. Medications, therapy, selfcare, education—all of it just treating symptoms of a lingering absurdity.

What absurdity?

The absurdity of car payments and alarm clocks and owning property and daily vitamins and feeling lonely around those we love.

I don’t think that’s something meds can fix. And you’re putting a lot of pressure and expectations on small, chalky-white pills.

So I find other ways to beat back the darkness. I reach for long pulls on a glass pipe packed with weed. I reach for strong cups of black coffee that almost burn my lips. I reach for the distant, desolate surface of Mars as a terraforming colonist in some Philip K. Dick novel, my face covered in red dust, looking at the Earth as a white pixel burning against the Martian sky.

That sounds like a cool novel. Especially if you read it high while drinking black coffee.

I reach for the philosophy of Alan Watts to try to understand how the mind shapes reality. I reach for isolation, my cat staring at me as I bang away on the keyboard at 3 a.m. I reach for drinking beers with friends in crowded bars. I reach for that brief but intense human connection at concerts, dancing and jumping and moshing with strangers to music that strikes loud sparks in the heart.

Yet the darkness abides.

A vast sea blacker than space itself. Wave after obsidian wave crashing violently against the skull, carving holes in my thinking like hollow caves at the base of a cliff sunk halfway into a furious ocean.

That sounds overwhelming.

Bukowski once wrote a poem called Hug the Dark. “Stay away from god,” he writes, “remain disturbed / slide.”

But where do you slide to?

Maybe that’s not important. Just keep sliding. Keep finding new ways to slide under the ceaseless waves. Find new ways to beat back the darkness, knowing full well it will always be there—as if pills could just wipe away darkness.

This sounds defeatist.

Or liberating. Maybe hugging the dark instead of trying to defeat it gives us the space to slide, even if it’s only an inch.

Even when we tumble back for miles and miles, falling into deep valleys we thought we escaped. We need space to drink a beer with a friend. To smoke weed and listen to Bowie. To fall asleep naked next to a lover. All this sliding while nothing is resolved.

Giving up is salvation?

Sliding isn’t giving up.

Well, neither is going back on meds.

Maybe not, but I still feel troubled about it.

Then feel troubled. At least you’re getting some sleep again.

I do enjoy sleep. It’s a great way to slide.

OUTFRONTMAGAZINE.COM

// 4 3

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