Growing Up, Coming Out is a series of personal reflections from queer American designers, released every day this month. I’m sure someone has said this before, but it’s like you’re always coming out in a way. I’m 31 now, and I still have to come out to people. Not that I’m super straight-acting, but it’s … Read more
Growing Up, Coming Out is a series of personal reflections from queer American designers, released every day this month. I grew up in a suburb outside of Toronto. There were no queer people at all. The first personal encounter in my memory was my mom had an uncle who was gay. He lived in downtown … Read more
Growing Up, Coming Out is a series of personal reflections from queer American designers, released every day this month. I was out to my friends from when I was 16. And I knew from pretty early on. Seth [Altuzarra’s husband] and I were talking about this recently: I never had this feeling that I didn’t … Read more
I was very, very lucky: Coming to terms with my sexuality was a smooth transition for me, and I owe that to the struggle that all of the gay men and women who came before me had to endure. I was living in New York and my friends were all quite liberal and in the … Read more
Over the years I’ve had this tendency to say, “Oh, growing up was all great.” The last few years I’m like, “Why did I do that? That just wasn’t the truth.” I would say it was not easy, obviously, growing up in Texas in the late ’80s, early ’90s. There weren’t gay people around that … Read more
Growing Up, Coming Out is a series of personal reflections from queer American designers, released every day this month. I am from a very conservative, rural part of California in the San Joaquin Valley, and the town I grew up in was predominantly immigrants—very traditionally Mexican and very traditionally Catholic—and in the 70s, the community … Read more
I grew up in Houston. My family was Catholic, and I went to church, youth groups, Sunday school—that kind of stuff. I went to quite a conservative all-boys Catholic school, very academic and kind of old world, with priests teaching. But through working in the school theater, I was able to figure out who I … Read more
I formally came out in my freshman year of high school, but it has been such an evolution over time. When you think about what queerness means as an idea beyond gayness, which is about sexual attraction—there’s a lot of other sociocultural things that are tied to it, but at the core it’s about attraction, … Read more
Growing Up, Coming Out is a series of personal reflections from queer American designers, released every day this month. Some of my earliest memories from elementary school are just always carrying a notebook with me and sketching—I would draw images that I had seen in the magazines my mom had lying around. My mom and … Read more
In first grade I had a crush on one of my classmates and just said to his mom, “Oh—I think your son is really cute.” I don’t think she was expecting that. I was fully naive of what I may have been presenting or revealing to someone. This would have been the early, mid ’90s. … Read more