(Originally Published on The Huffington Post – 1/10/2012)

I spent my 20s in complete solitude. Even when I was in relationship or around friends, I was impossible to reach and might as well have been by myself. It was a decade spent mostly alone, and I think there were many times when I felt like this was just how life was going to play out. I watched as my little brother married his high-school sweetheart, and in the 10 years since, I’ve had the great pleasure of holding their babies as they joined us in the world. Loving these beautiful creatures has in many ways made my own as-of-yet-unrealized dream of building a family an easier pill to swallow — but I have always hoped that some great love would make its way to me, as well.

In October 2010, after spending the better part of two years in single-man lockdown mode recovering from a long-winded, ugly breakup, I went to celebrate my 31st birthday with my dear friend at a local Portland patisserie. We sat and chatted about life for a while, and then I noticed this man walk through the door and sit at a table just to the right of the dessert counter. He was wearing a tight, white, v-neck t-shirt, and I found myself unable to stop staring at him. It may have been his big arms, his dark chest hair, his thick-framed Dita glasses, his pretty face — I’m not sure — but something clicked in that moment.

At one point my friend stepped out to take a call, and I took that as my cue to undress him with my mind and get down to fantasy business. (I’m not a sex maniac, but I had sworn off men and had been celibate for over a year, and my fantasy life had become both really involved and easily accessible during that time). So I imagined us getting freaky on the dessert counter until my friend’s return jolted me back to my sad, clothed, birthday reality. From across the room, I kept hearing my pretend boyfriend laughing this enormous, joyful, shameless laugh with his friend, and I tried not to stare. As we were leaving, I pointed out my exotic find to my friend and said, “I gotta get me one like that,” which, in retrospect, is a bit crass and actually isn’t all that romantic-sounding, but I figure the story’s no good if I don’t just tell it like it happened, and that’s how it happened. It may not have been poetry, but it came from a very real place.

Over the next two months I thought about this mystery man a lot, which was not a common thing for me to do when it came to random people from coffee shops whom I had never spoken to. Often, the thoughts were naked ones, but sometimes they were not. At times I was awake when he was there; other times he would appear in my dreams. What had happened to me there amongst the candy and cakes? I couldn’t figure out if I had been possessed or if I was just really horny from swearing off sex. Maybe I just needed to get manhandled on a dessert counter somewhere. Either way, I hoped I would run into him again and promised myself that I would speak to him if I did.

One afternoon in early December I looked up from my desk at Portland’s Q Center, and there he was, standing in the door of my office Read the rest of this entry »

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(Originally Published on The Huffington Post – 1/2/2012)

The first 12 years of my career were spent writing songs about loss and longing, so in some way I suppose I owe the fact that you are even reading this on The Huffington Post to my own unhappiness. Historically, I have felt most at home in heartbreak, both in art and in life. It’s largely what I knew growing up, so everything else felt foreign and wrong as an adult. For years, people being kind to me felt painful. I was terrified of anyone actually knowing me. It’s pretty fucked-up — and I still struggle with this. It’s a jagged part of my makeup that I will most likely be working on for the rest of my days.

I first learned about how sad the world can be when I was 7 years old, courtesy of a much older family “friend” who just couldn’t keep his hands off me. I won’t get into the specifics around the abuse suffered, but it was ongoing and horrible and went undetected for many years. The scars from this experience in my formative days have done just that: they formed me. They changed who I was and how I looked at the world, and they altered my sense of self at its core. All of this was complicated by the fact that I also happened to be a gay man born into a fundamentalist Christian home. It was a perfect storm for me to go completely apeshit, which I did.

I began experimenting with drugs and music around the same time, both before my 11th birthday. By 14 I was a full-blown, cigarette-smoking, drug-addicted alcoholic with headphones and a notebook who fancied himself a singer-songwriter. Those same old scars now rooted me on as I built an impenetrable wall of sadness and sound around myself. They gave me words and melodies to purge the feelings that could not be killed chemically, and I began seriously writing and recording music when I was 17. Those first songs would become my debut record, GLEE, which was released in 2000. At the time of its initial release, nobody knew what I was trying to do. I recall a lot of head scratching and people being really uncomfortable with the lyrical content, mostly, so I decided to take a break and focused solely on partying my brains out for the next five years.

In 2006, prompted by more unfortunate heartbreak of the drugged-out variety, I Read the rest of this entry »

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As many of you probably already have heard, Seattle’s evangelical Mars Hill church has just set up shop in SE Portland. The story broke via the Portland Mercury last week and ignited a controversy which has been covered in the media (both local and national) ever since.

When anything notable that’s LGBT-related happens in this town I generally expect to get calls from newsrooms wanting official statements from Q Center about said goings-on. That’s part of our role as an organization, actually; to speak out and offer up a voice from the queer community. As Q Center‘s Public Relations Manager, this time-sensitive-race-to-press stuff lands on my desk – generally all at once and without warning. This was certainly the case this past week. At 4pm Thursday Fox News descended upon my office with TV cameras. The Oregonian and Just Out had both interviewed me about the church just before they arrived as well.

Here’s where this whole thing gets tricky:

I’m a gay man who was raised in an anti-gay fundamentalist Christian church/cult. My father was a preacher. I came out when I was 14 in Nebraska (Pre-“Will & Grace”, mind you) and, well…it wasn’t pretty. My time in the church was incredibly painful, second only to the pain of leaving the church & rejecting my family, my friends…everything I had ever known. Suddenly Fox News has a TV camera in my face asking me how I feel when I hear that the co-founder of the Mars Hill church has described gayness as a cancer. You can imagine what first comes to mind, but this line of work that I’m in is complicated.

I know that ultimately what comes out of my mouth in these initial unplanned moments matters much more than any of the well thought out words I will think to say in the days following…so I try my best to speak from the heart and stay focused on the issue at hand instead of my past experience or perceptions. I’m not gonna lie, though- This particular issue is hard to stay objective about…impossible, maybe…so I decided not to.

Instead of fighting to stay removed I dove headfirst into my personal experience. I thought about how different my relationship with my family, the church and the world is these days compared to when I was coming out as a teenager and I thought about how it was that we got from there to here. In the years since coming out I have been able to change the hearts and minds of the people in my life. The once conservative views alive in my family are no longer anywhere to be found. We live in a profoundly free, new world together; a world full of love and celebration of our differences. It’s really quite beautiful. Had you told me this would be the case with my loved ones when I was 14 and miserable I would have laughed in your face at the impossibility of it all.

When I think about how this change in our lives came to be there are many variables. The common factor is me, however. In getting to know me, in seeing what it means to be a gay person through my life, my parents and these anti-gay people around them have changed their minds. It has taken years…but eventually is so much better than never. There are educational opportunities in front of my face all the time. Sometimes I am the teacher, but I am ALWAYS the student. When I heard Mars Hill Pastor Tim Smith speak in this video (click HERE to watch) I knew this was one of those times. I invited them to come take a tour of Q Center and chat and they took me up on the offer.

This afternoon MH Pastor Tim Smith arrived at Q Center with his colleague and we (along with Barb and Paul) spent nearly 2 hours together, chatting first about our similarities to find common ground and then about our differences and what that means for the local LGBT community here in Portland now that they have arrived. It was a very respectful, civil afternoon. We spoke about what all we do at Q Center, about youth suicide, bullying, queer families, the local political landscape and the state of the LGBT community here in Portland and worldwide. They spoke, we listened. We spoke, they listened. We had “ah-ha!” moments, they had “ah-ha!” moments. It was really that simple. No screaming. No fighting. Just talking. I believe we all left today’s meeting with a better understanding of one another’s perspective and with a resolve to take this dialogue to the next level.

In discussing what that would look like initially, we have decided to gather a dozen people – 6 from the LGBT community and 6 from the Mars Hill/Evangelical Christian community – to meet and dive deeper into these discussions over the course of a period of time yet to be determined. This will be an opportunity for the hard questions to be asked, answered, cried about, talked over, etc in a safe space, with the end goal being that both sides walk away with a better understanding of the other. There is so much fear on both sides of this particular coin…and we often are most afraid of the unknown. My hope is that we can replace the fear with knowledge, swap out the misinformation with education. I have seen this happen in my immediate family and believe wholeheartedly that it can happen in the larger human family as well. We are all just people, after all.

Today was a victory for courage, compassion and kindness; for being heard and for listening to. I’ll keep you all posted as this develops. I have high hopes that something really good comes out of this bridge we started building today.

In the end, love wins. Always. You’ll see.

xo,

Logan

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I can barely make out the words on the screen through my tears as I am typing this. I’ve hit a wall with being able to push down my anger about the cruelty and hatred that’s directed at me and my friends just for being ourselves. Last night a group of my friends got jumped by a bunch of gay bashing Rose Festival hill people. Everyone is alive today with much to be thankful for, but I’m fed up. This is not a political post. It’s not about fucking politics at all, actually. These are the words that are going to turn to cancer in my body if I don’t let them out, so I have decided to do it now. FUCK IT.

As you can see from the photo above, I’ve always been different. There has never been a time in my life where I walked into a room and instantly felt like I belonged there. I’m just not wired that way or something. I grew up in a very conservative home in a very conservative part of the Midwest. Other kids started calling me “girly” at an early age. This morphed into “sissy” which morphed into “gay” and sort-of spiraled out into violence from there. At the time, I didn’t really know what any of those words actually meant. I just knew that the other kids (and sometimes adults) didn’t like ME. I got beaten up for the 1st time for being a sissy when I was 8. I ran all the way from downtown York, Nebraska to my Mom’s friend’s house, crying, scared out of my mind. This would be the 1st of many encounters with mean boys to come.

(This is a photo of me getting my very first Barbie & Ken dolls. My parents did the best they could with me at the time. Looking back, I think it is very sweet that they loved me enough to let me play with dolls in the privacy of our home. Most boys like me without sisters back then weren’t that lucky. Have you EVER seen a face so happy?)

Things went terribly wrong in my life around that same time and I went inward. It became clear to me what I was soon after…that what they had all been talking about that whole time was true. I was a sissy. I knew this by the time I was 10 years old and had already begun to seek out ways of taking the edge off chemically, making myself feel better through lies, and protecting myself by being totally fucking fake. By the time I got to high school the torment had moved to torture. I was constantly ridiculed by the guys in my class and had to be removed from gym during Sophomore year at York High because they were harassing me. Eventually, I was removed from the school all together when we moved to Kansas. I decided to come out of the closet in 1994. It was a very unpopular decision. I could probably go on and on forever about how horrible it was to be an out teenager Pre-Will & Grace and how I couldn’t get from class to my locker without having my books knocked out of my hands for a full year my last year of high school, but tiny violins are not really the point of this post.

My message to all of you homophobic gay bashing pricks is this: WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU??? Why has it always been such a huge problem for me to be myself? Why do you care whether my male friends are wearing wigs and dresses to a gay bar? What’s it to YOU? I feel like I have been fighting you my whole life because I HAVE BEEN. You have never once let me be myself without the fear of being attacked or made fun of and I’m just fucking sick of it.

LEAVE US ALONE. IT’S ONE THING TO NOT ALLOW US THE SAME BASIC RIGHTS AS YOU, BUT IT’S ANOTHER WHEN YOU WANT TO SEE US BLEED. IF IT’S BLOOD YOU WANT, IT’S BLOOD YOU SHALL GET…BUT IT WON’T BE OURS. FUCK OFF, NAZI PIGS. BITE YOUR TONGUE OR WE’LL BITE IT OFF FOR YOU.

…and to my brothers and sisters who’ve been fighting back their whole lives, too:

KEEP FIGHTING. WE ARE GOING TO WIN THIS EVENTUALLY. THINGS ARE GETTING BETTER. STAY STRONG, KEEP YOURSELVES SAFE, BE WHO YOU ARE, AND KNOW THAT I LOVE YOU. I’M HERE WITH YOU. WE ARE ALL IN THIS TOGETHER.

-Logan