Blind Prophecy

I am a 30-something queer activist and writer living in Cincinnati for a year as I prepare to begin law school at Fordham University School of Law.

Most recently, I spent two years living in “gay Mecca” – San Francisco – where I worked as the communications guy for Out & Equal Workplace Advocates, a national LGBT-rights nonprofit organization focused on workplace equality.

Prior to that, I served as the coordinator of Utah Pride 2006 in Salt Lake City. I have also held positions as the publications manager for the Sundance Film Festival, editor of Salt Lake Metro (now QSaltLake), and editor of QVegas magazine (formerly Las Vegas Bugle). My activist days stretch back to my college years at the University of Nevada, Reno, where I graduated cum laude with a bachelor’s degree in theatre arts.

Highlights in my political and social activist activities include helping organize the first ever Reno Gay Pride in 1997, membership on the staff and board of Equal Rights Nevada, youth program director for the GLBT Community Center of Las Vegas, five years as a board member and committee chair for Las Vegas Pride (including two years on the executive committee), founding committee member of the Las Vegas National Coming Out Day Festival, membership on the Utah Pride Center board of directors, and more.

At UNR, I was heavily involved in the campus theatre program, student publications such as the Artemisia yearbook (co-editor 1995-96) and Sagebrush newspaper (Arts & Entertainment reporter 1995-98), along with participation in community theatres such as Bruka and The Actory. Following graduation, I spent a summer working for a dinner theatre in Denali Park, Alaska, then I volunteered occasionally with Las Vegas’s LGBT theatre company, Center Stage Inc. I don’t have much time for theatre these days, but still love to dream about Broadway and I never stopped listening to original cast albums.

I was raised Mormon, but left the religion as a teenager (a few years before coming out as a gay man). For several years I followed a Pagan/Wiccan path and joined the South Valley Unitarian Universalists Society, but nowadays I embrace my atheist reality.

Other labels that sometimes stick and sometimes don’t: radical liberal queer, anti-gun activist, civil rights activist, pro-choice feminist, anti-assimilationist, cheerleader for gay Las Vegas (that one made it in print), Buffy the Vampire Slayer and X-Men fanboy, showtune queen, and Cherry Poppings (a.k.a. the Nevada Gay Rodeo Association’s Miss Closet Ball 2002).

In my free time, I enjoy reading, playing video games, blogging, and amateur photography. I’m fighting genetics and years of bad habits to try and get into better physical shape, but I’ve basically been overweight since I was 12, so there’s a lot of work to do.