“I’ve had plenty of teachers, most unacknowledged. Bill was one of them. Bill taught me that kindness isn’t naivety or weakness. Kindness is wisdom and softness is strength.”

“Most of my time and creative energy isn’t spent on words. It’s spent on images — images that tend to be, as my own artist bio politely puts it, ‘intense.'”

Pride is the one day — the one day — of the year when you aren’t afraid. It’s the one day of the year when you aren’t trying to decide which stranger voted to take your rights away, when you aren’t worried about what bathroom to use, when you aren’t a fetish or a target.

“I think that we all need to think more about the way we are training ourselves to think. Humans are born to learn, born to discover.”

“Living with PTSD is like being a kid who is afraid of the dark. People can’t understand why you’re scared, what you’re scared of or what to do to help you in those moments of darkness.”

“I go for a lot of walks now. I go mostly in the morning. I like the morning time. It’s quiet, the whole day is open before me and so much still feels possible to me in the morning.”

This is the second in a profile and interview series from the perspective of News columnist Iden Crockett that aims to highlight people who work in the arts in the Miami Valley, with a focus on those who create space for women, BIPOC and queer creatives.

“The Fourth of July is a celebration of freedom — not a celebration of the hope of freedom, not the promise of freedom, and certainly not the illusion of freedom.”

“On June 28, 1969, the police raided The Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village. It wasn’t the first time they had done this, but that night, the patrons stood up determined to make it the last.”

“The danger to transgender people in this country is real, and the need to stand up and fight alongside us is urgent. We are a small group. We need our allies.”