Alexis Floyd has been living her best queer life for years — and this week she was ready to share that publicly with the world for the first time on an episode of the Made it Outpodcast.
The conversation began with host Mal Glowenke asking Floyd about her upbringing in a military family. Floyd shared that while her father didn't serve in the military it heavily influenced his parenting style. “There's a sense of formality and protectiveness that has a positivity to it. I think where it becomes challenging is when you internalize that sort of systematic way of relating, and then it makes being self-expressive, especially for someone like my dad, who's the youngest of five, black military family in Texas discovers that they're gay and does not feel like that fits the framework that makes the family function,” she recalled. Adding that what she didn't know growing up was that her father was gay. “It really never is too late and it took an extraordinary amount of bravery for him to come out in his fifties to his family and he continues to exercise that bravery now. My mom is the same way, so I give them so much credit.”
In some ways, his story echoed her own. “So funnily enough, I was pretty closeted growing up,” she said of her queer journey. “I've had relationships with people of all sorts of gender identities. So I myself, I'm still looking for a definition. I love the word queer because it sort of holds it all,” she continued. “ I had connections with men, women, non-binary folks, trans folks because I was in the theater community. And so I was blessed to have a whole community of people who were just colorful, you know. And when you're younger, too, you don't necessarily have the words for it or need them yet.”
While she has long been out to her family, she struggled with opening up publicly. “I still and something I'm still navigating is this internalized feeling of not being queer enough to like, like to be honest, like this is the first time I'm really publicly speaking about my queerness on a formal platform.”
It was finding the word queer that ultimately allowed her to embrace her truth. “What I love so much about the word queer again is like it is, it is like an ever expansive sort of container, which is just to say like, you can be embraced here if you want to be embraced here. And that is kind of the end of it, you know?”
She recalled that her queer awakening happened in stages. “, I was pretty young, like probably fifth grade. I remember having a crush on a girl and hanging out with her and kissing at a playdate,” she recalled. “Then that just sort of continued through my life where in college, again, like, yeah, I would date trans folks, non-binary folks, like all sorts of folks.”
But truly it was doing work for the Trevor Project that solidified things for Floyd. “ when I started working at the Trevor Project, that was one of my sort of survival jobs, which ended up being a survival job on a very deep level,” she recounted.
It was during training to be a phone counselor that she had a final epiphany. “I could have just walked away from the training, having had tools like a human being, navigating the world that would have changed my life. Like before I even got on the phone with anyone for the first time, which is a whole nother level. But the way that you learn how to hold space and use words that again are expansive and not limiting. It's as simple as that.”
Everyone’s coming out journey is different, and no matter how you get here the LGBTQ+ community is glad to welcome you. Floyd's story and its emphasis on bravery, exploration, and expansive acceptance is particularly poignant in this moment and a reminder of why coming out whenever, however remains so powerful.
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