SIUSLAW NEWS ❚ SATURDAY, OCTOBER 14, 2017
LGBTQ
from 10A
“Just being authentic”
Jeremy Austen is a Florence
native. The owner of Florence Old
Town’s toy store, Funky Monkey,
moved to the city when he was 8, and
said he’s thankful for growing up in a
small town.
“It wasn’t easy growing up gay,
but it would have been much harder
in California, especially the area I’m
from,” Austen said.
That’s not to say that school was
easy for him. He didn’t identify as
gay until he was in his 20s, but he
knew he was different at the age of
four.
“I’d always been attracted to girls
in my class,” he said. “There were
girls in high school that I was infatu-
ated with. And it really felt like love
to me.”
But the attractions were purely
emotional for Austen.
“When someone says ‘I didn’t
know I was gay until I was an adult,’
I think that’s kind of BS,” he said. “If
someone has hit adolescence and
puberty, and you have sexual feelings,
then you’ll know. I had very sexual
feeling toward men since adoles-
cence, but I never had emotional feel-
ings toward men. So it was very con-
fusing for me.”
Austen found a sort of solace in
that confusion.
“It gave me hope. ‘Maybe I’m not
gay, or maybe I just haven’t met the
right woman,’” he said. “But that
never happened. It wasn’t that I didn’t
try. Looking back, that was what I
was the most angry about. How much
effort I put into trying to change, and
self-loathing.”
And it wasn’t just his attractions
that worried him.
“I am a stereotypical gay person
since I was very young,” he said. “I
was into theater, I was into costum-
ing, I was into fashion, all of these
things that were very ‘gay.’ I always
fit that mold, and it really bothered
me.”
Other students also picked up on
this. He was often bullied in school,
particularly in junior and senior high
school.
“I think I was called a f****t
everyday,” he said.
But still, Austen said that he had it
easier than many children growing up
gay.
“I hate that this is considered ‘a
good experience,’ because some kids
don’t have it as good, but no kid
should have to deal with that,” he
said. “If that was ‘easy,’ then that real-
ly sucks.”
But he also had a trove of positive
experiences in Florence as well.
While he was never good at tradition-
al academics in school — he called
himself a terrible student — he found
other outlets to boost his self-esteem.
“I loved growing up here. I was
really active in theater. I helped with
costume design at the Florence
Events Center’s very first production
when I was 14. I did that for years. I
did really well in art and it was the
only thing I took seriously in high
school. I loved my teacher. I had a
really good community in that
aspect.”
And things have gotten better for
Austen as he grew up.
“I’ve never felt threatened here,”
he said. “As an adult, I’ve been called
a fag twice. Once by a group of 8 year
olds on a bike,” he said with a laugh.
The other was a drunk man in Old
Town.
Austen has been out of the closet
for seven years now. It happened in
London at a convention to buy col-
lectible high fashion dolls, a hobby he
still loves to this day. He fell in love
with a man, a feeling that mirrored the
infatuations he had for women when
he was in school.
Except this time, it felt right.
“That was amazing,” Austen said.
“That was my coming out.”
When he came back to Florence,
he made it a point to systematically
tell everyone he was gay, but it was
difficult.
He grew up in a religious commu-
nity that wasn’t accepting of homo-
sexuality. Most of the friends he had
were from his religious congregation,
and they didn’t take it well.
“I lost 90 percent of my friends
and support group,” he said. “It was
hard for my mom, because I was no
longer part of the congregation. I
wasn’t shunned, but I wasn’t a part of
that anymore. To this day, I see people
I grew up with. They might not ignore
me, but it’s very weird when you
know everyone in town, for good and
for bad.”
Austen, though, isn’t one to dwell
on the negative. He found new
friends, reaching out to the only gay
person in town he knew, Matthieu
Korso. He immersed himself in the
doll community, traveled more and
built up his toy store.
“My customers were awesome,”
he said. “It’s not like I was telling my
customers, but they could tell there
was a weight that was lifted off, and
it’s very true. There was something
about admitting it to yourself and just
being authentic. I don’t like that word,
but it is true. It’s being true to your-
self. Definitely no regrets.”
Florence can still surprise Austen.
“For being so small, I don’t think
it’s closed-minded at all,” he said.
The year he came out, Austen
played an openly gay character in
Last Resort Player’s production of
“Cabaret.” He said that he doesn’t
plan on going on stage again, but he
felt the experience was liberating.
“We’ve come so far, but there’s
always room for improvements,” he
said. “I’m very grateful for what’s
happened in the last 10 years and it’s
definitely a lot better. But we’re at a
standstill politically.”
Austen knows there’s a lot of peo-
ple who identify as LGBTQ in the
community. He said Florence could
do better with LGBTQ rights, but it’s
not necessary.
“I don’t need to feel included for
being gay, because being gay is a very
small part of who I am,” he said. “I
don’t need a lot of gay friends,
because that’s not something I think
about a lot.
“My adult life has been really pos-
itive. I’ve done the shop for 14 years,
and it’s been great. I feel very safe.”
“I’m just me”
“In my case, I had a girl brain and
I had a boy body,” Jane Hudson said
about being transexual.
Hudson, who is the president of
Florence’s Parents, Friends and
Families of Lesbians and Gays
(PFLAG) chapter, felt so strongly
about being trans that she spent
$23,000 for surgery and $18,000 for
hair removal, fully transitioning to a
woman seven years ago.
“I tell people how I woke up from
surgery. I lay there for a minute think-
ing about the enormity of what I have
done. And I started smiling and I
couldn’t stop. My friend Patrice said,
‘Yeah, and you haven’t stopped yet.’”
Hudson is transexual, which is dif-
ferent from the term transgender. That
is an umbrella term encompassing a
variety of different gender identities
and stages of transitioning. Some
only wear clothes of a different gen-
der, while other take hormone therapy
but never get full sexual reassignment
surgery, like Hudson did.
“I know a lot of people who are
transgender who have not had surgery
and no ideas in that direction,”
Hudson said. “They’re just happy
who they are.”
But the terms aren’t really impor-
tant to Hudson.
“I’m just me,” she said. “There’s a
lot of labels, but I think more people
are getting away from labels, simply
because people just don’t fit under a
specific one. Why should I be labeled
anything? I’m just a person.”
Hudson’s long, flowing blond hair
and delicate features usually wouldn’t
give a person pause as to her gender,
and if anyone is confused about it, she
suggested people just take a look at
her.
“As long as it’s not said with
hatred, that’s how it is,” she said.
“Some people make mistakes, and
some people get it right. You’ve got a
50-50 chance.”
As for her sexuality, Hudson con-
siders herself pansexual.
“Traits and characteristics is what
I’m interested in,” she said. “I like
masculine energy, whether it’s male
or female. And I like intelligence, and
of course a sense of humor. Who the
person to me is more important.”
Hudson realized she was a woman
when she was around 6 years old,
which is common for the trans com-
munity.
“There was nothing wrong with
me. I just didn’t look the way I
should,” she said. “And, of course,
later on, I was not treated the way I
thought I should be.”
As a child, Hudson did get the
opportunity to be her true self, at least
for a while. Her father was a trucker
and would be gone for long stretches
of time.
“My mom was sitting at her dress-
ing table one morning, so I asked her
about putting on makeup and clip-
ons. I think she thought it was just a
phase I was going through, and she
just let me be.”
She passed for a girl for years until
her father got a job as a dispatcher and
came back to live with the family.
Hudson was forced back into the
closet, living as a man into adulthood,
eventually getting married to a
woman and becoming a trucker her-
self.
“I had a stash of clothes, but I was
always denying it. I mean, who wants
to be weird? It’s called internal trans-
phobia. We’ve been told for so many
years that this is bad.”
She was married for 37 years.
Hudson wasn’t open about her
feelings with her wife at first, but after
a while, she couldn’t live with herself
as a man. Hudson’s wife initially
allowed her to wear women’s cloth-
ing, but only if she wore her clothes
inside the home.
“It almost got to the point where it
physically hurt to take off female
clothes and have to look like a guy
again,” she said.
Hudson packed up her belongings,
got in a truck and left. Her wife
attempted to convince Hudson to
come back, but after she went through
her operations, the marriage officially
failed.
Hudson lives in Mapleton now.
She lives alone, which doesn’t bother
her in the slightest.
She’s since been a rather quiet but
hopeful leader of PFLAG, working to
rebuild the organization.
11 A
While great strides have been
made regarding the public’s view of
the transgender community in recent
years, there are still issues.
“They’re all in an uproar about
bathrooms at this point,” she said. “I
mean let’s face it, everything takes
place behind a closed door anyway.
Those fears are unfounded. Most of
this is the case that, people are just
normal.”
But she does believe that, for the
part, the public is becoming accepting
of the transgender community.
“It’s just not completely under-
stood,” she said. “I would like to be a
part of the community simply
because there’s more acceptance
when there’s more people. One of the
things I see as an impediment to trans
people is finding the resources they
need, because younger people don’t
know who to see to begin with.”
Finding physicians and therapists
to transition can be extremely diffi-
cult, even in large cities. It took
Hudson months to find any doctors
who even had the medical knowledge
to help her, much less the willingness.
At the beginning, she was taking hor-
mone therapy by herself with medica-
tions she purchased off the Internet.
“It would be nice to have a
stronger community in Florence,” she
said. “What I see at this point is that
people have this feeling that it’s a
conservative town. ... And that’s why
a lot of people don’t come to PFLAG.
They don’t want to be recognized. I
just shake my head over it because
it’s not that way anymore, but they
still haven’t gotten past it.”
And if they haven’t gotten past it,
how can others who are still question-
ing their identity come to terms with
it as well?
Of course, it does get easier with
each generation.
“If you look at who’s complaining,
it’s the older generation. The younger
kids in school don’t seem to have a
problem with it anymore. No big
deal. They’ve seen it; they understand
it. They have classmates that are com-
ing out. It’s going to be normalized,
it’s just a matter of how many gener-
ations it takes,” Hudson said.
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