Aside from Christmas, this is one of my favorite times of year: QFest time! A time where friends gather together in darkened theaters to laugh and cry and share experiences with LGBT people all over the world. PGN: Where are you from?
PGN: Tell me a little about growing up. JS: Bucks County was very, very rural. My dad fixed and raced motorcycles. I grew up with the smell of grease and oil and dirt underneath the fingernails and scabs on your legs.
My mom was a bartender. PGN: A fun childhood memory? JS: My dad used to do wheelies with me on the back of his bike. My mother was obsessed with Halloween. She was an artist: She loved to dress mannequins up and put them out front. PGN: Favorite toy? JS: Good question: Those kind of things help mold you into the adult you are. I liked books with stories about children on their own that had to brave something. Stories where there was an individual alone and no one to protect it.
PGN: What prompted you to run away? There was just nobody like me that I could relate to or communicate with. So I left. PGN: The best and scariest moments from being on your own?
JS: I think being a baby and seeing the Redwoods, seeing a world I had never even known existed. Scary was everything. Scary was leaving. I was a year-old runaway, but once you realized that scary was everything you had to dismiss it. It was a matter of how to perceive things. JS: Oh my God, do you really want to hear about them? Do I want to tell you about them? I did get fired from a carwash. I was a drier and a guy on incredible amounts of coke fired me, screaming with his finger pointing in my face.
