PorterBacks Unite!

I will never get over how he always brings himself past the breaking point before the song even starts. I will never get over the way Stark sings this song, in any performance, on any day. I will never get over his trademark hand choreography and stomping throughout. I will never get over how much he loves performing this song. I will never get over his Charlie.

"We're the same, Charlie boy, you and me."

“Blessed is the influence of one true, loving human soul on another.” — George Eliot

"All of my life's moments have led to this. From the first school bullies to call me 'faggot', even though we were too young to even know what that term really meant, to the aggressive, religious and politically-sanctioned homophobic rhetoric vomited from the bully pulpits, and reflected in legislation that somehow seemed to support those bullies.

From finding my true voice at Reizenstein Middle School in the after-school musical theatre program to being told in college that my voice was too high for the American stage, and I would never work. From wielding that voice as a defense weapon by singing as loud as I could, as high as I could, for as long as I could, to losing that same voice for a time, unable to produce sound, silenced from the outside. But a necessary challenge to prepare me for what was to come. From narcissism to activism. From hate to healing. From finding a personal truth that caused a fracture of epic proportions in my family. To being a daily conduit, every night on this stage, eight shows as week.

I've waited all my life for this moment. Miss Lola appeared in my life and proceeded to cut the ties that bound me to a narrative that wasn't mine, boundaries placed on my life by others, and dropped me smack-dab into the center of a kind of healing that I never knew was possible.

Moment to moment to moment to moment, life happened, and the only thing that's constant is change. And while my heart breaks at the thought of leaving this world behind, the moment has come to let her go [...]."