An 8-Year-Old Girl Asked To Meet Me. When We Came Face-To-Face, I Had To Hold Back Tears.

In 2015, I had the honor of being featured on a billboard for the Portland Timbers soccer club. The process of being chosen was intense. Hundreds of Oregonians competed for online votes and pushed for their photo to be selected. After a week of voting, my picture was picked as a winner!

As a butch lesbian who always felt like an outsider, I was honored, humbled and terrified all at once. I had spent much of my lifetime hiding who I was from the world. But there I was, on a 20-foot billboard, muscles flexed, as I posed with two axes over my shoulders in an image that flaunted a bravado and confidence that I never could have imagined.

What a transformation I had made from a closeted little girl who was scared to admit she was gay to an out, big butch lesbian on a billboard. It was a very proud and monumental moment of my life, and it led to my meeting a young girl named Snapper.

A few years after the billboard went up, a client asked if I’d meet with her friend, whose 8-year-old daughter, Snapper, had come out as gay. I was confused as to why this young girl wanted to meet me, as she knew nothing about who I was except that I was on a billboard. I neither had children nor particularly wanted them, so was lost as to what I could offer this young girl.

Thinking about Snapper made me think of my own childhood. I grew up as a closeted lesbian in the late 1970s. For most of my adolescence, I thought I was simply a tomboy, as I always gravitated toward stereotypical boy activities, like playing with toy trucks and digging for hours in the mud. I almost always wore jeans, usually with holes in the knees, and T-shirts covered with dirt. The phrase “she’ll grow out of it” was tossed around so much that I started to feel like it was