Raising Raul

1. You are not excluded from the human condition. You feel hopeless? You feel like you’re on the brink of tears every other hour? You hate who you were and you are afraid of who you won’t become? You’re experiencing a very real, very difficult part of what it means to be human. But thinking such suffering is abnormal and unavoidable is what will be most painful– resisting it, running from it. You can’t seamlessly execute your life with grace and charisma at all times, if ever really, and it’s in comparing whatever you are to that infallible ideal that you’ll hurt yourself the most. 2. The best people, the most beautiful people, the people who are best able to love completely, are the ones who have been wounded and scarred and have experienced the most. There is a certain understanding they bring to you, a certain fondness in identifying with what you’re experiencing and an appreciation for all the ways you’re unsure and unsettled with yourself. They have the kind of capacity to

1. When did you first become aware of your romantic/sexual feelings for members of your gender?   I feel for me it’s a feeling that has always been inside of me (my attraction to men ) when I finally had a sexual experience with someone of my same gender I already knew it was what I wanted, what I was attracted to, always. I think it’s the same as someone who identifies as heterosexual. They have always just had a feeling for the opposite sex however as they go through puberty those feelings become sexual and romantic naturally. That’s how it felt for me; Natural! However do to social norms and family expectations I resisted and didn’t accept my own sexual orientation because I did not know of it being acceptable. I had never seen gay love ever in my life, I wasn’t taught to be gay, I was raised to be straight. I knew who I was inside and eventually to me I could not live a lie. I could not lie to my mother and to those who love me. I could not lie to

R.I.P August 4, 1975 - August 28, 2007 Angie served as a mentor to so many. She was invested in the lives of so many children and offered her mothering, food, her housing, hormones, clothes, bed, and her love to so many without Judgment. Angie was made to be a mother. So many of today's young (and not so young) ballroom super stars in some shape way or form received some help from Angie at one point or another. Angie would really help anyone who needed her help that's just the type of women she was. She was respected on and off the runway not only for her realness but for the fact that she always let you know she was not the one, she wasnt called Bangie Angie for nothing. however she never kept any grudges. Angie was one of the few ballroom mothers left that was a real fem queen mother that truly embodied the word mother and lived and breathed it . Her realness legacy is only matched by few and I literally mean a few. She was a consistent heavy hitter for realness starting