Pride Month Announcements: New Merch, new episodes, new Homestead! – Homestead on the Corner
Sigh. Take a sip of coffee, and begin again…
Hello. My name is Wray Van Winkle, and I am a nonbinary trans woman.
A little over 5 years ago, I began another coming out post in a very similar way. Back then, I’d only just begun producing the original Homestead on the Corner anthology – I’d met a number of friends through my work with local theatre groups and was starting to take small acting roles in a number of productions as well. I thought – I really believed – that I had myself figured out at that point. That I’d finally cracked the code and figured out why I’d always felt so isolated and different from my peers, and that my journey of soul searching and self examination was finally over.
Oh how very wrong I was.
About five months later, COVID arrived in full force and completely shut down the world I’d known. I began writing and producing The Sheridan Tapes in reaction to that sudden change, and found a level of success I never could have anticipated. I found new friends and deepened existing friendships online as I met new people who listened to and worked on the show. And as 2020 rolled into 2021, I found myself back in Oregon, living with family and having little to do but write and work and sit with my own feelings… and I began to feel like something wasn’t quite right. That it hadn’t been right for a long, long time.
Midway through season one of the podcast, as the show began to attract a larger and queerer audience than I’d expected from all across the world, a number of listeners began to share posts speculating on Sam’s identity, particularly when it came to gender. It’s not hard to see why, looking back on it – Sam was a character who died and was supernaturally reborn, going through a long process of self-examination and growth to uncover truths about himself that had been suppressed since childhood. And as people began to headcanon Sam as belonging to various identities under the transgender umbrella, I found myself doing the same… and found myself enjoying playing him far more than I had all season.
My relationship with Sam as a character is… complicated, to say the least. By the end of the show, I’d been playing him for nearly five years including the original release of “Case Notes,” and all that time I’d alternated between loving and hating the fact that I was the one giving him a voice. But the fact remains that once I too started to headcanon Sam as trans and write it into the subtext of the story, I suddenly found it much easier and more enjoyable to step into the recording booth and do his lines. Moreover, I found it easier to understand and relate to him and his story, though I didn’t really understand why.
***
I think you can all see where this is going, so I won’t belabour the point. As obvious as it seems in hindsight, it still took me the better part of a year to realize what I was missing. The egg cracked very slowly for me, but during the first few months of producing Tales of the Echowood, it finally broke. It was not an easy time for me, nor was it an easy thing to accept about myself – I knew all too well how hostile the world can be to trans people, and to trans women in particular. But in the end, it just got to the point where I could no longer deny the call, and on a spontaneous daytrip to the Oregon coast – alone in the woods near the spot where I wrote that very first coming out post – I finally let that image of my old self go.
The next few months were a whirl of experimentation and self-discovery. I shaved my horrible little goatee (a remnant of my past attempts to over-perform masculinity), bought a bunch of cheap skirts online, tried on makeup for the first time, and by Christmas of that year, I was prescribed feminizing Hormone Replacement Therapy. I’ve been on hormones for the better part of three years now, and I couldn’t be happier with how my body and brain feel. I’ve made dozens of new friends and came out to old ones as I felt comfortable. I found love, as I realized my asexuality, while still a part of me, was definitely overstated as a result of dysphoria about entering any kind of relationship as a man (I’m bisexual, by the way, should probably mention that here too). And I’ve found a name and an identity that finally feel like they belong to me… that feel like home.
Do I think I’m done figuring myself out? Absolutely not. Coming out, as I know all too well, is a never ending process, and while this is my first step towards learning how to live and create openly as my authentic self, it’s certainly not going to be the last. And that’s okay. I kept all of this hidden from almost everyone in my life for years due to a fear of possible repercussions in my personal and professional life. I’m honestly still scared of those repercussions, especially given the time in history where I’ve decided to very publicly come out as trans. But I refuse to allow the fear of would-be autocrats and populist demagogues to dictate how I live my life any longer. I am who I am, and I don’t feel like I can continue to create in a meaningful way while hiding the deepest and truest parts of myself from those who take part in my work.
All of this is a big reason why my very ambitious plans for the end of 2024 fell through. The untimely death of my beloved cat Frankie back in August certainly played a part, but even though I’d written two of the planned season 4 b-sides and fully produced one of them, the thought of releasing another episode while hiding behind a pseudonym in the credits eventually became unbearable, and I decided to go back to my original plan for the rest of this year… that is, to give myself a goddamn break for once in my life.
I’m sorry I overpromised yet again – this is a pattern I am all-too-aware of, and I’m trying to work on being better at knowing and planning for my own limitations, especially now that I’m working as a solo creator once again. More podcast stuff is coming, I promise… just probably not for a little while. I’m immensely thankful to say that freelance editing work has been keeping me very busy over the past few months, and as Feminist Fairytales gears up for production yet again and I’m beginning to step into a bigger role with the team at LegendLark, the time available for my own personal projects will be a bit more limited than it’s been in the past. Even so, I’m working to find a more sustainable way to approach writing and producing my own stories through Homestead on the Corner going forward, especially now that I feel more free to express myself and write more openly about the things I truly care about. I’d just like to ask that you all be patient with me as I sort everything out, and expect that when content begins appearing on our feeds again, it will be a bit slower than it used to be.
***
It’s strange… when I wrote that first coming out post all those years ago, I felt much more of a need to explain and, in some ways, defend myself. But honestly, I’m done trying to make excuses for myself or justify my identity to strangers on the internet. Sure there’s more that I could say, but honestly, the season of oversharing about my personal life online has been over for a while now. This is all you really need to know: I am trans. I’m a woman. I’m nonbinary. I use she/they pronouns. I’m bi. I’m grey-ace. I am loved. I am myself. I am enough. And so are you.
I honestly just wish I hadn’t missed transgender awareness week, but what can I say… better late than never.
Homestead on the Corner 