On Telling Our Stories
For five years now, I have had the privilege of working with a nonprofit organization based in southwestern Alabama called Prism United, that serves and supports LGBTQ youth. From my fundamentalist Catholic days to my present world of affirmation and openness, I’ve always wanted to give back through my art.
I’ve always genuinely believed that we are all created with unique gifts and that it takes all of us using our unique gifts together as a community in order to keep things going. My gifts have always been artistic, writing primarily but also filmmaking. I also used to love music ministry, when I played my flute at mass every Sunday growing up. And so I continue to find ways to use these gifts to uplift and support queer people and our stories today.
Video is my film-making reel from 2021, when I lived in Mobile, AL and captured a variety of footage including real estate stuff and other commercial projects in addition to LGBTQ related footage for Prism .
Most of us already know what it feels like to have someone else tell our story–or worse yet to have our story overlooked. To share our lived experience, yet be rejected, talked over, or ignored. In fact, when I came out, I had a family member who I now joke tried to filibuster me out of being trans by literally never giving me a chance to speak.
Often, this is what being trans in the Catholic Church feels like, especially when people in the comments of social media posts fixate on my trans identity itself, ignoring everything else I have to say and making it a goal to discredit me specifically because of my identity. Has something like that ever happened to you? Because you’re a woman? Because you aren’t white? Because you aren’t from “an important family”? It doesn’t feel good. And I can’t picture Jesus treating someone that way (more the opposite, in fact).
Our stories are important not just for community and respect and listening, but also for memory. Sharing our stories is how we remember together. It’s a totally simple and free way to expand our own horizons–it just costs a little time.
I feel that expansiveness when I work with Prism, listening to stories from young trans boy who has always lived in the south and always known that his gender doesn’t fit the script or from a retired gay bar owner who was there when in-person encounters were some of the only ways queer people could find each other.
From story to story, the details change, but I feel the threads that connect all of us in the common experiences that make us smile or wince, and just the beautiful variety of LGBTQ life. There’s always a few big extroverted characters, stepping out on the town in their fiercest outfit, but there’s also the quiet but present people who kept showing up day after day, week after week, and together, built a movement.
These are the stories the rest of the world might never listen to that we keep telling anyway. For the young people who feel like there are no examples to grow up to. For the elders to honor the journey and celebrate the richness of gay lesbian, bisexual, transgender, asexual, queer life.
I’ll be working with Prism some more this summer, capturing more stories and scenes of LGBTQ life in the city where I first started with my own transition. I have been challenged by this place and it’s a joy and an honor to celebrate these people. And in my own way, it’s how I can use my own unique gifts to contribute something beautiful to the chorus of the human family.
View the “Who We Are Campaign“ that Max filmed with Prism United here.
Or, check out a recent essay from Max around the web “What happens when Bishops listen to trans Catholics” published on the Outreach website.
