You Wanna Have a Kiki?

Hello again, readers! You won't normally have to hear so much from me in a single week, but because we're switching some stuff around in our newsletters, we're being extra sure you know what we're doing so you're not thrown off guard when you get two newsletters a week from us, instead of one.

But I also wanted to give a bit of background on me, and explain why we broke out our original newsletter to its own standalone weekly email.

I grew up in Arizona. My roots are here, whether I like it or not. I'm an East Valley kid from Mesa: I went to Booker T. Washington Elementary before going to Arizona School for the Arts, and then Dobson High School. I was in the Phoenix Boys' Choir and the Mesa Youth Symphony growing up. My father and step-mother ran a humble Persian restaurant at Thomas and 15th avenues. And my mother worked as an elementary school nurse in Laveen, while my step-father worked at the Proctor & Gamble plant making horse fiber and gelatin.

But I often tell people I "escaped" Arizona soon after high school, and there was a reason: I didn't feel safe or welcome being a gay Middle Eastern man here, and I didn't feel like I could have a community here.

After years of finding myself in West Hollywood, I eventually popped back home briefly to attend two semesters at Scottsdale Community College before moving to New York for schooling and to live the rest of my life away from this state.

In that time, I learned my definition of community: It was finding commonality and shared purpose among people who were ethnically, religiously, economically, and physically different from me. That's when I learned to love our community, embrace it, and celebrate it as something special that needed protection and cultivation. It's also why I came back home.

This newsletter aims to help. When we spoke with more than 400 of you last year, many of you said you didn't feel there was a community in Arizona, but you wanted one to exist. So, every week we're putting together a calendar of LGBTQ+-exclusive events where you can go find others like (or not like) you. You can go make friends, understand each other a bit more, and start building the community you want here.

This isn't going to solve for everything, but it's a small thing that we can do every week to help find your tribe. As always, feel free to reach out and tell us your thoughts!

-Joseph Darius Jaafari