Interview with Raleigh Clough

In my second interview in the series, I am talking with one of my favorite humans and someone I can talk to for hours. He is a beautiful soul who is constantly teaching me what it looks like to love yourself, your body, and how taking up space can look like pure kindness with a touch of sass. He is fearless and vulnerable and everything I aspire to. I hope you enjoy watching/reading as much as I enjoyed the conversation.

Ricky: Thank you so much, Raleigh, for taking the time to talk to me today. I really appreciate It.

Raleigh: It's my pleasure.

Ricky: So let's start off. Just tell us a little bit about yourself, like who you are, what you do, whatever you're comfortable sharing.

Raleigh: Sure. My name Is Raleigh. I'm 56. I am a physical therapist. I am married to my beautiful husband for just almost a year and a half now. Before that, I was married to a woman for almost 30 years. You know, grew up very conservative, fundamentalist Christian and did the things that, you know, that I was taught to do at that point in my life. But yeah, I'm still, It was an amicable divorce. I'm still In good relationship with her. I live In the Portland, Oregon area. Love It here. I'm just, I'm happy to be here and chat with you about life.

Ricky: And several of us will be In Portland very soon. I'm really, really excited about that.

Raleigh: know I'm excited to be a part of that weekend as well.

Ricky: So how do you identify today and what was that journey like?

Raleigh: I Identify as queer. That's my vocabulary of choice. When pressed, I would also say that I am a... Ooh,I love this language. I love how expansive our language Is. I'm definitely a gay man, but I like queer better because It's more expansive and It feels Inclusive to me and It helps me to feel like I'm standing In solidarity with my non-binary and trans kin and friends and chosen family. Yeah, demisexual, um, polyamorous. There's a lot of words, um, and they all have deep meaning and they help me, um, understand myself and be able to communicate myself better to other people. So yes, I am polyamorous, demisexual, gay man who chooses the label queer. How about that?

Ricky: I love It. I love It. Well, and I think more than ever, It's Important for us to be In solIdarIty with the rest of our

I have really, over the last couple of years, also kind of changed to queer as an identifier. Yeah, quite the journey, being married to your wife and then now married to your husband. What was that journey like?

Raleigh: So I came up in the mid to late 1980s, which was for a queer person that era was dominated by one thing, and that was AIDS. And I was experimenting; I was deeply closeted. I grew up Seventh-day Adventist. I went to church school. So, I was deeply enmeshed In my church culture, which was non-affirming, distinctly non-affirming. But there were other kids at my school that were definitely queer. So, I mean, I had people to connect to. I had some experimentation. I was really Intrigued by It, but I was also terrified by It. And so I had some unfortunate experiences with sexual assault In my teenage years, In my last year of high school and the next year after that. And one of my dear friends that I confided in about some of that was a woman who was became my best friend. And as I started looking at the choices I was making In life, I believed that If I chose to embrace my attractions and my orientation and follow that path, that I would probably be dead In a few years, either from drug addiction or AIDS. And so I chose to kind of like turn my back on all of that and intentionally start to lean Into and connect Into my relationship with her. She knew about my orientation. She knew about my struggle with the language of the time, my struggle with same sex attraction. And, and we supported each other as really dear friends. And there was a romantic element to It. So, we chose to, we chose to get married and pursue our life together. We weren't able to have kids, which was actually a relief to me because I don't think I ever wanted them, but we kind of went through our own separate grieving journeys through that. Over the course of our 20-some year marriage, we both evolved In our understanding of both faith and spirituality and human sexuality, both of us on our own individual, yet some intersecting deconstruction journeys and understanding and becoming more affirming. So, It was...A journey of actually at some point, I would say In probably about 2015, 2016, I chose to come out as bisexual. I had actually always In my adult life, I had always been to some degree out to our church community as a man who struggled with same sex attraction. And we were held up as the poster children of how to manage that. I participated In conversion therapy efforts for over a decade. And so there's some things that I have some regrets about. There's some things that give me some anger about that. But that w