KBIA News

Alphabet Soup

What radical courage does it take to love in the face of hate? Through portraiture and personal narratives highlighting joy, belonging, found family and meaningful romantic and platonic relationships, KBIA’s Alphabet Soup challenges the notion that Missouri’s LGBTQ+ community is a monolith.Tucked away within the amalgamation of letters that makes up the LGBTQ+ community and the complex identities each represents is joy: rebellious, resistant, radiant. If you have a story you would like to share, visit https://tinyurl.com/LGBTQJoy or contact news@kbia.org.Created by Bailey Stover.

Ellie Nixon: “Gender is a weird one for me. I'm not sure that I'm super far in my journey with that.”

KBIA | By Reporter & Photographer: Bailey Stover, Producer: Alex Cox, Photo Editor: Nick Sheaffer

Published August 26, 2024 at 1:48 PM CDT

Ellie Nixon, who is a 20-year-old pansexual queer person, sits on her couch on Wednesday, April 24, 2024, at her apartment in Columbia. Despite growing up in a home where queerness was sometimes spoken about derogatorily and where she remained closeted during her adolescence, Ellie now lives in her own apartment and has begun to more critically question her own gender and sexuality. “I don’t ever want to hide anything about who I am from the public or from myself or feel a need to be ashamed of it. But it is nerve wracking, especially when people are making comments, people are catcalling. It’s very uncomfortable, and it is scary,” Nixon said. “I actually noticed that the first time that I really went out with people on a date with someone that was feminine-presenting, I ran into a bunch of childhood friends who happened to be there. And they told me that I looked happier than I had ever been, and I continued to receive comments like that from people I ran into in public. It was just that I seemed to be more open and myself and proud of myself and confident, and it made me very happy.”

Ellie Nixon is a 20-year-old pansexual queer person who's relationship with gender is currently in flux. She spoke about her gender journey and learning to be comfortable with who she is.

Alphabet Soup shares LGBTQ+ Missourians’ stories through portraiture and personal narratives.

Ellie Nixon: Gender is a weird one for me, it's a hard one. I'm not sure that I'm super far in my journey with that. I know I like to dress and act on a very large spectrum.

I don't currently identify with they/them pronouns, but whenever people refer to me with those pronouns, I think just because they don't know or, you know, that's just how they're speaking – it does make me happy. It makes me feel good to not be fit in that box.

I do think sometimes I confuse the less queer-educated people in my life.

Laughter

Clothes hang from Ellie Nixon’s closet on Wednesday, April 24, 2024, at her apartment in Columbia. Nixon described her style as one that ranges from “a hippie vibe” to being more aligned with the punk, metal, rocker scene. “I like to get dressed up and wear lots of Gothic makeup with pretty skirts and tall boots. But I, most days, am not like that. I will have on a graphic T-shirt and jeans. And most days in the summer I am wearing men's shorts. I swim in swim trunks,” Nixon said. “I try to feel like, ‘This is what I want to wear. This is how I feel.’ And that's just how I try to go about any given day.”

With the ways that I act and dress because – even the way I speak, I might be speaking more feminine using, I guess, what we could consider more feminine terminology on one day than another.

And I don't really know what causes me to feel differently on different days or in different settings, but I definitely go back and forth.

I feel most affirmed in my gender, I think when I, again, kind of had a long time to get ready, and I can formulate a look.

Fashion has become a lot more important to me than I realized the last two years, and being able to wear something that's a mix of masculine and feminine, and to just not care about the rules, following those, has made me feel very confident and sure in myself and my gender identity – even if I don't quite know what that is.

I think I have gotten to the point of comfortability that I have with not knowing my gender identity or just being okay with where I fit into it – whether that may be any point on the spectrum – just through growing up, through going out and experiencing new things, and slowly trying to care less and less what other people think of me, really.

I think that moving out and living by myself really helped with that.

Walking around in a dorm setting, walking around an apartment complex setting and seeing so many different people – whether they were proud of the way they presented themselves or not – it's kind of just like, this is where I'm at and who I am, and I can't change a lot of these things.

"It makes me feel good to not be fit in that box."

Ellie Nixon

And I got a lot of that mentality also from – I've been an eating disorder recovery for the past five years, and a big part of that for me was having to figure out how to not care about my body and the way that other people were looking at it.

And to realize that everyone else's worrying about themselves. They're way too busy to be concerned what I look like or what I'm doing in my spare time, or at least I would hope so.

And I think really just that feeling of I'm going to be me, and it doesn't matter what other people think of me, you know, they can be here for me or they can leave for me.

It just really got instilled into me at some point after leaving my parents’ house.

And going back to my parents’ house, I feel the same way they you know, I feel like they want to see me they don't see me as much they miss me, and they're going to take me as I am. Because this is me and I'm tired of hiding it.

Ellie Nixon’s artwork sits atop a keyboard in her room Wednesday, April 24, 2024, at her apartment in Columbia. Nixon said these items represent the creative outlets she felt insecure about pursuing until she began living on her own and “experiencing the freedom to live authentically.” “I want to love everyone, and I don't want any kind of rules for that love. I just want to look at a person and see them for their personality and their being and their existence here,” Nixon, who is pansexual, said. “I want to go towards the person I'm interested [in] for who they are, and I don't want structure surrounding that.”