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.

Clayton Morton: "I felt confident calling myself bi after watching Rocky Horror Picture Show."

KBIA | By Reporter & Photographer: Bailey Stover, Producer: Rebecca Smith, Photo Editor: Nick Sheaffer

Published December 28, 2024 at 11:54 PM CST

Clayton Morton sits on a chair in their room on Monday, May 6, 2024, at their home in Columbia. “Something that gives me hope about new generations is that it does seem that, more rapidly than my generation, they're realizing that people older than them don't really know what they're talking about a lot of the time, and are thus willing to be more explorative and expressive about what they feel and think without feeling like they have to fit into this box that has been built for them by the previous generations,” Morton said. “Just seeing the passion and focus of young people and people my age and older that are engaging in these activist movements, and just creating community spaces for each other, provides me with some hope.”

Clayton Morton is a 31-year-old agender and asexual “ish” person. They spoke about finding the language to describe themselves.

As a note, you can hear a lawnmower behind Clayton as they speak.

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

Clayton Morton: I just never saw any weirdness in having equal attraction to people of any sort of gender.

I remember ranking celebrity attractiveness with my sister and, like, the idea that one of us should rank boys and one of us should rank girls was just never even considered.

And then around 18, I felt confident calling myself bi after watching Rocky Horror Picture Show.

Laughter

Just the makeup and like the story of the film just very broke a lot of conceptions I had coming into that point of, like, gender expression, and how different people could be attractive in different ways.

And I think I remember distinctly, like, the end floor show scene, being something where I was like, “Huh, I am not just attracted to women.”

A rainbow-painted tire filled with meaningful trinkets from throughout Clayton Morton’s life, which they said is a reference to the early 2000s video game “Katamari Damacy,” sits on a shelf in Morton’s room on Monday, May 6, 2024, at their home in Columbia. “I think that it is important for queer people, just as a marginalized group, to not only be aware of their own struggles but the struggles of other marginalized groups because we all benefit from sticking out or sticking up for each other,” Morton said.

And maybe in my early 20s – 21ish, 22, I felt sort of gender fluid, and now I would consider myself agender – just not really, I don't feel much of an attachment to any gender.

And my sexuality is still bi but also sort of ace-leaning. Not really driven to seek that in general.

I always sort of realized, or I guess didn't realize that it had to be a certain way. So, I just was always comfortable being different in that sense. I just didn't always have terms to describe it.

I've had some, I guess, inner conflict with how to approach that because on the one hand, my gender identity is just not very personally important to me, but on the other hand, I feel sort of social responsibility to be vocal, so that other queer and trans people are like, “I'm not alone, there are other people like this.”

It's been an interesting journey. There is some isolating feeling because I feel like nonbinary people sort of get erased as “not being real trans people.”

But I have also found a lot of joy from the times that I have connected with people either similar to me, or just that they've found a better understanding of themselves because I've been vocal about my many opinions and experiences.