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.

Kat Rittenhour: Navigating the world by ‘being open and honest and not taking bigotry as an answer.’

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

Published February 7, 2025 at 2:00 PM CST

Kat Rittenhour sits in her living room on Wednesday, March 27, 2024, at her home in Columbia. “I prefer to use the term ‘queer’ when describing my sexuality because it's so broad. … It's more fluid and more flexible. And so I have both a female and male partner, cis-woman and cis-man partner. And I love the term queer because it doesn't pinpoint me into a specific sexuality,” Rittenhour said. “For me, it's a lifestyle, I guess. And it's part of being—it's a community of people who just love who they want to love, or have sex with who they want to have sex with, either way.”

Kat Rittenhour is queer and polyamorous – and a Sociology professor at the University of Missouri. She spoke about navigating the world as an openly polyamorous person.

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

Kat Rittenhour: It’s really interesting being at a university and being queer. In some cases, I share with my classes that I am queer, and I talk about my partners in some cases.

That's usually in, well, my queer theory class where most of my students are queer, and we have that shared lived experience, which is why I share it with them – for representation purposes and because lived experience is so important.

Versus other classes, I might not be as open about those identities as I am in in queer theory, and I don't feel as comfortable, I don’t, you know?

A drawing with three cats, which Kat Rittenhour said represents her relationship with one of her partners, hangs from her refrigerator on Wednesday, March 27, 2024, at her home in Columbia. “I've had multiple partners for many years now. Some I am still partners with, two I'm still partners with, and some I'm very, very close friends with now, which is, you know, part of the queer experience for many people,” Rittenhour said. “And it really means my relationships can look any way that meshes with that person, however, I mesh with that person. And relationships can change, and they're flexible. And we can go from friends, to intimate partners to something in between. There are so many ways that relationships can look.”

I also struggled with this when I was doing research. I really struggled with whether or not I should include some type of positionality statement, which states your identities and how those could impact the research process.

And I ended up not including the positionality statement that I otherwise would have because of concerns about how that might be viewed – if I was on the job market, and somebody read that paper and had some type of prejudice.

Currently, it's scary to be teaching those classes in this climate, and even to be this public, I think that there the benefits outweigh the costs.

The benefits of that representation and speaking out and connecting with my students and with people in this community is really, really important, but there are fears there, as well.

My partners didn't necessarily want to or haven't all come out as poly at work, or as queer at work. Whereas I have. I have that privilege and that benefit because I'm in a sociology department at a university that they don't have.

So, it can be, you know, it's a risk, but it's a risk we're taking.

Being – having that privilege, I try to use it to be visibly polyamorous and queer in a way that many people don't have the opportunity to do.

So, I guess I address the stigma by throwing it back in, you know, the face of the person who holds that stigma and just, you know, being open and honest and not taking bigotry as an answer.

So yeah, there's a lot of stigma there, and I think that navigating it is about having, knowing which community is going to be is supportive and making that community your chosen family.

Various items sit and hang from shelves in Kat Rittenhour’s kitchen, which is an area she associates with one of her partners, on Wednesday, March 27, 2024, at her home in Columbia. “I probably feel most myself at home and with my partners, but second to that would be around my friends who have been really wonderful and supportive here,” Rittenhour said. “It's just really great being poly and being able to lean on different people for different things, explore interests with different people. I can go play derby with my partner, with one of my partners, and go to the library to sit down and read a book with somebody else and explore those passions with people in a way that it doesn't have to be intimate, or sexual or romantic or any of it. But, to be able to explore people on our terms, and where we get to decide what that relationship looks like, is really probably my favorite thing.”