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.

Anna Porter: "The people that matter to me are the people that will accept me for who I am."

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

Published February 21, 2025 at 2:00 PM CST

Anna Porter, right, sits with Lydia Bennett, left, with whom she has been partners for about the past year on Tuesday, April 2, 2024, at Porter’s apartment in Columbia. Porter is bisexual and polyamorous. “My journey kind of started growing up in a pretty conservative religious household. There wasn't a lot of talk about being gay or being queer in any way other than, ‘It's just a sin.’ And so the transition to college was a really interesting time for me because I kind of got out of my bubble and started to meet a lot of people that were much different than I was. And I was like, ‘Well, this is really cool. It's awesome to meet all of these people and start understanding their stories and learn through them,’” Porter said. “And I think, through that process, I started to feel more comfortable kind of delving into my own identity and went through sort of a process of figuring out, ‘Hey, maybe I also like women as well as men.’ And I think that was just a really big time for me to explore that part of myself.”

Anna Porter is a 30-year-old bisexual and polyamorous woman. She spoke about how going to college – and moving away from her religious upbringing – gave her the space to explore her identity.

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

Anna Porter: So, I grew up – I was the oldest of five children. I grew up in the South, in the Baptist Church. Went through a lot of different Baptist churches.

My family moved around a lot when I was younger, and yeah, that was, I don't know, it was a really interesting time for me.

I think in the particular religious culture that I grew up in, there were a lot of expressions of who I was that were not allowed.

I've always kind of been a very outspoken kid. I was always labeled bossy or told that I would be a great lawyer when I grew up.

A salt cellar, which Anna Porter’s partner Lydia Bennett gifted to her, sits on a table on Tuesday, April 2, 2024, at Porter’s apartment in Columbia. “I think Lydia shows that she cares in a lot of ways. I think Lydia is someone who will pay attention to small things, and then they come up later. We went antique shopping a few months ago, and I just mentioned one time that I wanted a wooden salt cellar, and I was on the lookout for this,” Porter said. “And Lydia surprised me a little bit later with this one. She burned the image of the giraffe—my favorite animal—and her initials on the bottom of it. It was an example of what a thoughtful and attentive partner she is to me.”

And so, I think that kind of expression, while maybe okay within my own immediate family, was frowned upon in the religious culture that I grew up in, yeah, and so I think that was that was difficult to grow up in at times.

And I think for me, going to college was a way to kind of fight back against that culture that I had grown up in, and be able to express myself a little more freely and wear what I want and do a lot of the things that I had not been allowed to do up until that point.

Really, the first time it started coming up, I studied abroad in Spain for a year in college, and I met a lot of different people. I started hanging out with a group of friends in Spain who were very queer and very out and proud about their queerness.

And I just thought it was so cool that they could so authentically live their lives and be in the relationships that they wanted and love who they wanted.

And so, I think through kind of that process and seeing them be so open with their lives, it was easier for me to start to explore that, and to just, yeah, start engaging in relationships with other people, and explore that for myself and what that looked like.

And I think the process of it was hard at times – there was a lot of guilt at times because of my upbringing and kind of battling some of the internalized homophobia that I had grown up with.

And I think as I began to push through and explore that more, it's just really become something that's made my life so much better – being able to live and be the way I want to be and not feeling like I have to hide that from other people.

Because the people that matter to me are the people that will accept me for who I am at this point in my life.