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.

Sophie Freeman: “Knowing who I am, I think that's pretty important.”

KBIA | By Bailey Stover, Photo Editor: Nick Sheaffer

Published March 28, 2025 at 2:00 PM CDT

Sophie Freeman sits at her desk on Monday, May 20, 2024, at Rock Bridge High School in Columbia. “I think if I could give some advice to someone who was questioning and younger than me, or maybe something that I wish I had heard when I was in that space, is that no matter what you're feeling, it is OK. And, it might change, and you should still feel that way. If you're feeling something, you're feeling it for a reason. There's nothing wrong with you. There's nothing different about you. You are OK. Like, you are good. As long as you're being kind to other people, you'll be OK,” Freeman said. “Humans are so multifaceted. I can be queer, and I can be a good teacher. I can be queer, and I can like traditionally feminine things. I can be something and also lots of other things. My whole personality is not who I love, though I love to talk about it, and I love her dearly. But, I am made up of so many wonderful qualities. We all are made up of so many wonderful and different qualities and interests and skills and abilities. And, I just hope that someone who looks at me knows that my queerness isn't all that I am, though I love it dearly. But, there's more to me. And there's more to everyone than that.”

Sophie Freeman is a queer woman who grew up in a “very small, rural, conservative town” in the Missouri Bootheel.

She spoke about exploring her sexuality during the COVID-19 pandemic and unlearning harmful LGBTQ+ stereotypes.

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

Sophie Freeman: So growing up, the narration to me about queer people was that they were weird and different and bad, and if you aligned yourself with them or supported them in any way – you were going to hell, and, like, they were seen as like predators.

So, in my head, like I had kind of walked away from that intense belief in my early like teens just from reading and like living in the world, but I still carried some of that like, “Are people thinking that about me?” Or like, “I can't be myself, especially in Missouri.”

So, it was a lot of working through previous expectations of like – what does a queer person look like and what do they do? Because I'd only known negative things.

I remember the first time, like in grade school, a girl held my hand on the playground, and we like, ran up together, and of course – like thinking back before I knew kind of where my journey was headed, I didn't think that was like anything special – but now knowing who I am, I think that's pretty important, that I can literally remember being in second grade and a girl running up being like, “Let's go.”

“Okay. I'd love to!”

Anyways.

So, my story probably started there, but realistically, it started during COVID. We were trapped in the house, I had a male partner at the time, and he would see TikToks that, like, had women in them, kind of like thirst traps.

At first, I was like, “Why are you watching those?” And then I was like, “Wait, I kind of like those. Why do I like those? What's going on? What am I feeling right now?”

So, I started doing some introspection, I got into therapy, and I realized, “Oh, I think I might like women, actually, and this is, like, news to me.”

A hand-painted sign reading “Ms. Freeman” and Sophie Freeman’s lanyard featuring a “she/her” pronoun pin, which Freeman got during Kansas City Pride, sit on a group of tables in Freeman’s classroom on Monday, May 20, 2024, at Rock Bridge High School in Columbia. “I think my experience [of] feeling not accepted in different spaces throughout the world over the past couple of years led me to be so inclusive with my classroom decor. I really want everyone to walk in this classroom … as a human and be accepted as a human. We're all in this together. I literally love every single one of my students, and I wanted to make sure every single kid felt that,” Freeman said. “It's painful to exist in a place where you know you're not comfortable, where something so innate to you and something you know you can't change is a problem for people. And, I really wanted to avoid that moving forward. So, I made sure to decorate as affirming and inclusively as I could to let them know without having to say anything, like, ‘I see you. I support you, and, no matter what, I'm with you.’”

I'm 21 at the time, 20 years old, before I knew and figured that out. So, we had our moment of, like, trying to decide where do we go from here? What do we do? But ultimately, we decided to, like, end that relationship, and then I moved on as a queer, curious woman.

Now I feel pretty settled in my identity. It took some experimentation, researching, understanding, learning about the community and the culture, unlearning a lot of things,

Now I have a partner. She's lovely. We just moved in together. I know, so exciting!

I feel like I keep saying this, and I will keep saying this, I immersed myself in a lot of media like, I was reading books by queer authors. I was watching like queer television and movies and things like that.

I was making friends with people in that hemisphere because I was realizing that was who I am, like, that was not a separate world, that was my world, and I wanted to live in it.

Unlearning specifically, I think, as a kid, I remember seeing like two people of the same sex kissing, [and] being like, “Uh, oh,” like that feeling of like, “Oh no, get away from me. Bad.”

And so, as I like, grew into adulthood, I wasn't like having that visceral experience anymore, perhaps because it wasn't in my ear, and so, now, like, years later, seeing that, I feel warmth inside.