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.

Hallene Darland & Tina Sherman: “It is possible to be neurodivergent and to be an active member of your queer community.”

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

Published June 13, 2025 at 2:00 PM CDT

Tina Sherman kisses her wife, Hallene Darland, on the cheek in their bird room on Sunday, May 25, 2025, at their home in Sturgeon, Mo. “A lot of marriages, especially straight marriages, there's a whole ball-and-chain attitude about it. What I love most about our relationship and our marriage is we very clearly like each other. And we — even if we weren't married — we'd still be spending all this time together,” Darland said. “On the first date there was an instant connection. It’s almost this transcendental experience of liking each other and being good fits for each other, and being life partners. We go through life together as a unit. And for people that are looking at us as representations, not only for a queer couple but for a healthy relationship and a solid relationship, I like to think that we're good representations of the standard that you should have for the person in your life.”

Hallene Darland and Tina Sherman are a married autistic and ADHD queer couple. They spoke about the sometimes-complicated intersection of queer celebration and neurodivergence.

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

Hallene Darland: I have autism and I'm ADHD, so going to those events are very overwhelming for me.

Laughter

And there was a lot of time especially – and maybe this played into my inability to like participate in the community when I was younger – because there was this idea that the queer community and pride in general was just a very overwhelming, loud, you know, “We're gonna take our place, and we're gonna tell whoever we need to tell that we're here.”

And I'm just, you know, I'm more of a quiet person and I'm more of a relaxed person, so it was a little overwhelming for me to go.

I went to Denver pride. That was my first Pride and, and I think I had a panic attack in a poke bowl restaurant, you know.

So, I wish I could say that “Oh, it was amazing,” and “Finally, my people were surrounding me,” but it was actually, it was an overwhelming experience for me.

I do feel like it's important to talk about being neurodivergent and being queer because a lot of queer people don't know how to be in the LGBT space because it is very overwhelming.

And sometimes, you know, you want to be part of the queer community, you want to go to the local LGBT meetups, and you want to go to pride, and you want to be a staple and a beacon.

And then there's this other half of you that says, “Well, that's not who I am though.”

Luna — Tina Sherman and Hallene Darland’s rescue umbrella cockatoo — sits atop its cage in the couple’s bird room on Sunday, May 25, 2025, at their home in Sturgeon, Mo. “People kind of think we're crazy because we rescued this cockatoo. And then we also devote like a third of our lives to this cockatoo, and she's gonna live to be about 80 years old. You know, she's 15 right now. And that's a lot. People look at us and they're like, ‘So you're just gonna spend the rest of your life with this bird?’ And it's like, ‘Yeah,’” Darland said. “There's not a lot of people here that would say ‘I love animals so much, and I center them and their well being in my life to such a degree that an 80 year commitment to a bird is right up my alley.’ So, it's very important to us in who we are in the life that we have built. It's very much about animals and helping those that can't help themselves. And animals, they can't advocate for themselves. So, this sensation and this duty of advocating for things that can't advocate for their own well being, and to be that person, to step in and to help them, and to create space for them, it's always been a very important issue, I think, to both of us, because they're the most vulnerable among us.”

So, I think that's kind of what we're trying to do in this phase of our life, is to create a space of intersection between LGBT and neurodivergent people, and to create a space where we can kind of come together and figure out what that looks like.

Because, you know, we want to participate, and we want people to know that we're here, and it's possible to be here and it's possible to – it is possible to be neurodivergent and to be an active member of your queer community.

Tina Sherman: And to survive and live and thrive – even in Missouri.

Hallene Darland: Yeah.

Because a lot of especially queer and neurodivergent people, they really do fall through the cracks, you know, because a lot of the visibility of being in a queer community is partaking in those things and if you're just not somebody that can really handle that kind of stuff, then you feel like you're neglecting one of the two halves of yourself,

Tina Sherman: And like I'm just as queer when I go to an event as I am when I go get some groceries.

Hallene Darland: And you’re just as autistic, as well.

Tina Sherman: Yeah.

Laughter