I write a short story for most of my live sets. It suddenly occurred to me that I should post them here (duh!). I performed at the Northern Sky Festival in Olympia on September 6, 2025 and told this story about James Dobson at the show. You can watch the recording of me telling this story on my YouTube
James Dobson died a couple of weeks ago. Ding dong….
If your lucky enough to not know who he was, he founded an organization called Focus on the Family that was the precursor to him also being involved in starting several other organizations that today have become the anti-queer and anti-abortion evangelical movement. Focus on the Family wasn’t just anti-queer, misogynist and racist, Dobson strongly encouraged physical abuse to discipline children. He was a real piece of shit.
I’ve unfortunately known this man’s name since the early 1980’s when my parents started listening to the Focus on the Family radio show daily on the local Christian radio station. They recorded episodes on cassette, they read his books and they played his radio show on the radio with all of us kids in the car. Just in case I wasn’t getting enough anti-trans hatred from school, the world or from my mom, I could count on Dobson’s vitriol to invade my ears and inner world on the regular. Needless to say, I’m grateful that the walkman was invented. Although they weren’t talking much about “transgenderism” like they are now, I was hearing over and over that there is only one way to be a boy or a girl. Dobson taught me that who I was inherently wrong, it was against god's will and that children should be punished for going against god’s will.
Although my parents didn’t physically abuse me the way Dobson said they should, they also didn’t make it safe for me to be my full self. Hearing messages like that only made me want to make myself smaller and hide who I was was. It taught me that I should be afraid and ashamed of who I was. Those messages seeped into everything I did or wanted to do. At times I could be a fearless freak, like being the only AFAB kid in a small Wisconsin town who competed in break dance competitions. But it also made me afraid to fully embrace the things I wanted to do. It made me defer so many of my dreams as a kid and then as an adult.
I retreated to my room, my safe place, where I would draw cartoons, listen to music and dream that I would one day grow up to be a man, a man who was loved for who he was instead of hated. Almost 30 years ago I fought to make that dream a reality. Another one of those dreams was to be writing songs, sharing them and playing and singing on a stage. I finally started doing that about 7 years ago and while I’m thankful for this journey, I can’t help but wonder what my life, and my creative life, might have been like if I hadn’t heard Dobson’s words, if my parents hadn’t embraced his hate and if they had kept me safe as a trans kid. This song is about that kid and a real experience when my mom told me there was no great need in the world for artists while praising one of my sisters for wanting to be Miss America. And in this song, Dobson, makes an appearance. Good riddance to him. Maybe his death can be a small step towards this world protecting trans kids and all their dreams.