What is this "Happy Hour with Cameron Stiehl" thing anyway?
Monday, November 12, 2012 at 2:42AM Allow me to share with you my Concept Summary. It may be a bit rough, but we're getting there.
Tagline:
Building Bridges…One Cocktail at a Time
Concept:
“Fear is the highest fence.” – Dudley Nichols
“Let’s break it down.” – Cameron Stiehl
As humans, we fear the unknown. We are nervous around strangers and doubly so around strangers who seem very different from us. But sit down with a stranger over a drink, open up a bit and have a good heart-to-heart talk? Many times, you’ve made a friend by the end of the night.
So, I’m inviting the world to happy hour to meet my friends. Not just any friends…these are amazing, strong, passionate gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender individuals who are living fulfilling lives, serving their communities and contributing to the world. And they have stories. Sometimes juicy, sometimes sad, often hilarious—and always inspiring. These tales are full of hope. And I’m going to get these guests a little drunk and make them spill them all. I believe that once you get to know us, the fear and fences will disappear.
Taking the “It Gets Better” concept one step further, I want to show how much better it can get. What do young gays grow up to be? How do they survive young adulthood, family issues, oppression, adversity and coming out? What careers do they go into? How do they serve their communities?
Goals:
- To show LGBT youth what they have to look forward to.
- To give straight culture a chance to get to know who we really are—beyond the stereotypes—so that, hopefully, the fear of the unknown (and therefore hatred and mistrust) can begin to dissipate.
- To bring more integration into our own community and show how all of us can get along (gays, lesbians, drag queens, etc...so much is unknown and segregated, even among ourselves.)
Guests Just Waiting to Share: (OK, this I'm keeping a secret for now, but please...if you are interested in participating in any way, please send me an email, text, comment, carrier pigeon, etc. I want to hear your story!)
Why Me? Who the heck is Cameron Stiehl, anyway?
I’ve been through it, too. At 14, I was blessed enough to fall in with an amazing group of kids (at a drama festival, shocking!) that were the most fun, creative, intelligent, crazy people I’d ever met. I was in love with them all instantly. After spending a day or two dashing from play to workshop to god-knows-where with these kids, one of them felt the need to confront me directly. His name was Johnny and I will never forget him.
“Cami,” he said. “You know we’re all gay, right?”
Ok, I might have had an awareness that they were different somehow than the rest of the kids there, but I think that’s why I felt so comfortable. The only surprising thing to me was that there was a name for it. Gay. And that it was a secret, something to be ashamed of and kept quiet. My mind reeled.
You see, I was brought up in a very liberal way by hippies. Anything-goes kind of hippies who considered “The Joy of Sex” to be a coffee table book. I had assumed the whole world was bisexual (not that I knew there was a name for that either) like me (THAT I knew) and that was the way it was. But this was different.
It was at that point I began to learn and understand about love in all its differently defined forms—and the hatred that accompanied it. It was ON. It became my personal mission to defend myself, Johnny and all those wonderful kids (and the hundreds more I have been lucky enough to become friends and/or lovers with since) from all the ignorant, and sometimes violent, people out there that just don’t get it—yet. They will.
We’ve come so far in the past thirty years since that drama festival but there’s still a ways to go. We don’t have equal rights. Scared kids are still being bullied by their peers—or worse. People are still losing their jobs, friends, family, and sometimes their lives…all because of who they love. I say bullshit. I say come have a drink with me and my friends and let’s build some bridges between us—one cocktail at a time.
;)