Coming Out in the Great Outdoors

Lack of representation is one of the biggest issues facing the LGBTQ+ outdoors community. Queer adventurers don’t often see themselves represented in the marketing campaigns and media narratives of mainstream brands and companies, but queer people are out on the roads and trails doing awesome things outside every day, and today’s guest is forging the trail for LGBTQ+ representation in the outdoor adventure world with determination and infectious joy. Today In the Den, Sara is joined by national parks expert and endurance athlete Mikah Meyer to talk about a journey that shaped him, the friendships that sustained him, and the vision he’s building for a world where every person can step outside—into nature, into community, into themselves—and know they belong.

Special Guest: Mikah Meyer

Called a "professional road tripper" by REI, Mikah's 3-year, world record road trip to all 419 U.S. National Park Service sites made him the first to experience all federal parks in a single journey. He's continued that passion in the 2020s with the creation of the Outside Safe Space Program, which provides allies a simple way of making The Great Outdoors more accessible for LGBTQ+ people. Since its launch in 2020 with a Run Across Minnesota, it has sold over 100,000 symbols, become carried by REI stores nationwide, and Mikah has raised awareness for the OSS Program through a Run Across Mississippi, Run Across Nebraska, Bike Across Oregon, and other "Across" projects. The symbol's creation has helped Mikah consult major brands on the design and implementation of their first Pride products, and spawned workshops, including keynote speaking for Kansas City Design Week, about inclusive marketing to the $1+ trillion dollar LGBTQ+ purchasing power community in the United States, and beyond.

Links from the Show:

• More on Theodore Roosevelt 
• Buck Island
• Outside Safe Spaces Logo Gear
• Canyon Chorus Documentary 
• Join Mama Dragons today

In the Den is made possible by generous donors like you. Help us continue to deliver quality content by becoming a donor today at www.mamadragons.org. 

Transcript

SARA: Hi everyone. Welcome to In the Den with Mama Dragons, a podcast and community to support, educate, and empower parents on the journey of raising happy and healthy LGBTQ+ humans. I’m your host, Sara LaWall. I’m a Mama Dragon myself and an advocate for our queer community. And I’m so glad to be part of this wild and wonderful parenting journey with all of you. Thanks for joining us. We’re so glad you’re here.

Lack of representation is one of the biggest issues facing the LGBTQ+ outdoors community. Interestingly, queer adventurers don't often see themselves represented in marketing campaigns or media narratives or mainstream brands and companies. But here is the thing: queer people are out on the roads and trails and doing awesome things outside every day. And today's guest is forging the path for LGBTQ+ representation in the outdoor adventure world with determination and infectious joy. You are going to love this conversation. Today, we're joined by adventurer, storyteller, and LGBTQ+ advocate, Mikah Meyer, whose journey across all 419 U.S. National park sites became more than a world record. It became a calling. And through that experience, Mikah began to name what so many had felt, that these vast shared public lands haven't always felt welcoming or safe for LGBTQ+ people. And out of that realization and his own story and experience navigating identity and belonging and grief, he created Outdoor Safe Spaces, an initiative that invites visibility, safety, and allyship into the outdoors, making them as recognizable as a trail marker. But Mikah's work doesn't stop there. His award-winning documentary, Canyon Chorus, takes us deep into Utah's Desolation Canyon following a group of gay men, friends, mentors, chosen family, as they raft together through the landscapes and deeply personal terrain. It's a beautiful story of friendship and coming out and coming into oneself, and the kind of belonging that becomes possible when people are finally free to be fully seen and loved. Today, we're going to talk with Mikah about all of those things and that journey, and everything that launched this passion for the outdoors, and his beautiful career. Mikah, welcome to In the Den. It is so good to have you with us. I'm so excited for this conversation.

MIKAH: Yes, it's a pleasure to be with you virtually after we met in person, gosh, just a little less than two months ago.

SARA: I know! I have just been so captivated by your story, by all the bits of it. First captivated because I hail from a beautiful state that's full of parks and gorgeous landscape. And so this love for the outdoors, it feels very special. And I'm astonished by folks who have done massive endeavors, like visiting every single national park site, or riding their bike across the country. But then your story about weaving that into identity, to your coming out and kind of blazing a trail, really, for queer folks in the outdoors has been really inspiring. And I want to talk about all the cool things that you've done and all the accolades you've received. I do want to mention some of those. The first Openly Gay Man featured in an outdoor recreation campaign with REI, sponsored by REI at some point. Your work nationally recognized by NBC during New York City's World Pride in 2019 as one of their Stonewall Pride 50 Innovators and Changemakers, alongside the likes of James Baldwin and Marsha P. Johnson. My goodness, what an honor. And of course, I like the fun one, the sexy travel guru from the gay cities. That must be really fun, too. And so I want to talk about all of that. But I want to go back to the beginning because this all started, you share very openly, with the death of your father. And your work is really integrated into your story and your coming out and representation. So let's start there. Tell us a little bit of your story and how it got you here.

MIKAH: Yeah, well, probably fairly appropriate for the Mama Dragons. My story has a lot of faith connections. So my father, at one point, was the pastor, the campus minister of America's largest Lutheran campus ministry which was at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

SARA: Wow.

MIKAH: Go Huskers. And at one point during his tenure there, he received what's called the Distinguished Service Award, which is given annually to essentially the best Lutheran campus minister in America. So my dad was known throughout the Lutheran Church. They say he was responsible directly for sending over 100 students to seminary to become pastors themselves. And so, I sort of grew up in this – shadow is the wrong word –  but with an understanding that I, as part of his family, was under a microscope and that there were expectations of how I was to be as part of a representative of that family of America's best Lutheran campus pastor. So that was a large part of my upbringing. And then really my dad influenced my life in ways I never could have imagined when he died and that's because I was 19, and he was 58. And it totally shook me from this idea that I'd grown up with, that I think most of us grow up with, assuming that if we go to school and work hard and get a good job that we'll make it to 65, and then we'll get to do all those things we've been dreaming about our whole life that take more than two weeks vacation. And when I saw him pass away at age 58, I realized that that was not going to be the case for everyone. And it just totally shifted how I lived my life. I was the good midwestern Lutheran pastor's kid who had started saving for my retirement in high school. And that was how responsible I was, and what I was going to do to do the right thing. And then at that moment, I was like, well, shoot, I might not make it to retirement. So in a weird way, my dad's death taught me a lot about life and about appreciating it and living it while you got it.

SARA: So after your dad died, you took a road trip.

MIKAH: I did.

SARA: Talk about the journey from first road trip to deciding to visit all 419 national park sites.

MIKAH: Yeah, so it's actually when I talk to people, people have different words for sort of the term Kismet. Some people think it's the universe. Some people think it's God. Some people think it's coincidence. Some people think it's providence. But whatever you want to call it, I think they all played a large part in what happened because I was in the second semester of my freshman year at the University of Nebraska. I dearly, dearly did not want to go to college where I grew up. But because my dad was in hospice, it made the most sense. And I just needed to get out. And I was just really looking forward to this post-freshman year road trip that I had planned with my childhood best friend. And we scheduled a week to get out of Nebraska and go to South Dakota and Minnesota and all those really glamorous places that you hear about on all road trips story podcasts. But then my dad ended up dying during finals week.

SARA: Oh.

MIKAH: And so that road trip, we were discussing, do I still do it or not because this was a week after his funeral. And we decided to do it anyway because we'd planned it. And at the time, I didn't realize this but looking back now, it was exactly what I needed. It took me out of a town that had been nothing but chemo and radiation and surgery for three years. And now just was reminders of death around every corner. And it allowed me to put my body into new physical spaces that I think helped me find new emotional spaces in my body to help me heal from what had just happened in ways that I don't think would have happened if I just would have sat around the house with his hospital bed sitting there, and all those memories.

SARA: Yeah, yes, that's really powerful. Was there a moment on that first road trip that you feel like something clicked for you in terms of thinking about that intersection of grief and your own journey?

MIKAH: Not in particular, but really it was the whole thing. I mean, I remember I did that week-long road trip for under $100. I was so proud, because between me and my best friend, we split the gas, we stayed only with friends and family who fed us. I think we went to the two Native American casinos along the way that each gave you a free $10 of betting money. And we bet that, and then left. So I was real proud as a super frugal midwestern Lutheran, which my dad totally was, that I did that trip so affordably. But it was just a combination of things. The first destination we had was to Brookings, South Dakota, which was where I was born. And so we stayed with my first ever friend, like the first person that I ever spent time with hanging out while growing up. And then we went to the Twin Cities of Minneapolis, Saint Paul, which was big and exciting. We got lost in downtown and ended up in this random parking lot. And I was so mad because we had to pay $10 to park. And that was just not fitting with the affordable budget. And then we turned the corner out of the parking lot to walk to the Metro Dome to buy tickets. And some guy said, “Hey, are you going to the Twins game?” And we said yes, and he handed us two tickets on the third baseline for free and walked away.

SARA: Wow.

MIKAH: And then we went and visited my sister in Rochester, Minnesota, and went back home. But it's stuff like that ticket thing that I call the magic of the road trip where I find that when I go on sort of these fun road trips and just get out and escape, there's always something magical that happens. So if I had to pinpoint one moment, I would say it was kind of like that free Twins ticket, like, just magical things that happen when you put yourself out there.

SARA: Yeah, yeah. And those are beautiful, memorable moments. When you were growing up, I mean so much of your work in your life is really shaped by outdoor adventures these days, biking and living in a van and running and rafting, camping. Were those experiences of your childhood?

MIKAH: No, not at all. In fact, it's so funny because I've been featured in Outside magazine, and I think when I look at my accolades, most people would assume I was an Eagle Scout growing up and my dad took me camping every weekend. But my dad had to preach the sermon on Sunday morning. We didn't go on weekend camping trips. I was in my mid-20s before I ever did a camping trip at a national park. I am sort of the atypical outdoorsman which I say in the sense that I think so many of us feel like we're not the right “type of person” who does those outdoorsy adventures? And if anything, like, let this little gay kid, male soprano from Nebraska, the flattest state in the country, show you that if I can set a world record visiting our national parks and come from that background, anything is possible.

SARA: Yes, so talk about the national parks. How did this gay kid from Nebraska who never went camping, and then the road trip, what made you decide that that would be an awesome quest?

MIKAH: Well, so from that first road trip right after my dad's passing and realizing how incredible it was, I started doing one every year around that time. Usually just a week to visit friends and family and sort of those happened every year. And then by the time I finished grad school at age 26, all of my friends were moving to Boston or New York because I got two degrees in classical singing, and that's just what you did. And appropriate for this podcast, I actually, I remember saying to people, “I don't want to do that. What if I end up being 50 and I hate my life and I'm arguing with my spouse and I say, “f I would have just visited Salt Lake City, I would have found out I loved it. And I would have been there and not here with you.” It was, for whatever reason, Salt Lake City was the city I chose. But so I ended up living out of my dad's old car for 9 months, and traveling to 46 states and provinces, with the goal being to visit everyone I'd ever met who was still alive in North America, basically every one of my Facebook friends, but also to figure out where to move after grad school, where my heart wanted to be. And really interestingly, on that trip is, I was visiting old friends and family, and going to random churches and random concerts and just sort of whatever my friends and family were like, this is what I would normally be doing on this Thursday night. I'm like, alright, let's go to bowling league. And I would meet people and tell them what I was doing. And what I found was really fascinating was when I met my peers, like those in their 20s and 30s, everybody was really taken aback, and they were shocked. They were like, “You just finished your degrees, why aren't you going and making money?” And understandably, we come from a huge culture of college debt. So for a lot of us, it's not even a matter of do we want to? It's a matter of, I have three or six months before I owe $1,000 a month in loan repayments. I have to go find a job right now.

SARA: Yeah.

MIKAH: But because I come from such a frugal family background, I had finished grad school with just a tiny little bit of savings. And so I didn't have that obligation of student loan repayment. And so I was able to do this road trip. And so I found it really interesting, though, that all of my peers were like, money, money, money, career progression now.

SARA: Yeah.

MIKAH: But then the people I met who were in their 50s, 60s, and 70s all said, “Oh my god, I wish I would have done what you're doing right now. I went straight into the workforce. I totally regret it. I think what you're doing is amazing. I wish I would’ve known that lesson when I was your age.” And that stuck with me a lot. I mean, it was so consistent that people who were near, or at, or beyond their retirement age were like, “What you're doing is what I wish I would have done with my life,” that it just ate away at me. And I thought, I want to somehow reach my peers and share this lesson in a positive way, since I had to learn it in a really hard way. And so I wrote a book. Or I mean, I just wrote down, like, what I did on that road trip and why I did it. And I spent four years trying to sell that book. The book was called Life's More Fun When You Talk to Strangers, and I thought, “If I can just get this book out there, then I can really help shape people's lives.” And I was reading Wild by Cheryl Strayed and Eat, Pray, Love. And I was like, I could I could make this, the young man's Eat, Pray, Love, and just help people.

SARA: There you go.

MIKAH: And totally failed. I wrote the book and nobody read it. It never went anywhere. It's sitting in the coffers of my computer right now. But that did keep giving me the motivation to do something to share this message. And so what I decided at age 28, on my 28th birthday, I thought, “When I turn 30, at an age where people pay attention, where you're now more of an adult, where things are significant, blah blah blah, I'm going to say F you 30. And I'm going to do some big outdoor adventure to grab people's attention. And then with that attention, I'm going to share them about the lesson learned from my dad's passing.”

SARA: Beautiful.

MIKAH: And so, as I thought about what would get people's attention, I remembered the handful of national parks I visited on that first 9-month road trip. And I remember there were people of every race, every ethnicity, every age, every nationality, every ability, every income status. I was like, “Every single person seems to enjoy our national parks. That's going to be the way to reach people, is if I go to all 63 of them.” But then I did a little research, and I found out that there were a thousand people who had done this in their lifetime. It was actually my campus pastor who his retirement goal was to visit all those 63 national parks, and that's kind of what gave me the seed idea. And then I found out that wasn't miraculous in any way. I would probably get no media attention unless I had, like, one leg while doing it. But, America didn't just have these 63 capital and capital P National Parks. We actually have over 400 National Park Service sites which encompass our national seashores, our lakeshores, our preserves, our reserves, our monuments, our historical parks, 20 different destinations.

SARA: Wow.

MIKAH: And what I figured out was if I could go to all of those, I would become the youngest person in history to have ever done so. There were only about two dozen folks who had ever been to them in the history of America.

SARA: Wow.

MIKAH: And I would also be the first person to do it in one continuous journey, most people taking three, four, or five decades to do it. So that was two world records. Also, kind of what had become one of my bucket list goals, and it just felt like this perfect moment to blend my own interests with this mission from my dad's passing into one annual road trip for my dad on steroids.

SARA: Amazing. And how long did that take you?

MIKAH: So again, by coincidence, by providence, by whatever you want to call it, of those 24-ish people that had been to all the National Park Service sites in their history, one of them just happened to live five miles east of me.

SARA: Get out.

MIKAH: Yeah, and through what I like to call the Gay Christian Mafia, I found this guy because I was living in the school at America's oldest and only Jesuit boys boarding school, which our two most recent male Supreme Court justices went to for school, as a gay man, every day terrified that the Catholics would fire me for being gay. But because it was the Washington DC area, I had this friend from this Gay Christian group I was part of who was involved in a group called Green Latinos. And in that Green Latinos group, he knew a gay Latino guy who worked for the National Parks Conservation Association who had just done a story in their magazine about this guy, Chris Calvert, who had visited all 409 parks when that was the number back then, who was also gay. And so, all those people connected me to Chris, who calls himself a Luddite, who doesn't have social media, who doesn't have email. He just uses the landline. And through the gay Christian Mafia, I found Chris Calvert's landline, I called him. And he lived five miles east of me. So I said, “Come over for dinner at the boarding school cafeteria.” And I set out a laptop and one by one, I listed every park by name. And the question I asked him was, “If you could go back to this park, what would be the ideal amount of time to spend?” So,Grand Canyon National Park, ideal amount of time, one month. First Lady's National Historic Site, ideal amount of time, four hours. And I added them all up into a spreadsheet. And at the end of the spreadsheet, it was three years.

SARA: That is very organized, and analytical of you. And so, did you spend the three years doing it, or did your trip take a different shape?

MIKAH: I launched the journey on April 29th, 2016, the 11th anniversary of my dad's passing.

SARA: Wow.

MIKAH: Specifically to try to resurrect that day. in a way that took a day that had been horrible for 11 years, and turn that tragedy into triumph, to repurpose this day in my mind. So I launched it at the Washington Monument April 29th, 2016, and on April 29th, 2019, to the minute that I visited the Washington Monument, I returned there. And with about 100 folks, we walked past the reflecting pool up the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, and I finished that trip three years after I began it.

SARA: Wow. What a gorgeous way to finish, too. Like, this is very, it is very triumphant. It's a very triumphant finish. I want to continue to piece together your story. But I am curious, were there a couple of sites that you visited that were your favorite or just really interesting because you didn't know a lot about them, like, maybe the lesser known places?

MIKAH: Totally. I mean, when people ask me my favorite National Park Service sites, I sort of see the life go away from their face because what I've learned is that – I heard this phrase years ago, and it always makes sense – people know what they like, and they like what they know. And what I learned was, I would post about some obscure park. And I thought people are going to be so excited by this, because they've never heard of it before. And it would get a few likes and a few comments. But I would post about Yosemite and it would get so many likes and so many comments of people saying, “Ooh, I remember that.” or “Here's what I did.” Know what they like, and they like what they know. And they knew these parks. So they were way more excited about them than the unknown parks. And so, it's funny, because people ask me that question, and I think, understandably so, they want me to say, Yosemite and the Grand Canyon, so they can say, “Me, too!”

SARA: Where, if I could go visit somewhere that I didn't know about, where would you recommend?

MIKAH: And that's what excites me the most, because what I'm thrilled about is, let me tell you about a place that you would not go otherwise, but now you can know it, and you can have a memory to share an experience. So because people are listening probably all over from this, I'll give you a few around the country.

SARA: Great.

MIKAH: So everybody has one driveable. The first is near where I live in Minnesota, and that is Badlands National Park and Theodore Roosevelt National Park. North Dakota is the most likely state to be the last state that someone visits if they go to all 50 states. So much so that their tourism board has something called the Save the Best for Last Club, where if you make North Dakota your last state and go to visit a North Dakota shop, they'll give you a pin and a certificate, and you'll join the Save the Best for Last club.

SARA: Awesome.

MIKAH: But I don't think you should save it for last. And I don't think you should go to Fargo, which is the city most people think of from the movie. I don't think you should go to Grand Forks. I don't think you should go to Bismarck, where the capital is, or Minot, where the Air Force base is. I think you should go to the western corner of North Dakota where all the oil drilling happened about a decade ago and go to Theodore Roosevelt National Park because it is stunningly beautiful. ridiculously affordable. I went out to eat with a friend from New York, and she was like, “How is this a total bill?” And it's stunning. There are wild horses. There are prairie dogs. There are bison. There are incredible paths that you can hike, or cycle around a scenic drive. And it's basically like a cake. It's like a layer cake of earth that lives underneath all of us at all times, except in this park, it eroded so that now you can hike down in those layers of earth and you see all these cake layers that shift colors as the sun turns, and on the top, though, you see that beautiful grass. And so it's just all these amazing colors and animals everywhere. And then if you keep going down into South Dakota, you have the Badlands, which are basically like the North Dakota Badlands minus the grass. So you get just these hues of purple and salmon and red as the sun is setting on these rocks that are shifting colors with the light. And it's just a really stunning place in a part of the country that people fly over and maybe think of Mount Rushmore, if we're lucky. And there's so much more to offer in the Dakotas. So, as a child of South Dakota, and a Midwesterner now, don't sleep on that.

SARA: Okay, that's a great recommendation. I had to look it up while you were talking. It's gorgeous.

MIKAH: Yeah. But for those of you who are listening to this in winter, and the snow is still on the ground, or it's just not warming up and you want to get somewhere warm, the most popular destination of the United States Virgin Islands is St. Thomas followed by St. John. There are three islands in the U.S. Virgin Islands, and I think you should avoid both of those and go to St. Croix because, in St. Croix, there's an island off the coast of the St. Croix Island that is called Buck Island. And Buck Island has a reef that President Kennedy snorkeled with his family back when he was president. He thought it was so beautiful that he wanted to protect it. So he went back and with the power of the Antiquities Act and the stroke of a pen, created Buck Island Reef National Monument which now has an underwater trail that you can snorkel to view the beautiful reef and then end up back on land, which is a natural turtle nesting ground. And they have tours that take you out on a catamaran and then feed you lunch and rum punch afterwards, on your way back to St. Croix. where you land next to Christiansted National Historic Site, which is an old Danish fort that existed before the Virgin Islands became part of the United States. So, if you're a Hamilton geek and you also want to tie into that history, if you want to see the place where the sun first touches the easternmost point of the entirety of the United States, go to Buck Island Reef National Monument in the US Virgin Islands and escape the crowds of Puerto Rico, St. Thomas, and St. John.

SARA: That sounds amazing. Gorgeous. And of course, the US Virgin Islands, we know in the back of our minds. But I wouldn't have paused long enough to think that there's a National Park there, National Park Site.

MIKAH: And you don't need a passport. There's actually three sites on St. Croix: there's a preserve, a historic site, and this national monument. And then most of the entirety of the island of St. John is Virgin Islands National Park. So a lot more people have heard of that, and will go to that one, but they'll totally overlook these other three sites. So that's particularly why I like to highlight them because less crowds and really amazing experiences.

SARA: That's wonderful. That is great. Thank you for those recommendations. I think that's exciting. We're going to put them in our show notes. We'll put links directly to the parks in our show notes, so if people can check out while they're listening some information on those beautiful parks.

MIKAH: And I'll actually send you blogs that I've written about each of them from when I was there, so you can get the direct experience right from the horse's mouth.

SARA: Beautiful. Beautiful. Now, I know your whole journey because I do want to talk about the film, which also kind of wraps in this whole story that we're talking about. And in a beautiful, very short 16-minute documentary. But I wonder, before we just dive deep into the film, if you can then now connect us with, in what point in this story, when did you come out? And when did this sort of sense of queer identity, gay identity, become such a central focus of your journey and this work that kind of led you? I want to lead us into the story that you start to tell in the documentary Canyon Chorus.

MIKAH: Yes. Well, because we're on a podcast, if you're driving, don't close your eyes, but if you're sitting down or somewhere where you can close your eyes, I want you to close your eyes, and imagine America in 2004. I was in my senior year of high school. My dad was having his surgery for his first round of cancer. And my state of Nebraska was voting on whether or not to make marriage defined as one woman, one man in the Nebraska State Constitution. Now, this was pre-social media. This was nascent internet. And so the main sources of information that I had access to were the nightly news and the newspaper. Now, imagine the headlines in Nebraska about this proposition to essentially ban same-sex marriage. The stories were, if we let gay people get married, folks are going to want to marry their dogs next. If we let gay people get married, it's just going to be pedophilia everywhere. I mean, the most heinous, nasty things you can imagine were said about queer people. And I, as a little closeted pastor's kid, was praying every night, "God, don't let me be this way.” And I just knew that if I prayed hard enough, and I had enough faith, and I was the perfect enough Christian that God would fix me. And after years, God didn't fix me. So I went away to college and I thought, “Okay, well, I've heard that if I marry a woman and have kids, then God will cure me.” And so I went to college, and I was looking for that woman who would fix me. And I thought, if I just meet the right girl, then God will cure me. And this is what I saw on TV, Exodus International. This is what popular culture was showing, was that you could pray away the gay, and that God would fix you if you just had enough faith.

SARA: Now, I'm curious to know, was this also the theology of your dad's church at the time and the particular Lutheran setting you were in at the time?

MIKAH: Sort of, so I like to say that the sin of the Lutheran Church was the sin of omission. And that is, I never heard the “God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve” sermon. I never heard from my church anything directly negative about queer people.

SARA:You just didn't hear anything.

MIKAH: But I never heard anything positive. And we could talk about our alcoholic neighbors. We could talk about so-and-so who whisper “had an abortion”. But people barely talked about queer folk. And if they did, it was always derogatory. It was always rumors. It was always shameful. And so, if anything, that taught me that it was the worst because if we could say these are sins, these are horrible things, then they're out there. But this just wasn't spoken about, period. And if it was, it was hidden, which taught me that this must be the worst. If it's so bad that we can't even talk about it. So, while I didn't get the direct Hellfire and Brimstone sermons, I never had anything to counteract everything around me in my real world and in the media world that told me it was a sin and God hated you.

SARA: Wow. Yeah, that's probably a very common experience.

MIKAH: Well, and I think it's like in the 2020s, there was a lot of talk about the difference between being saying, I'm not racist and I'm anti-racist. I think it's the same thing. It's like, well, I'm not homophobic. Oh, but I also didn't do anything positive to show that it's okay to be gay. And I think that is really what's the difference, is the difference between being not racist and anti-racist, in this case was the difference between being anti-gay and being neutral. And if we're not positive, it's kind of the same as being anti-gay.

SARA: Yeah, exactly. Okay, so you're in college. You're looking for the right girl. When did you stop? When did you officially come out?

MIKAH: Well, I was so sure I was going to find her. And that first week of college in Memphis, Tennessee, I did the campus ministry tour, where they take you to all the different campus ministries. And one of them told me that next week they were having a real-life former homosexual come speak.

SARA: Former.

MIKAH: Yep. Somebody who had successfully prayed away the gay. And I was like, “Okay, yeah, that makes sense.” And at the end of the tour, I said, “Well, where's the Lutheran campus ministry?” And what I learned was that the entire city of 1.6 million people had three Lutheran churches in its whole metro area. And basically all my friends were either evangelicals or Baptists. And so they straight up said to me, “What's a Lutheran?”

SARA: Wow.

MIKAH: And so I very quickly realized that I was very much in the buckle of that Bible belt. And what is interesting about that is because of that magnifying glass, coming from a state that was mostly Catholics and Lutherans to now evangelicals and Baptists, I met one of my professors who did marry a woman and did have kids to cure him like his Baptist pastor told him would happen. And I saw that his wife now hated him, and his kids were broken because they felt like their whole existence was a lie because now that family was divorced, and they were dealing with that, and it's because this pastor and this community and this faith told my professor, “God will fix you if you get married and have kids.” And so he did that to be a good Christian. And I say all that in the sense of all of these things I'd heard about or seen in the news or heard about in media, I now saw in real life. And in real life. I saw all the BS. And I saw all the lies. And that made me the most annoying student at my campus ministry because I ended up at the Methodist Wesley Foundation. And I would ask my pastor every day, “I met somebody today, and they told me that they didn't choose to be a lesbian. Can you believe that? Isn't that crazy?” And what I came to learn is that when you read the Bible, assuming that it's a choice to be gay, it reads one way that would allow you to condemn it. But when you understand that it's not a choice, and it's something that you yourself have prayed for a decade for God to fix you on, along with so many other people, The Bible reads really differently. And I realized that nobody was condemning my Black friends and saying that they were going to hell because they were black. Nobody was condemning my left-handed sister and saying she was going to hell because she was left-handed. And nobody was condemning my bipolar cousin who, during biblical times, we would say, had a demon in her, because was speaking – when one would have episodes –  would speak and see things and pretend to be someone else. Biblical times, we would say she had a demon, but nobody said she was going to hell for being bipolar. And I thought, “Well, you don't choose to be black. You don't choose to be left-handed. And you don't choose to be bipolar. Society just learned to accept those qualities of human beings. So if I also didn't choose to be gay, and if I'd been doing everything in my power to change it, then how could God condemn me hell to for that as well? So there must be nothing wrong with it.” And then the Bible reads completely differently. So I do have sympathy for people who are biblical literalists who, deep in their heart, believe that the loving thing to do is to tell you you're horrible for being gay and to not let you go down that path of sin. And I just wish that they could feel what it feels like to lay in your bed as a 15-year-old and say, “God, can I wake up tomorrow and will you fix me finally?” And maybe they would feel a little differently about theology and reading the Bible.

SARA: So were you able to come out to your dad before he died?

MIKAH: No, so I was almost 22 when I accepted it myself. And he passed away about three years before that.

SARA: Wow, that must be really hard.

MIKAH: Well once I accepted it, I visited his grave and I said, “If you didn't already know, you know now.”

SARA: That's right. And because then suddenly you became very public about it, and really wove it into your story, I remember an interview – and I think it's actually part of the film, and so we can kind of dive into the film a little bit. Canyon Chorus, which is a beautiful story of you and a mentor, a professor, and some friends. And I really struck about sharing both the experience of being out in the wilderness on the river together as gay men. But then also some really deep sharing about what that experience was like. And I think sometimes, even though the politics are really complicated right now in 2026. It might be easy for some of us to forget how hard it really is still, still, to come out, to feel that acceptance and all the fear and angst that comes with that, whether it's the church, or your family, or society, and often some combination of all of those things. And I was just really struck by that. But I'm remembering a particular moment in the film that was like a news clip of you, perhaps during your Parks National Sites journey . . .

MIKAH: Uh-huh, uh-huh.

SARA: . . . where you were talking about, at first trying to pretend to be straight, like, be the representative that you thought people expected to see the guy outside. Talk about that a little bit.

MIKAH: The All-American Outdoorsman.

SARA: Yeah.

MIKAH: And when I was doing research about this trip, I didn't see any single LGBTQ+ person, gay, lesbian, bi, nothing in outdoors culture in America. And it was as if we didn't exist, which taught me, “Oh my gosh, if I'm trying to be the All-American outdoorsman visiting all the parks to reach people to share this message from my dad's passing, being gay is going to –  people will lose the entire forest for this one gay tree. And they'll no longer pay attention to my national parks mission and my lesson from my dad's passing, just if they know I'm gay.” And so, I made a decision that for the mission of this National Parks trip, I needed to sort of go back in the closet and hide this part of myself. But what was really interesting, and what you mentioned, in the film we talk about this briefly, but it is the power of representation. And that sounds cliche and cheesy, and we hear it all the time. But to give you some context of really how much that means, I grew up in Nebraska and. I have teachers now who I now know were in high school and were gay, and who have come up to me and said one of them said, “Mikah, I came out on the nightly news four years before you started high school. And I just assumed everybody knew.” And I said, “That might be true, but I never heard you talk about your spouse. My heterosexual teachers had pictures of their families on their desk, and you didn't have one of your partner. So there were rumors that you were gay. But again, it was a whisper, it was a joke, it was something to be ashamed of.” So the first time I ever met an adult who was like, “Oh yeah, this is my husband, and okay so your syllabus says,” was my professor Larry. And even. . .

SARA: Who is in the film.

MIKAH: . . .more than just who's in the film, who's the star of the film. But even more than him just saying, “Yes, I'm gay, okay, let's move on,” was Larry was successful. And remember, I have to be the perfect pastor's kid. And I'm the youngest of four kids who all, like, got full rides to college and were brilliant and successful and charming, and the perfect pastor's kid. So for me, it wasn't enough just to be a hairdresser, the hairdresser that everybody makes fun of. I needed to be successful. And so when I met Larry, I not only saw an openly gay man, but I saw someone who was successful, who is the longest serving symphony chorus director in America, who was admired by his colleagues at the college, who had got his doctorate, who had completed all these tasks. So Larry wasn't just surviving. Larry was thriving. And that was the life I wanted to live and I'd sort of been trained and expected to live my whole life as this well-known pastor's kid. And so when I met Larry, that's when I really started to think, “Okay, I could come out and actually live a real life.” And so, with this parks journey, I was hiding this part of myself until I started getting so many messages from LGBTQ+ people who figured out I was gay, who Googled me and there are things there that'll confirm it, not dirty things, just things I'd written, articles I'd written for the Huffington Post to be specific.

SARA: Fair.

MIKAH: But people figured it out and, and they started writing me and I just realized how important this was that I could be the Larry for those people, that I could be the successful, thriving outdoorsman, that they needed to see to show them that they could come out or that they could also be involved in the outdoors community. And so I was so terrified that if I came out that my parks journey would fail and that I wouldn't get to do my original mission. But ironically, and sort of beautifully, that first year of the trip, when I was trying to hide that I was gay, I was also trying to fundraise for the trip that I didn't have enough money to finish. And mostly what I got was not donations, it was hate mail. It was people who called me a brat who said I was a trust fund kid, not knowing that pastors make nothing. Maybe they thought I was Joel Osteen's kid or something, or T.D. Jake's kid. I was like, “Donate to let me share the parks with you, to help me take you on this journey,” and people were like, F off, this kid. But once I came out and sort of made that part of my identity on this trip, I started getting $20 from somebody who said, “Hey, my kid's gay and and this is really important that they see this.”

SARA: Yeah.

MIKAH: And maybe the most amazing twist of all is that I was running out of money. I was about a month away from running out of the money I'd saved up to start this trip. And a friend who I knew, who was now a pastor in Fort Lauderdale, invited me to come sing for his church, and to put out a basket. He said, “You will sing for your supper and we’ll help you fundraise for your trip this way.” And I showed up to his church, and unbeknownst to me, he was planning on me preaching that day, and had not told me until the gospel lesson was being read. And I said, “Are you kidding me?” And he said, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, just go like talk about growing up gay in your church and talk about your parks journey and tie it into the gospel lesson somehow. You'll be great.” And I did that, and I just shared my story, which I think for anyone listening to this, there is so much power in stories. Hello, look at what the Bible is.

SARA: Exactly.

MIKAH: So all of us telling our stories means a lot. And so I shared my story. And I got amazing reactions from folks in the church who cried and said, you know, “My niece is a lesbian,” or “My uncle's gay.” Or I will always remember one gay man came up to me crying, and he said, “I am gay. And I never thought I would hear those words and my story from the pulpit.”

SARA: Yes.

MIKAH: And then that pastor put me in touch with another pastor in town. And when I came back from Dry Tortugas National Park that next Sunday, I was now the guest singer and preacher at another church.

SARA: I love it! The church is fundraised for you! That's fabulous.

MIKAH: And that's what ended up happening. Somebody in the congregation said, “Where are you next Sunday?” And I said, “Well, I'm going to be in Tampa.” And they said, “Oh, I know this pastor in Tampa. Call them and tell them I told you that they should have you come preach and sing.” And that kept happening and kept happening. And by the end of the remaining two years of that journey, I was the guest preacher and singer at 113 churches around America. And America's Christians funded a gay man to set a world record.

SARA: Yes, they did. That is so fabulous. I love that so much. So, friends who are listening, Mama Dragons community, who are still a part of churches and faith communities, I'll just give a personal pitch and recommendation. Mikah came to my fellowship and in our pulpit. And it was a beautiful Sunday where we got to both show this documentary that we're going to talk about  and hear his story and hear him sing, which we haven't even talked about the whole singing piece in all of this. And it was stunning, and really moving, myself included. Like, I found myself getting teary-eyed. And I think it's particularly now, in this time, in this political moment, in a red state, your story is a reminder of how important representation is, how important it is to have those safe spaces. This is what the film says, “Where you can be seen, where you can come out, where you can share your story and know that you'll be really deeply loved and accepted.” And it sounds like this –  so at what point in the journey did the logo, the Outside Safe Spaces program, come into being, because that's a real pivotal piece of this whole story?

MIKAH: Yeah, well, first, let me say thank you for providing one of those safe spaces. I know that Boise and Idaho have been going through a lot recently, as I saw firsthand when I was there showing my film for the Wild and Scenic Tour in Boise just last month. I know people are really going through it. And so you are providing a space that is life changing for people. So never forget that.

SARA: Thank you.

MIKAH: But yeah, the park journey finished in 2019, and after three years of solitude and nature and loneliness, I wanted everything that was the opposite. I wanted big cities. I wanted musical theater. And I wanted gays. I wanted to go on a second date, you know? And I was going to move to Manhattan because that felt like the place to get all those. But by this point, I got connected to Mel White's agent, so those of you who are familiar with the Gay Christian Mafia will know Mel White, because he wrote the book Stranger at the Gate – which was, like, kind of the original gay Christian memoir where he talks about, like, being connected to electrodes to shock him when he saw images of two men, like really early, early conversion therapy stuff – And Mel's story is fascinating because he was the ghostwriter for like, Billy Graham, Jerry Falwell, all these high holy rollers, he ghost-wrote all their memoirs, so brilliant writer, which will make total sense when, for those of you not in the Gay Christian Mafia, you find out that his son is Mike White, creator of the White Lotus series on HBO. So, this whole family are epic storytellers. And I got ahold of Mike White's literary agent, who said, “I think I can sell a book, finally.” And Jedediah Jenkins had just come out with his book about cycling from Seattle to Patagonia. And it was a New York Times bestseller. And he said, “I think you need to write this story that you just did down.” And I thought, okay, well, I'm going to spend the summer, then, of 2019 writing this book. And I am sure as heck not going to pay $2,000 a month that I don't have to sit behind a brownstone in Brooklyn and do it when I could go to some place beautiful like Minnesota for the summer where it's just temperate and I could find a lake to sit by. I could go back to the old Lutheran church camp I worked at and work out of a cabin, like that sounds amazing. And then I started looking more and more at Minneapolis and realized it would be sort of the perfect place for a 33-year-old single gay man to move. So I moved there in May of 2019. And a year later, we were in the middle of the pandemic and I was living a little less than two miles away from where George Floyd was killed.

SARA: Oh, my goodness.

MIKAH: And that was a really fascinating time to live in Minneapolis because most of my friends were Minnesotans and had families that had lake houses. And they all fled the city. And they were like, “I'm not risking my apartment catching on fire or my house. I'm gone.” But I didn't have a lake house to go to. And I also felt like it was important to be in the city to witness what was happening, to not just run away, to be part of it. And that became very acute when I learned that one of my neighbors in my apartment complex was coping with the stress by getting drunk every night. And I did not have a car, and so I went to him and I said, “Hey, I'll make you a deal. I'll stay up all night, and I'll watch Twitter and the news. And if our apartment catches on fire, I will come to your apartment and get your drunk ass and save us. But you have to let me use your car.” And he agreed. So I stayed up every night watching the news and rereading all those messages I got from the thousands and thousands of LGBTQ+ people during my parks journey, who said, “I could never do this. When I leave the safety of my gay-borhood and my big city, I hide myself. I apologize for who I am. I change my gait. I change the way I dress. I change the way I talk, I lower my voice.” All these things of “When I leave the safety of the city for the outdoors, for rural spaces, for national parks, I hide myself to keep myself safe.” And I thought, I remembered – I'm sure the Mama Dragons are familiar with this – There's the Safe Space symbol, which is the green circle with the upside-down pink triangle that some teachers put on their doors to signify maybe your parents, maybe your siblings, maybe your church, maybe your community does not accept or support people of different orientations or identities. But I am a safe place. This room, behind this door, this person is a safe space. And I thought, that's great, but it's on a door, indoors.

SARA: Right.

MIKAH: I need something that's off doors for the outdoors. And it didn't exist, so I made it. And I made the Outside Safe Space symbol. And all night while watching the Twitter, I was drafting and using my colored pencils and trying to make a symbol that was inclusive, and sending it to people who work for racial inclusion in the outdoors and disability advocates, and refining this symbol to make sure that everybody felt represented, everybody felt seen, everybody felt equal. And then by July of 2020, it was done and I launched it by running across the state of Minnesota – safely during the pandemic – so that I could use an adventure again to get media attention to share this Outside Safe Space symbol. And since then there's now over 100,000 of these symbols all around America living out their mission and ministry.

SARA: Amazing. We're going to put a link directly to the page on your website where folks can see the symbol and see all of the merch and the logo stuff that they can buy. And I'm sporting my pin that I bought from you today. But could you describe it for us briefly?

MIKAH: So the symbol itself is a tree, which felt really appropriate. And in the tree, you have the rainbow flag at the top. And then below that you have the bi flag and the trans flag, which were really intentional placements. Not because they're less important, but because those are the biggest, strongest branches of the tree. Those are the ones that have been there the longest, because they're the biggest. And so, those are specifically meant to represent the members of the LGBTQ+ community who are bi and trans, who have been erased or overlooked over the years and acknowledge that they have been there from the beginning. And then the tree trunk of this is made up of all different racial skin tones from all around the world, which initially, I had this beautiful gradient beginning with black at the bottom and going up to white at the top, and then the white of the tree trunk merged with the white of the trans flag. And it was beautiful. But I showed it to a black friend and he said, “Why does black have to be on the bottom? Why do I have to be the lowest of all these racial colors?” And I thought, that's a great point and I remember these amazing eucalyptus trees that I saw in Hawaii, in Haleakala National Park that had this sort of curvy design that swerves its way up the trunk. And naturally, when the bark of these trees falls off, they reveal colors of red, orange, yellow, and green. So the trees are called rainbow eucalyptus trees. And I thought, well, that's perfect. So the design of the tree trunk is inspired by the rainbow eucalyptus trees and weaves in and out all the different racial skin tones to represent all identities and ethnicities equally in status. And then, understanding that the LGBT “legibitiqua” community – as my friend likes to say – is constantly evolving, I wanted to make sure that people who weren't part of those flags could still be represented. And so the entire tree is made up of triangles which harkens back to that original upside-down pink triangle symbol of the Safe Space symbol, which comes from the Holocaust when queer people or sexual deviants or what we would now call the legitibiqua community was put in concentration camps and labeled with an upside down pink triangle. So we have taken it back. We have put it all over the place in the Safe Space symbol, and now the Outside Safe Space symbol.

SARA: Yeah. It's beautiful that just listening to you describe it just brought tears to my eyes again. It's so thoughtful about how to be maximally inclusive. And I'm curious, I remember you talking about how after you launched it, you got park visitors’ centers to display it and sell it and all of that, but that this particular administration's anti-DEI stance on every and everything good, wanting to destroy everything good, has meant that Park Visitor Centers, National Park Visitor Centers, can no longer display?

MIKAH: Yeah, so in addition to being intentional with the design, I knew that the symbol had to be aesthetically pleasing. It had to be pretty because nobody wants to put an ugly pin on their backpack, or wear a t-shirt with an ugly tree. So I knew this, this thing, it had to look nice. It had to be something that somebody would want to wear even if they didn't know what it meant because that's what it would take to get people to opt in to this individual symbol of allyship. And so, fortunately, there are people who just say, “Oh my God, what a pretty rainbow tree. I want that.” And then they find out the meaning. And so as I was trying to figure out how I could get this symbol as far and as wide to live out its mission, I realized that a great place to start would be our National Park gift shops. I'd been to them all. It was a natural connection. And also it would reach people in every single state and territory because we have a National Park Service Site in every single US state, five territories, and one District of Columbia. So I thought, boom, instant national strategy to get this everywhere. And for those of you not familiar with this – I'm going to nerd out really quick – but getting items in a National Park Service gift shop is a B-I-T-C-H. It is so hard. When you leave that national park and you're looking at the little magnets or trinkets, or books, you have no idea what goes into getting it to the register. So this is not just, like, Target picking items every season of “What's hip this year? What are we going to sell?” No.

SARA: Government bureaucracy at its finest, I'm sure.

MIKAH: Oh, Lord, let me tell you. So every gift shop is not run by the Park Service, it's run by an association, a nonprofit that manages the gift shop. And so the first step is you have to convince the person who buys the items for that association to carry it. Now, some associations manage multiple parks. But most parks have their own association. So if all the 433 sites, you have to convince Yellowstone Forever. You have to convince the Grand Canyon Conservancy. You have to convince each executive director and their buyer, “Hey, this is a product that is worth selling.” And then once you convince them, they have to go to the government National Park Service and get approval from the Park Superintendent. And then after they get that, they go to their board, and their board says, “Okay, here's how much money we have to buy product, buy the thing, blah blah blah.” So, when I say it takes years to get these products into stores, I'm not joking. And for five years, I went to the convention where all these organizations meet every year. I was the keynote speaker one of those years. I did free educational courses basically designed around how to get around that one angry white guy who's homophobic, who won't let you buy this at your company, like, how to get around your homophobic executive director or get around your homophobic buyer. And spent five years and, finally, by the end of that had gotten the Outside Safe Space items into about 60 national park service site gift shops, which was a huge victory.

SARA: Huge.

MIKAH: And in January of 2025, all of that work was taken away with the stroke of a pen that said no gift shops on federal lands could have diverse products in them or they would lose their federal funding. So the Outside Safe Space symbols, books about little black girls hiking, books about slavery, books about our Native American history, have been removed from the shelves, no longer allowed to be sold at National Park Gift Shops because they're considered diverse. And we're not allowed to tell the stories of all Americans, which is really ironic because most people think about the national parks as just big natural wonders. They're not. They're the places that tell America's story. They are the physical pieces of land, of buildings, of battlefields that tell our American story. And so it's kind of like the government saying, “You diverse people don't deserve to be part of the American story.”

SARA: Right? Right? That's terrible. And we've seen it. We've seen the microcosm of this play out at Stonewall, which is such an important national site for the LGBTQ community, trying to erase trans folks and erase queer folks in any kind of identity. And it's really terribly sad which I think it adds to the inspiration of your story, and I think the desire for people to want to represent on behalf like, as a way to say, “To heck with the government. I will wear the symbols. I will buy the merch. I will put it out so that it can still get out there.” And I was really, really pleased to see on your website that there's so many retailers, independent, private retailers that are putting your symbol out. Even in my very red state, there was one, and I'm really happy about that. And I'm like, maybe we could get a few more.

MIKAH: Well, just a quick tangent about that. So there is one National Park Service site that still sells them and will be able to sell them as long as they want. And, miraculously, that one park is the only national park service site to tell the LGBTQ+ American story, Stonewall National Monument, which was added to the park system partway through my journey. And the women of color who founded the visitor center were smart enough that they said “We will not take any federal money for the visitor center. We will not put the visitor center on federal land.” So right now, at this moment, all of my items are still sold there because they made their gift shop visitor center outside of the normal system. They made it queer.

SARA: How wonderful.

MIKAH: And they did it differently in their own way.  So if you're listening to this, go to the Stonewall National Monument, right this moment, you can get the Outside Safe Space items there, because they had the foresight to say, “Nah, we've been treated unfairly in the past, and it's probably going to happen again.”

SARA: How smart. How smart. And I love that story. That is brilliant of them. I'm so glad to know that. We've been talking for awhile. And we haven't gotten to the documentary yet because there's so many pieces of your story that are so interesting. But I do want to talk about it with just one question. And the documentary, for our folks listening, we'll make sure to put a link to that in our show notes as well, because it is an encapsulation of all we've been talking about which is featuring you and five gay men on a rafting trip together in Utah's Desolation Canyon, just talking and sharing and singing. And so you've heard Mikah mention his singing background. He's a beautiful singer. So there's lots of singing in this documentary, which is so delightful. What was the seed for making that film? And what do you hope its impact is? Or what has been the impact because it's been out for a bit and I'm sure it's had an impact?

MIKAH: Well, to those listeners who have already watched the documentary, I just want to apologize and say I understand that there should have been more singing in the documentary. That's the number one complaint we get from people is they'll say, “I love the documentary. It was beautiful. The story was amazing. I cried. I laughed. But I really wanted more singing! Why didn't you sing more?” So I've heard you. Next time, I'll do more singing.

SARA: More singing.

MIKAH: Yes, the story that's told in Canyon Chorus is sort of a slick combination of sort of everything we've talked about today. It's very high level of my national parks journey, of sort of discovering that I needed to be this openly gay role model that didn't exist before. But ultimately, the story is one that I'd held, kind of to myself for a long time, waiting for the right opportunity to tell it. And I had somebody with the means to pay for a short film come to me and say “I've got this bucket of money to make a short film, and I'd like to give it to you to tell whatever story you want. What story do you want to tell?”

SARA: Wow.

MIKAH: And I said, “Well, there's one I've been waiting for the right moment to tell. And I think it's now.” And we've talked about my dad on this podcast. We've talked about my professor on this podcast. So what we haven't revealed is that my biological father's name is Larry. And my mentor's name is Larry. And I first encountered my mentor, Larry, in February of 2005, when I was auditioning for the University of Memphis. And what I did not find out until a decade later was that I walked out of that audition room and I had put in my application letter, “My dad's dying. I don't have any money to go to college. I need a scholarship to come to school.” And I walked out of that room, and Larry, my future choir professor, turned to the committee and said, “We have to do whatever it takes to get this singer at our school.” And got me a full tuition scholarship. That was February of 2005. April of 2005, my biological father, Larry, died.

SARA: Wow.

MIKAH: August of 2005, I showed up to my first week of classes at the University of Memphis and met and shook for the first time, his hand, my professor, Larry, who was the first openly gay adult I'd ever met and who changed my life. And so I kind of feel like God took one Larry from me, and gave me the other Larry that I needed desperately at that point in my life. And the movie does not get into all that backstory.

SARA: No, I didn't know that story.

MIKAH: The movie basically just says, “Here's Mikah's dad. His name is Larry. And here's Mikah's mentor. His name is Larry.” And then it goes on. But that's the story that I wanted to tell. And that's the story that we tell in the short film Canyon Chorus.

SARA: It's beautiful. And it really is a little bit of everything we've talked about. It also really, kind of one of the takeaways is this idea of mentorship and chosen family, which I know is really important in the queer community, particularly for those who don't have supportive family or who have had to break ties with their family, or for folks like you who have lost close family members and so don't have that father or mother figure in their life. And those chosen family members really fill those roles in really powerful ways.

MIKAH: Yep.

SARA: And that is really evident when you watch the film. It is also, I will say, listening to Larry, your mentor Larry, talk about how hard it was to come out and his own journey. And he's an older dude who's been living as a gay man for a very long time, like, that was also really powerful to listen, to watch him still feel those really deep, complicated feelings about that. And highly recommend this film, especially parents in our Mama Dragons community. It's a short film. It's a really great thing you can watch with your family, with your kids. You can send it to family members. It's super fun and delightful. Yes, there should be more singing. But the singing there is also what makes it delightful. And there's this other theme, too, that I think an impact that the film has had which is creating safe, queer-friendly, outdoor adventure spaces, is really important. That it makes it possible for the queer community who love to do these things, or maybe who never thought they would because they didn't feel safe, now have a place where that's possible. And although there's a very profit-driven incentive for companies to do that, it's lovely to see. I know some of the impact of Canyon Chorus is that now rafting companies are doing queer-only raft trips.

MIKAH: Yeah. Yep.

SARA: And we're seeing that everywhere in all industries, but in the outdoor industry in particular. And I find that really, really beautiful. And I hope it's inspiring to a lot of our queer community to be like, “Yes, you can! You can go on the all-queer camping trip where you know you will be with other folks. And so you know you can kind of let go of some of that fear and anxiety.”

MIKAH: Well, I have two requests for the Mama Dragons community listening to this.

SARA: You bet.

MIKAH: The first is that as soon as you finish this podcast, you go on YouTube, or on Google, or on my website, Mikahmeyer.com, and you watch Canyon Chorus. It's free. It's 16 and a half minutes. You can do it while you eat breakfast or before you go to bed at night. But just watch it. I'm constantly amazed at how it touches people, how it moves them in just 16 and a half minutes, makes them laugh, makes them cry, and I truly believe if you just start the film, you'll be so glad you watched it. But it's hard to get people's attention these days. So that's my ask number one of you is just to watch it. And then my second – actually, I lied, I got three asks.

SARA: Fair.

MIKAH: My second ask is to share it. Share it with an LGBTQ+ youth. Or even if you don't know that they're queer, share it with your kids in case they're queer because people ask me what the number one goal of this film is. And I say my number one goal is that every adult who watches this film, when they finish watching it, they'll go to their kids, they'll go to their nieces and nephews, they'll go to their mentees, whoever, and they'll just say, “Hey, in case I never made it clear, I will love you whether you're gay, straight, or purple. And I just need you to know that.” Maybe they'll go, “Mom, or whatever.” But just tell them because you never know it could save their life. The third request specific to, I believe, the Mama Dragons has an LDS history in its founding?

SARA: It does.

MIKAH: Correct. Okay. So we've won awards with this film, we've made world tours. But we are still sitting at about 18,500 views on the YouTube because the brand who funded it won't promote the film at all because they're afraid of being the next company to be boycotted because of supporting a gay person. So that means that we've struggled to really sort of have it break through this attention wall. And I heard from somebody who does tech that YouTube doesn't start recommending videos until they get 20,000 views. So I believe that the Mama Dragons, that this podcast, can be the ones to push us over 20,000, to get us 1500 more views so that we can start being recommended by YouTube. And more so, I'm just praying that some gay faithful celebrity will see it, and tweet it out or post it. So if you know David Archuleta, if you know Brandon Flowers of The Killers, if you know somebody from Imagine Dragons, or even non-LDS connected celebrities, if you could send this to them and ask him to post it or whatever, I truly believe we are one celebrity post away from this thing catching fire and being seen by so many people who can then tell their kids, “I love you whether you're gay, straight, or purple.” So those are my requests of the Mama Dragons.

SARA: Oh. Okay, Mama Dragons.

MIKAH: I've asked some people to do this. I even put out for my birthday, my 40th birthday, I said, my 40th birthday wish is to get Canyon Chorus to 20,000 views. And we're not even at 19,000 yet. But if somebody can do it, it's the Mamas.

SARA: All right, Mamas, let's be the ones in this moment. I think that is a beautiful way to end. I was going to ask you, like what is giving you hope right now? And I'll just say, this is it right here. You just gave us the hope. You gave us something actionable to do. And something fun to do, and something that we can share with a lot of people. So let's go, let's do it.

MIKAH: Also giving me hope are little old ladies because I live in Minneapolis, and let me tell you how many little old ladies are driving up to their local Lutheran church in their Subaru and they're saying, “Well, I'm here to learn what happens when I get arrested for standing up for my neighbor.” So, little old ladies are also giving me hope right now.

SARA: Oh, totally. So much. And Minneapolis, like the people of Minneapolis. We didn't get to talk about that. You were there for George Floyd. Minneapolis is showing up again in a pivotal moment in our country, and Minneapolis is giving me hope, despite all the pain and all the violence. The people of Minneapolis are extraordinary. And their impact and their resilience, and their take-no-guff is, I think it's really spreading. And it gives me a lot of hope. So thank you for being part of all of those beautiful communities. And Mikah, this has been a gorgeous conversation. I could keep going. Thank you for your work. Thank you for your voice. And also thank you for your joy. You bring a lot of joy to this with all of just your personality and the film in a moment, I think, that can be really, really heavy. So I want to encourage people, like, if you need a little spark of joy, go watch this film because it will just re-inspire you again and again.

MIKAH: Thank you.

SARA: So grateful to you. Thank you for your time today.

MIKAH: It's an honor to be part of the Mama Dragons community.

SARA: Thanks for joining us here In the Den. We want to tell you about free, public QPR classes coming in April. QPR is Question, Persuade, Refer and it is a powerful suicide prevention training designed to equip you with the skills and confidence to recognize warning signs and respond when someone you love may be in crisis. The training is online, secure, and just two hours long. It’s a small time commitment that can make a life-saving difference. You can register for this training on our website at mamadragons.org.

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