Storytelling Strengthens Community
Our stories as LGBTQIA+ people are powerful. When we see ourselves in other peoples’ stories as well as when we learn about experiences that are not our own, we build understanding and empathy for each other. We affirm our own experiences and embrace difference. The act of sharing stories strengthens our communities.
The stories archived here are primarily a part of the Queerly Photo Collection, an independent project established in 2020 by freelance photographer, Kyle Warnock. The Queerly Photo Collection documents moments in the lives of hundreds of LGBTQIA+ people based in Maine.
Additionally, we now welcome community submissions! If you are a photographer and have a portrait + story to share, please fill out a form by clicking the link below.
Ouda أوضة (o-da), She/They
“As a queer multiethnic artist and facilitator, my artwork bridges community, agricultural connection, and the land. Inspired by the unconditional acceptance of the natural world and growing up all over the Earth, I create art to help people slow down, ground, connect with their inner child, and feel deeply seen. This embroidered cloth—crafted by my Sudanese-Egyptian mother—has traveled with me as a constant symbol of love, heritage, and connection across differences. I am also inspired by my grandparents, who were a steadfast presence in my life until they passed, and who were the original reason I came to Maine.”
Photographer Credit: KWarnock Photography, September 2026.
Tobey from Ringtail Carpentry
“Ringtail offers a wide range of carpentry and handyman services tailored to the proud (but busy) homeowner. We can chat about your growing to-do list from quality of life improvements to more urgent tasks. Ringtail’s know-hows include general home repairs, demo, drywall, paint, custom shelving and built-ins, cabinetry, trim, siding, flooring, window and door installation, and deck construction.
After a decade of working in graphic design, Ringtail owner Tobey McKinley found intrigue in carpentry through the design and construction of a 200 sq ft self-built tiny home on his 3-acre wooded property. Tobey combines his knack for digital design and project management with hands-on woodworking skills to make houses feel more like homes. His other self-led endeavors include branding and logo work, website design, web accessibility consultations, and Transcapsule – an app for documenting gender journeys. 🏳️⚧️”
Photographer Credit: KWarnock Photography, September 2026.
Marcin, He/Him
“One of the biggest regrets I carry with me is never showing my grandmother my full, true self.
She was the person who raised me. The person who stepped in and gave me the kind of love every child deserves to feel. She shaped the man I am today, teaching me kindness, compassion, and how to love people deeply and fully.
She wasn’t just my grandmother. She was my safe place. The person who made the hardest days feel lighter just by being there. No matter what life looked like, I always knew I was loved by her. And that kind of love changes a person forever.
Deep down, I truly believe she would have loved and accepted me exactly as I am. But there was always that quiet voice in the back of my mind asking, ‘What if she won’t?’ And that fear was enough to keep me silent.
I held her hand as she took her last breath. And in that moment, a part of me broke knowing she never truly got to know all of me. The real me.
That regret will always stay with me. Fear convinced me to hide pieces of myself from someone I loved so deeply. But I refuse to live behind fear anymore. I refuse to shrink myself for the comfort of others or for the ‘what ifs’ that once controlled my life. I am who I am. Fully. Openly. Proudly.
And maybe this is my full circle moment. Finally becoming the person I was always meant to be, with the hope that somewhere above, she sees me now…and smiles.”
Photographer Credit: KWarnock Photography, August 2026.
Jorden, They/Them & Danny, They/She
“With our theme song being ‘Just the two of us’, past created handshakes, and secret whisper language we developed as children, you can say we are a close pair of siblings. Besides trying to be as different as possible growing up and being 6 years apart, our life experiences have matched pretty uncannily. Being Black and Latino, queer, gender-nonconforming, working in the service industry, skipping out on college, and dealing with our interesting family. The years I have in extra experience as the elder sibling, Jorden, gave me lots of insight. Dealing with all these factors and encountering and navigating similar feelings/situations a few years earlier helped me guide my sister through, as they happened. Helping them have an easier journey heals me and changes my outlook on the world and the past.
Sometimes it slips my mind while life and society are a mess, that Danny thinks I’m cool as fuck and still wants to be like me. Our parents taught us how to be great siblings to each other and how to do the right thing. I wanna share everything liberatory for us in this life with Danny. So far I’ve been successful in sharing the local kiki ballroom scene and how to live your own damn life with them. The visibility and freedom in ballroom was something I knew that I didn’t want to and couldn’t keep for just myself. We do different categories but stun the room regardless everytime.
With support, Danny has blossomed into an ever evolving beautiful person. They remind me how to put myself first with other people, stay grounded, to not give a damn, to expect the unexpected, break limits, and that our shared stubbornness is valid (as well as always right). To this day it is said that you can find us on any given day having our weekly sister dates.”
Photographer Credit: KWarnock Photography, August 2026.
Katrina, She/Her
“I’ll be honest, All, this caption took me 6 months to write. As a neurodivergent person with an invisible disability, I felt the pressure of a platform and finding the perfect words. What I’ve realized is that I’ll never have them. I’m just a person, surrounded by all sorts of different people with unique experiences. Instead, I’ll tell you some silly things:
- I try to find a four leaf clover everyday, I’m often successful
- I first eat all the cereal in a bowl of lucky charms, then I organize and eat the marshmallows from least to most favorite (🌈, duh)
- I bought a graphing notebook just to use for the daily NYT Spelling Bee
- I have a tattoo of a cattail that is also a corn dog and so do 3 of my friends
Sometimes I get stuck thinking about the parts of me I didn’t get to choose, but today I’ll opt to appreciate the silly little choices I do make.”
Photographer Credit: KWarnock Photography, August 2026.
Chris, She/Her
“How is this my life?
I was born and raised in Maine. After graduating from high school, I left Maine to find my life, but thirty years of being away taught me my life was right here in the Pine Tree State the whole time.
I was a closeted lesbian in the Mormon church until I was nearly fifty years old. I was told that God wanted me to be a stay-at-home parent in a Connecticut suburb. I struggled to find meaning and purpose in my assigned roles of wife and mother, and the hopelessness of not knowing myself, or feeling known by anyone around me, eventually became too much to endure. I lost myself in the struggle to survive because although I had a good life, I knew it wasn’t my life.
Returning to Maine has brought me home to myself. I’ve connected with my joy and I’ve discovered my peace. I’ve returned to places I never thought I’d see again. Leaving my old life and coming back to live in the Northern Maine Woods has helped me ‘get the stink blowed off.’ The view from the top of this mountain is better than any future I could have imagined for myself.
People challenge themselves by hiking the Appalachian Trail and one of the rewards for finishing their rigorous journey is seeing the view from the summit of Mt. Katahdin. Now I get to live in that view.
This is my life. I’m so glad I stayed long enough to find myself here. And I have found myself. Here.”
Photographer Credit: KWarnock Photography, July 2026.
Victor, He/Him
“I grew up in Evangelical Christianity and purity culture, where being gay was something to overcome.
The messages were familiar: ‘Love the sinner, hate the sin.’ ‘Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.’ I was taught that homosexuality was an abomination, a rebellion against God’s design, and a reason to fear judgment. I also grew up hearing the AIDS crisis described as God’s punishment for being gay. Yet even then, I struggled to understand how a loving God would use fear, disease, and hell to compel belief or conformity.
I was conditioned to believe it anyway.
In Bible college, I wrote my thesis based on the belief that homosexuality could be explained, treated, and overcome. In many ways, I was writing my own story of denying my queerness. For decades, I believed a core part of who I was needed to change. I embraced celibacy. Beneath it all was a low-grade depression and the exhausting work of living divided against myself.
It wasn’t until my thirties that I first encountered the possibility that I could be both gay and Christian.
When I began coming out, I realized I no longer wanted to spend my life denying what the Creator had called good. As the psalmist writes, ‘Thank you for making me so wonderfully complex! Your workmanship is marvelous.’
For the first time, I began to believe those words applied to all the queer parts of my soul, too.
Coming out cost me deeply. Some family relationships ended. I lost the church community that had been my spiritual home for forty-five years. Yet I also discovered something freeing: the Creator I had spent my life serving was not waiting on the other side of authenticity with condemnation, but with the freedom to embrace all of me.
For most of my life, belonging felt conditional. Today, my ministry is about helping people discover the sacred—in themselves, one another, and across many wisdom traditions. I now believe that belonging is not something we earn. It is something we awaken to.
If I could sit down with my younger self today, I would tell him:
You were right to question the fear.
You were right to wonder whether perfect love truly casts out fear.
Guess what?
It does.”
Photographer Credit: KWarnock Photography, June 2026.
Ev, He/They
“When I left for vacation, I didn’t have a plan. The next morning, I was on a plane to Puerto Rico. Three nights later, after a few new connections made at a queer guest house outside of Old San Juan, I found myself sitting across from Mark, ‘a therapist from Brooklyn,’ with The Knight of Cups in one hand and clarified punch in the other. Intrigued, I asked him what he picked up on. He talked about not trusting my own voice (oh no), my burnout with the fashion industry (check), and that he could see me doing something in medicine or healing. (‘Nah.’ I thought) ‘Cool’ I said.
Returning to Maine, I thought about where I’d been on my own healing journey. From grueling self-confrontations at Vipassana meditation retreats, to perusing the self-help section for another book I wouldn’t read, I realized some of my most healing moments were with community, in movement, on a dark, loud dancefloor. Desperate to create the unapologetically queer spaces I was looking for since my time in Australia, I threw a few events at Jewel Box, Hi Blank* & OOF.
As the dust settled from OOF, I stepped away from nightlife but took the ingredients that made the dancefloor home; Dark. Loud. Movement. Community. Before I felt ready, I auditioned thinking ‘the worst they can say is no,’ but 5 months later began instructing at a local cycling studio, Reve, followed by NXGen & Salud.
Later, I went back to school to become an LMT. Movement taught me how to process emotion, energy, and experiences. Bodywork became the flip side of the coin to find regulation, rest, and somatic integration. While in school I connected with a massage practice for clients dealing with chronic pain. ‘The worst they could say is no,’ so I asked if they would take me on as an apprentice to learn deeper therapeutic work. Exactly a year after coming on board, I opened my own Therapeutic Massage practice in Portland, Ev.LMT.
Four years later, I still think about Mark and the Knight of Cups urging me to put intuition into action. Maybe it wasn’t so much a prediction of the future, but a reflection of movement held up at the right moment by a stranger outside Old San Juan.”
Photographer Credit: KWarnock Photography, June 2026.
Haley, She/Her
“I grew up knowing I was queer. It was a key that unlocked everything for me: my years as a singer, my friendships, my early work in special education, and my current work as a mental health occupational therapist.
At the core of my work is the conviction that everyone deserves to be in the driver’s seat of their own life. In my practice, Hummingbird OT, I support neurodivergent adults in stepping into that role. By addressing sensory processing, executive functioning, and identity exploration, I help clients find the keys to their own lives and trust themselves to drive.
This is where I am. Where are you trying to go?”
Photographer Credit: KWarnock Photography, June 2026.
Carl Smith is a retired public school teacher and Kerry Drach is a retired clinical psychologist. Both have lived in Maine for many years and both came out as gay men late in life after raising their families in long marriages. Carl is now divorced, and Kerry was widowed by the death of his wife to breast cancer. We are both fathers and grandfathers, and Carl is even a great grandfather. His children live in Maine, Texas, and Oregon, and Kerry's daughter, his single child, lives near Paris, France, with her French husband and their children.
"We met online at Match.com in 2015. At time Kerry lived in Portland and Carl in Brunswick, Maine. We found that we share a lot in common in terms of background and social values. Both of us grew up in the Philadelphia area, Carl on the Pennsylvania side and Kerry on the New Jersey side. We were both foreign exchange students in high school. We both graduated from Antioch College in Ohio, though we did not know one another there. Carl is an avid gardener, growing vegetables and flowers, and he was also a landscape gardener during times between teaching positions. Kerry is an avid classical pianist and is actively involved with the Portland Conservatory of Music chamber music program. We have taken trips together, including hiking in the southwest, a three week tour of Vietnam, and multiple visits to Mexico.
From the beginning we were mutually attracted by one another's intelligence, sensitivity, and good looks. In 2021 Kerry moved to live with Carl in Brunswick with the shared intent of being supportive, helpful partners as we age. We are fortunate to have a great circle of older gay men as friends and enjoy doing things with them. Given our age (in the 80's), both work hard at keeping as fit as possible. At this point in our lives our idea about living in a queer world is simply that people should feel free to be who are, and others do not need to judge what is right and wrong."
Photographer Credit: KWarnock Photography, May 2026.
Sam, She/Her
Lifelong learner. Social Diva. Proud adoptee. Queer. Outdoors lover. Mainer.
"As a Mainer, I’ve built queer community in unexpected places. I’ve met many of my queer friends through introductions from friends’ ex-fiancés, random dining hall encounters in college, interactions at places of worship, and gay dating app meetups. To my fellow Maine queers, I hope we continue building a queer culture that thrives on incidental encounters and silly introductions.
Maine’s tight-knit queer community is what has helped me feel so supported in discovering my trans identity, because without each other, many of us know we wouldn’t have other sources of queer joy. I’m about to graduate from UMaine. I don’t know what’s ahead of me. I do know that I call Maine home, I’m profoundly shaped by my queer friendships, and I want my life’s work to support the mental health systems and queer communities that showed me how to find pockets of joy in life.”
Photographer Credit: KWarnock Photography, May 2026.
Aiden, He/Him
“Hi! I am a queer, trans/non-binary, neuro-spicy, artist and therapist. I started my transition over a decade ago, and as I find myself becoming an elder queer, I feel a deep commitment to being visible, accessible, and supportive for younger queers. I believe in sharing lived experience, offering steadiness and hope, and helping make the path a little less overwhelming for those coming up behind us. I am openly out because I believe it matters, especially now, for queer and trans people to see real, joyful individuals doing life things in a tough political climate.
As an artist, I know colors and stories can say what words sometimes can’t. Art has been a place where my authentic self could exist before it was safe or possible to be myself. Making art helps me think, regulate, and imagine. Being creative gives shape to feelings that live in my body and nervous system in a way I struggle to communicate otherwise. I think queerness, too, lives outside of tidy narratives, and art offers a way to honor complexity, contradiction, and becoming ourselves.
As a therapist, I hold space with warmth, humor, and deep respect for your path. I believe healing works best when we bring our whole weird, wonderful selves to the table. My style is person-centered, strength-based, and gently goofy. I love mixing grounding, curiosity, and creativity to help you feel safe, seen, and supported. I am especially passionate about supporting queer and trans folks as we grow and step into authentic versions of ourselves.”
Photographer Credit: KWarnock Photography, April 2026.
Ria, She/Her
“I grew up in northern Maine, a place where queerness wasn’t often spoken aloud, let alone celebrated. For a long time, I didn’t have language for myself, only the sense that I was somehow adjacent to what everyone else seemed to fit into. It took the cliché falling for a friend (ugh) to finally see my own queerness reflected back at me. That realization arrived during a period of profound upheaval, when I was navigating an eating disorder and learning, piece by piece, who I wanted to become. Those years reshaped me. They pushed me toward healing, toward community, and ultimately toward the work I do now.
Today, I identify simply as queer, with labels like bi/pan and demisexual feeling adjacent but not definitive. I’m a size-inclusive, social justice-oriented registered dietitian living in central Maine with my partner and our dog, supporting many clients who are queer themselves. I carry an awareness of my own bodily privilege and the responsibility to divest from the systems that uphold it. My queerness, my recovery, and my commitment to liberation-centered care are deeply intertwined. They guide how I show up in my work, my community, and my life.“
Photographer Credit: KWarnock Photography, April 2026.
Caiti, She/Her
“One piece of advice I would give to my younger self is, nothing is linear. Milestones happen at times you least expect them to, and sometimes they will surprise you! When you’re young, especially for Millennials you are told, job at 25, house at 30 and settled by 32-35. That’s a pipe dream for most people nowadays! At 27, I came out as queer/Lesbian and it’s not really a milestone, but self discovery. It was a facet of my identity that I did not see unfolding until that point. I have a good job, soon to be a homeowner, and yes I’m 31 but I had to work for those goals. My point is, life will fall into place when it feels right, and taking life seriously and slowly will make you happy for years ahead.”
Photographer Credit: KWarnock Photography, January 2026.
Andy, He/Him
“Queer people don’t grow up as ourselves; we grow up playing a version of ourselves that sacrifices authenticity… The massive task of our adult lives is to unpick which parts of ourselves are truly us and which parts we’ve created to protect us.”
— Alexander Leon
“Those words have always resonated deeply with me because they capture so much of my own journey. Growing up as a young kid in Buxton, I became a master observer of the world around me - keenly attune to the people and world around me. What once felt like hyper-awareness for protection — the constant observing, sensing, and interpreting — I now understand as a deep, sacred superpower. It’s the part of me that was authentically mine all along, even when I didn’t recognize it. It allows me to connect with people in ways I deeply cherish. And laughter has become one of the brightest expressions of that authenticity: an entry point into connection and community.”
Photographer Credit: KWarnock Photography, January 2026.
Dana, She/Her
“When I moved to Maine, I wanted so badly to feel like the state border sign was speaking directly to me: ‘the way life should be,’ ‘welcome home.’ Things felt turbulent, ungrounded to say the least. Almost 5 years later, it’s easy to see that I’ve come into myself and found ‘home.’ After moving almost every year or two for 15 years, it just hit me that I’ve now lived in the same apartment—with my favorite person—for over four years. I’ve worked through so many prickly parts of myself and found a supportive community for both my creative work and my earth-based skills, even one that encouraged me to start a business. When you get to evolve in a place, it begins to feel like home.
One thing I love about Maine is all of the elder queers, there’s something so humbling about being around those who fought for all of us to be boldly standing here today. My wife and I got engaged at the shacks at Willard Beach, and when they washed away a few winters ago, we went back to find a piece of the wreckage. So many others were there remembering their own moments. We met an 80-year-old man who said he’d married his husband there; whether from the biting cold or pure emotion, his eyes welled up when we told him we’d gotten engaged there just months before the sea claimed that shoreline.
I feel blessed to live somewhere where queerness feels hopeful—where you can grow old with the person you love, and it really can be that simple. The world feels so threatening right now, and I often remind myself that the elders in our community fought fiercely for us to be visible, to love openly, even to marry. There is still so much work ahead for all marginalized groups in this country, but I remain profoundly grateful to those who paved the way.
Photographer Credit: KWarnock Photography, January 2026.