S2E6: Christopher Hamblin

Christopher Hamblin:
And I guess that's how I define family. If I need you for real, for real, and you're not there then you're probably not my family for real, for real.

Tyler Greene:
Hello there, and welcome to This Is My Family, a podcast about building a life with the people you love. I'm your host Tyler Greene, and I am so glad that you're here. I'm raising a baby with my husband in California, and as my family grows I wanted to talk to fascinating people about how we make our families, and how our families end up making us. In each episode I talk to somebody who can inspire us, think about family in new, bigger, and more inclusive ways.

Tyler Greene:
In this episode I have the pleasure of talking to Christopher Hamblin. He is maybe better known as Latrice Royale's husband. Latrice is a drag queen beloved around the world who was a breakout star from the reality competition show RuPaul's Drag Race. Last season we did a whole episode about Latrice, and that's how I ended up getting to know Christopher. He's a musician, but also Latrice's manager, so we emailed a lot and texted a lot, and it occurred to me after they both really enjoyed that episode that it would be really great to get the other half of that conversation, which is Christoper, and so that's what we're here to do today.

Tyler Greene:
I felt a connection right away talking with Christopher, especially, when we learned that we both have a history with the same microscopic town in the Tennessee Mountains. My mom actually lived in Christopher's hometown for years. I know it doesn't sound like much, but there's this magical feeling when you learn about a connection like that. It's an excitement that you could only really get when you love a place that nobody's heard of that makes meeting someone whose been there feel like kizmet. And despite our shared connection to this particular small town in Tennessee it wasn't an easy place for Christopher to grow up. Church sparked Christopher's love of music as a kid, but it took a really long journey for him to find and help build a community that blended music, faith, and acceptance of his queerness. It was his relationship with his grandmother that was the major centering force in Christopher's life as a closeted kid in Tennessee.

Christopher Hamblin:
My grandma Hazel was the matriarch of our family, and she was a very, very special soul. I think a lot of gay boys have special connections with their grandmothers. She was sort of a little bit my protector within the family. My situation was maybe a little unique, and kind of not in the South at the same time. My parents had married very young at 18-years-old and they had me at 20.

Christopher Hamblin:
Fast forward a couple of years and my mom and dad don't work out, so I don't really have any memories of living with my mom and dad as a unit really. I think from the time I was 2-1/2 years old, or so, my mom and I moved back in with her family, so at that time that was my grandmother and grandfather, and my mom's two brothers. There was a lot of us cousins and every Christmas we would try to have a family reunion that my grandmother and her siblings would orchestrate and figure out whose going to bring the ham, and whose going to bring the stuffing, and whose going to bring the egg salad. My mom became what I refer to as part of like the Reba McEntire generation of feminism.

Tyler Greene:
Yes, Fancy.

Christopher Hamblin:
Reba really did become a symbol for single mothers. My mom felt very, very obligated to go back into the workforce and back to school to educate herself to be able to have some way to provide for me, but that meant that most of my childhood was really spent with my grandmother because my mom was out in the workforce, and my dad was not always consistent with child support, or much else. And so my grandmother was definitely there in a certain way having to mother me, and my mother. There was a lot of judgment on the fact that there was a divorce in the family in the community. I know that my mom felt very judged, and so my grandmother really had to be supportive, and keep her head held high during that time to keep the family going, and to keep me feeling loved. There was definitely an expectation that I was going to grow up to be a basketball star, and an athlete, and follow that path, so when I started talking about Judy Garland, and Bette Midler, and Sandi Patty, they were like, "Hmm."

Tyler Greene:
Don't know what to do.

Christopher Hamblin:
Don't know what to do. I think that I was very different than anybody in my family. We grew up raising tobacco, and I was always so allergic to everything and they thought that I was making excuses, and just didn't want to participate in the farm work, or being lazy, or whatever. And my grandfather would always tease me, and say, "There ain't no girls around here to see you getting dirty. Quit going to wash your hands, warsh your hands."

Tyler Greene:
Warsh, I like the correction there that was good.

Christopher Hamblin:
Yeah, yeah, he said warsh, he would not have said wash. They thought it was superficial, or whatever, but I never liked being dirty. I didn't mind farming and now around the house I love landscaping, and I'm always out in nature. I'm still a country boy. I really believe I grew up in one of the most magical places in the world. The hollers and creeks and the mountains and the seasons. That being said, it is also, I hate to use it, but the word is backwards in a lot of ways. There are certain sets of beliefs culturally and spiritually that I was not a part of really. I grew up very, very Baptist at Pump Springs Baptist Church. There was a spring and there was a pump, and so that's what they called the church in the holler.

Tyler Greene:
Yes.

Christopher Hamblin:
Pump Springs Baptist Church. I was very into it. And I loved the music. That's where I started making music. It was amazing in its way, but the people eventually I felt very betrayed by because the love that I was shown as a child as I grew up and became more and more out it seems like that love has been withdrawn in a lot of ways. And that feels very hurtful to me. The youth minister at the church that I grew up in actually had deemed me unfit to aid in worship. And there came a point where I was no longer allowed to play the piano at my church because of my, quote, struggle with homosexuality. And I had felt very betrayed by him because he was my confidante and he was my minister, and he was the person I was confiding in trying to figure my life out when I was very suicidally in the closet, you know what I mean? I was really not wanting to be gay.

Tyler Greene:
Yeah.

Christopher Hamblin:
So even though I remember the geography of my childhood, and the sense of community that was there very, very fondly, I also have grown up to have to live somewhere else. When I graduated high school in 1999 the very next week I packed my car and started summer school at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. I didn't expect for this to be the thing that made me emotional, but I can still remember my grandmother just hugging me and crying her eyes out just so devastated to see me going, but knowing just there was this understanding between of us of why I had to go.

Tyler Greene:
Yeah.

Christopher Hamblin:
She just knew that I was different and special, and that I needed to get out of my situation. So I went to college, and then as soon as I got there I found out I wasn't quite ready for college. On an academic level I was okay, but on a musical level, which is what I was studying I wasn't as prepared as I thought I would be. And in the midst of trying to figure out what to do about that my mother's brother was suddenly killed in a car accident, and that sort of interrupted the entire family trajectory. My mom had reached out to my dad that day when she had found out that her brother was dead, and asked my dad to come and get me in Knoxville, which is about an hour and a half drive to tell me in person because they didn't want to tell me over the phone.

Tyler Greene:
Right.

Christopher Hamblin:
He did come and do that and he was using it really as an endeavor at being a standup guy, and being a present father, which he hadn't always been. And after that situation he lost his sobriety and had to go to rehab, and basically had said to me that the stress of explaining of being my father had cost him his sobriety, and that was why he was there. Even though I had experienced sadness and guilt and some level of insecurity and depression up until that point my freshman year of college really threw me off course mentally. I started not doing as well at school. I couldn't really focus. I was missing classes. I was discovering the night life. I was discovering drag. I was finding opportunities where I could perform, and make money without a college degree.

Tyler Greene:
So, Christopher quit college. He moved to New York City to pursue musical theater, and got exposed to all sorts of new things. One community in particular was a really big deal for Christopher, a group called the Radical Faeries, F-A-E-R-I-E-S. Chris describes them as kind of like the last of the living gay hippies. And he learned a lot about community building from them how to create an environment where people who aren't alike in every way can really come together and find common ground. And a few years after that Chris returned to Knoxville, and he used those lessons to find his people there. For one thing, he found a more accepting church.

Christopher Hamblin:
My grandmother taught me to believe in a God that was way bigger than King James. She didn't have the language or education to articulate that to me. She showed me the God of her understanding in her behavior and how she treated me, and then the way that she loved. And I try to emulate that in everything that I do in my life. There is a Christ likeness that I still aspire to even though I'm a filthy pervert, and a homosexual, and all those other things too, I feel that I have been able to grow into an understanding of God that has more manifestations than just the ones that I was taught about at Pump Springs Baptist Church. And when I found the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church, say that fives times fast.

Tyler Greene:
I will not.

Christopher Hamblin:
Right, I've tried it, it's not very fast, but I can do it. I felt like they were the closest community that I found in Knoxville to the Radical Faeries in that at a given service in a sanctuary in Knoxville you could be sitting between a Jew, and a Buddhist, and an agnostic, and a vegetarian, and a homosexual. The challenge then became how do we sit together? What do we agree on? And how can we come together for the betterment of our society, and our planet, and each other? And the church that I worshiped at became the church that I volunteered, and worked at a lot, but I got a job at the Catholic church down the street. I've played for almost every denomination. I played for the Catholics, the Christian Scientists, the Lutherans, the Presbyterians. I did play for the Catholics and I was at work there the day that my church got shot at. We did three masses a weekend so I had just played the prelude and got things going, and I went downstairs because I had already heard the sermon twice.

Tyler Greene:
It was in this day July 27, 2008 when there was a shooting at Chris's new church. Two people were killed, six others were wounded. Police who interviewed the shooter said that was, quote, motivated by hatred of Democrats, liberals, African-Americans, and homosexuals, end quote. Chris's community was shattered by this tragedy.

Christopher Hamblin:
Some of the people were letting me know that the church where I worshiped that somebody had been killed. It was just loose ends of information coming through. The pastor of the church, Reverend Chris Buice, when that happened it really created this kind of Columbine atmosphere around him. He was now thrust in the media being a spokesperson for an entire denomination. They kept trying to pin him to say that he thought that the man that shot at the church was going to hell. And all he would say was that he believed that that man must have been living in hell already.

Christopher Hamblin:
And it was just the most compassionate thing I'd ever heard another person say that even when you come to me with your violence I still wish you better than you could give me. And I felt spoken for and seen, and it was very, very inspiring to be a part of the movement that happened around the church at that time. We found a lot of allies, and that really led to the formation of the Knoxville Gay Men's Chorus. It came out of a birth of the trauma that the community experienced together. All of that informs my faith. I believe that every person has worth, and that every person should be treated with dignity. I'm not in charge of the rest.

Tyler Greene:
You've mentioned the Gay Men's Chorus, the Knoxville chapter, and I want to give you an opportunity to tell that story.

Christopher Hamblin:
Well, there wasn't a Gay Men's Chorus in Knoxville. I met a guy called Bleu Copas. We were both very involved in some political activist organizations. At that time I did not feel very popular, or respected within the gay community in Knoxville for various reasons. I was trying to do drag, and I wasn't really great at it. People just didn't know what to make of what I was trying to express, but within Knoxville Pride organizations, and community involvement there was just always, sorry, gay drama. There was just always just fighting, and I wasn't about that life. I found it really, really frustrating to deal with.

Christopher Hamblin:
And so when Bleu started talking to me about this idea for a choir I said to him, "If you can get people together, and we don't fight about it then I'm in." Because Bleu was very passionate and he had a great concept and an ability to bring people together. So we started having meetings, and what we found out was that there had only been a couple of people in Knoxville, or East Tennessee in general that had been willing to be in the media as out gay people because people were still afraid of not getting work because they were out. And we had to have a lot of discussions about whether to even put the word gay in the name of the chorus. I fought very hard to say that's the point of this chorus is to tell our story.

Christopher Hamblin:
I spent a lot of my 20s feeling like I was the only person going through what I was going through. When we started forming the Knoxville Gay Men's Chorus we found that even though it was different variations, or we might not even like each other that much for whatever reason there was a commonality there. And we felt passionate that we needed to stand up and tell our story, and let people know how we felt. And so we facilitated a lot of conversations about, like, we can't get up here and ugly cry, and do this. So we got together and cried all that out together beforehand so that we could get on stage and then present this story to let people know more about what we were all going through and we learned a lot about each other.

Christopher Hamblin:
The very first full concert that we did was at TVUUC at the Unitarian church with these beautiful acoustics. It's such a beautiful sanctuary. We did a piece by Stephen Schwartz called Testimony, which he wrote as a tribute to It Gets Better Project, and it was quotes from queer teens who had considered killing themselves, or had actually killed themselves that he compiled into this very dramatic emotional piece. (singing) And we sang this political anthem called Freedom Come, and we just begged for freedom to fill the space. (singing) We got this whooping standing ovation to a sold-out crowd. The whole sanctuary was there full of community leaders, and now they're an organization recognized by the mayor that sings at government events. It was just so healing.

Tyler Greene:
Coming up in just a minute, Christopher's love story with the iconic drag queen, Latrice Royale, from their adorable first meeting to their marriage. Wherever you're listening to the show please do me a favor and hit subscribe, follow, plus whatever it takes to get you into our fold.

Tyler Greene:
Christopher was living in Knoxville when a drag show featuring superstar, Latrice Royale, came to town, and that show changed his life forever. On stage, Latrice is a big, boisterous star. Offstage, he's a man named Timothy Wilcots who grew up in Compton, and spent some time in jail for a minor drug offense. Being open about his past on TV helped earn Latrice a very loyal fan base. Chris was among them, and happened to be friends with the organizer of the event in Knoxville.

Christopher Hamblin:
It was December 22nd of 2012, and if you remember they had said that the Mayan calendar was ending the day before that, and that the world ended. And the next day I met Latrice Royale.

Tyler Greene:
Yes. A new day.

Christopher Hamblin:
It's true. It was a whole new world, it really was. Instead of running off begging for attention that way I slide in the back way and I asked Zeena, "Hey, girl, do you need a little help with this meet and greet?" And she was like, "Oh, yes, please." And so I wound up being in charge of taking pictures, and making sure Latrice had her drinks, and managing a line, or whatever. I had been to meet and greets with Bernadette Peters, and seen how things worked.

Tyler Greene:
You knew how it went, yeah.

Christopher Hamblin:
So I had some kind of idea of what should actually be happening, and they didn't have anybody in that role yet because it was a new thing. And so I introduced myself and she started flirting just like drag queens do like it's their job to flirt, but she wasn't really expecting me to get mouthy back. And I've been around a lot of drag queens and I wasn't intimidated by her. I didn't know what she had gone to jail for, but I figured if it was real, real bad, or violent, we would have heard. You know what I mean? I just didn't have a feeling that this person was a threat, or going to hurt me, and I don't think he was used to that. He's told me since then that one of the turn-ons about meeting me was that I was not intimidated, or scurred, as he likes to say. So I flirted back. It was kind of harmless at first, and then she dropped her Sharpie. And she was signing autographs and somebody had to get the Sharpie. And so I bent over to get the Sharpie from under the table, and I made a big deal of it just to be silly, really, but I had also at one point been voted best ass of any bartender in Knoxville, so just so you know.

Tyler Greene:
There you go.

Christopher Hamblin:
There is junk in the trunk. There is stuff to notice back there.

Tyler Greene:
For all you podcast listeners.

Christopher Hamblin:
But I wasn't necessarily doing it that evocatively, or whatever, but then she dropped it again on purpose. And I was like, oh-oh, okay. And then she expressed some interest in hanging out after the show, but the dressing room was not very big, and I wasn't really popular like I said. So they were like, "Wait, you want him to come back here?" They were very thrown that I would be the person that Latrice noticed out of anybody in the world, particularly that club that night. After the show Latrice told me could I meet her at the hotel that she had to get packed, and all of that. Well, by getting packed she meant getting stoned with Zeena in the car. They went and smoked some weed, and I really believed that Latrice had completely forgotten about me. And this is getting be the club closed at three, so this is getting to now be close to 4:20, time to smoke again, right? And she's not out of drag yet. I'm just sitting in the parking lot of this hotel waiting on Latrice Royale feeling kind of dumb, but not wanting to ditch her, like, you don't want to miss your chance. She told me to wait here so I'm going to wait here.

Tyler Greene:
Yeah.

Christopher Hamblin:
So she pulls up and sees me waiting, and is completely plucked. And we go up to the hotel room, and he's trying to be a host, but is also not fully out of drag, and being a little shy about getting in the shower with a stranger in the room, like, what's going on here? And I was like, "I watch you on TV. I've seen you get out of drag before. I know what you have to go do. We'll talk when you're done." So then I wait for him to get out of the shower.

Tyler Greene:
Yeah.

Christopher Hamblin:
And then we sat and talked for the rest of the night. I said very boldly that night that I didn't know what it was, but that I felt like something that I call God was between us, and that I was supposed to be there. I said, "I think I know what you're doing. I think I get it. I've seen a lot of people that the community counted on that were in the spotlight burn out because they didn't know how to deal with it, and they didn't have the right people around them." And I said, "If you think I know what you're doing, and you'd like to hang out I'd love to be around for a while, but if you don't I'll get out of the way. I'm not trying to, like, you're Latrice Royale motherfuckin' Royale. I'm not trying to mess that up. Please keep doing that." And it sounds crazy now, but it was the truth. So before I made it home Latrice was texting me. And so I knew there was a connection, but I didn't really expect to be sitting here talking to you as his husband eight years later. That wasn't what I was thinking that night at all.

Tyler Greene:
So I'm interested in bringing your mom back into this equation to figure out when she found out about this relationship, and when she ended up meeting Timothy.

Christopher Hamblin:
At that time I only let them know that it was a professional opportunity because I wasn't sure if it was going to work out with me and Tim. And my family had never met anybody that I called a boyfriend because I didn't really have anybody that I ever felt like bringing home. I needed to find out for sure what it was going to be like to live with this man, and to see if this was going to work before I put my family through getting to know somebody because it wasn't just another Tennessee boy that they would know something about. It was a black man from Compton, California, who is 6'5", big ol' dude that's intimating physically to be around, and an ex-con whose been to jail, and a world-famous drag queen. Any bit of that is hard to digest for my family.

Tyler Greene:
Yes. It's not just bringing the boyfriend home. It's bringing Latrice Royale home. Yeah.

Christopher Hamblin:
Yeah, right, but the great thing is that Latrice Royale is so beyond any box that anybody can imagine that it just removed any possible preconceived notions of who my partner should be from my family once we did start introducing it in. My mom and Tim had not gotten an opportunity to know each other at all for the first couple of years of our relationship. I think that I was starting to let them know more about what was really going on during this time, but when he proposed to me on stage in Seattle, Washington, it was quite the to-do, and event. And it got a lot of social media traction immediately because Jujubee was live on Facebook.

Tyler Greene:
Okay, just a quick interjection here. Jujubee is a drag queen. Maybe that was obvious, and she was streaming this live on her Facebook page.

Latrice Royale:
It would do me the greatest honor to have you be my life partner. I know we were talking about traditional marriage, and we didn't care about the government being in our business, but bitch, I've had a change of heart, and I want you to be with me the rest of my life.

Christopher Hamblin:
And so the news actually made it to my mom via social media first. Our phones were blowing up from notifications from all over the world congratulating us on our engagement, and being happy for us, and celebrating that, and crickets from Tennessee. I heard from cousins and other people, and that's how I found out that she knew, but in the middle of the night I wasn't going to call her and wake her up and tell her something that she might not want to know in the first place.

Tyler Greene:
Right.

Christopher Hamblin:
And she was very hurt by that and felt left out of it. Later on Christmas passed and my mom had sent me a gift, but everybody else had sent us a gift. And when I saw only my name on the package, and every other Christmas card, or every other thing that we got was to Chris and Tim, or Latrice and Chris, or whoever they thought we were it really let me know that this is no longer acceptable, and I've got to figure out how we're going to do this, which meant that I had to make sure that my fiancé was willing and able to have a relationship with my blood family.

Christopher Hamblin:
There are assumptions that he had about where I come from, and who they may be that he had to work at putting aside to be open to having a relationship with them. Because he knew that our relationship was a challenge that didn't encourage him to want to engage, but he also didn't want us to go the rest of our lives without feeling like a complete family because I was seeing a lot of healing in his own family. I got to see him have totally full circle moments with his brothers that he hadn't spoken to in years that now call each other on the regular, and so I was being shown this example of healing, and being challenged, I felt like to enact it in my own family, and live up to the example that I felt like my partner was exhibiting for me. I finally set a time, and let my mom know that we need to talk, and we set aside some time.

Christopher Hamblin:
Basically, my mom expressed to me that day that she felt that if this was something that I was proud of that I would have called her, and included her. And I felt that if she had been proud of me and ready to celebrate with me that she would have called me because I knew that she had known, and it just left us in this silence for a while of she didn't think I wanted her to be a part of it because of the way that things went down. And that wasn't the case at all, but at the end of the day I do know that she was taught, and has practiced that homosexuality is a sin. I wasn't really sure if she would be willing and able to be a part of our world as it exists.

Christopher Hamblin:
That day, though, she really made a choice that she would rather have her son in her life than not. That's just what it came down to. Before my grandmother passed away, Tim and I scheduled a weekend where we went to Tennessee and he got to meet the whole family as Tim. They had never seen RuPaul's Drag Race, or any of Latrice's anything, so he won them over, and he got the chance to meet my grandmother Hazel before she passed, and my great-uncle Ray. Tim wears a lot beanie knitted hats. After my great-uncle had met him they said, "Well, what did you think of Chris's friend?" And he said, "Well, I mean, he's all right, I guess, but I don't know why he had that toboggan on in the middle of the summer."

Tyler Greene:
What did your grandma think of him?

Christopher Hamblin:
My grandmother thought that I was happy, and taken care of, and not calling her in tears in the middle of night anymore. That's what she knew. She knew that this man really did want to take care of me, and he was there the one holding me when they called me telling me that she had passed. So I think that she knew somewhere despite everything that she was taught that she saw that this was how it had to be.

Tyler Greene:
Yeah.

Christopher Hamblin:
It feels like my grandmother somehow was able to work through us almost more when she passed away then she was when she was alive because my mom once she heard Tim's story of losing his own mother while he was incarcerated because now she has that experience of having lost her mother she has a way to connect with him, and she just couldn't imagine grieving in isolation, and going through what he went through. She had a sympathy for him, and a way to relate to him that I don't think she could have had before that experience.

Christopher Hamblin:
So she has completely embraced him, and went from not even really wanting to know about our wedding to being the only person of my blood family that did stand with me at our wedding. It was the first time that people from very different facets of our lives got to be in the same room together. It was a level playing field where none of the girls were in drag, and so everybody was really relatable, and got to know each other for real. We hired some of the best musicians in the world to come and sing and play for us because you're not just going to put on no CD, or MP3 player at my wedding. I'm going to need to have some live music, and I'm going to need to feel it. People found Jesus that day that did not know they needed him. Lillie McCloud came. She sang a CeCe Winans song called Alabaster Box that talks about you don't know the cost of the oil of my praise of, like, you don't know what I went through to still maintain my idea of God standing here before you. And the whole place went, like, everybody was just boo-ha-ha-ha-ha. And [inaudible 00:32:34] sang Through the Fire by Chaka Khan to walk us down the aisle. Even though I was sort of saddened that more of my blood family did not choose to participate in the event, seeing Tim's family walking down the aisle and being so proud of him, and embracing me, and finding out that the country and the Compton aren't that different, like, the holler is just the hood without no concrete.

Tyler Greene:
Yeah.

Christopher Hamblin:
And everybody had stories to tell and they got along so famously. My step-father was a little confused. He's definitely low key would come to me and be like, "So is she a? Is she a?" He definitely had a lot of gender questions that I answered as appropriately as I could while educating him about, but I was just really glad he didn't go up to them and ask too many questions he came to me, but it was a wild educational experience for them.

Christopher Hamblin:
My mom absolutely fell in love with drag legend Tommie Ross who is a transgender woman legend in the industry, and my mom is all up on her Facebook all the time now. It's not predictable to me, but it just goes to show that we are all one. We are a family. We are a community. And I am so, so grateful to my mother for making the choice to show up. I let her know this is happening in front of the world, and there is a whole world of people ready to embrace you as a part of something meaningful. I've always said that there is a point to everything that we've gone through. There must be a reason we went through everything that we went through, and mom this is it. We get to be an example of something.

Tyler Greene:
In a way, Christopher's life as a part of the drag community is a ministry. Helping produce Latrice's one woman show which is full of stories of hope and redemption does help people feel less alone.

Christopher Hamblin:
It's true. I do consider my work a ministry still, especially, my work with Latrice on Here's To Life, her one woman show. I have seen the healing properties of Latrice telling that story. When people hear what my husband has been through for real, for real, especially, a lot of my white brothers that think that they've been through something find out that they really haven't had the struggles that they thought that they had. And the great thing is that Latrice can do that show and you know already that she's a success story, so you know it has a happy ending. So people can be very vulnerable in a space with her, and cry it out with Latrice because she's mama, and she has that Mother Earth energy. That is what you want from a preacher, or a spiritual guide. I know that I feel less ashamed of myself of who I am, and what I have offered the world because of relationship with my husband, and I think that our work together in the world has eased a lot of people's burdens for how they were treated by the world.

Tyler Greene:
Yeah. Last question. How do you define family today?

Christopher Hamblin:
Well, I define family as a choice as this point. I had to sort of step away from my father and his side of the family. That was not healthy for me, and other members of other parts of my family have had to step away from me because that is apparently what they feel is best for themselves and their children. I'm very, very, very lucky to have been able to travel, and find a lot of other people like myself. Wherever Latrice and I have gone we've kind of accidentally picked up the misfits of that city. And they feel heard by us, and understood by us, and I feel heard and understood by them, which isn't something I feel a lot of times. And I guess that's how I define family. If I need you for real, for real, and you're not there then you're probably not my family for real, for real. And sometimes family is coming through and showing that, no, I mean this. I love you and I want you to be okay. And that's who we fight for. Family is who we fight for.

Tyler Greene:
I'm just so endlessly grateful to you two for just everything you are in the world, and cannot wait to see you in person one day, hopefully, when this crap is over. Thank you.

Christopher Hamblin:
When this crap is over we have a guest room with y'alls name on it. It's a big king bed, and I think all three of you can squeeze in there and cuddle up real nice.

Tyler Greene:
I love Chris Hamblin, his energy, his enthusiasm, his authenticity. He's a delightful human being. And his life is a great reminder that activism can come in so many shapes. It can mean starting a choir, building a community, marrying the man you love. Building a life with the people you love isn't always easy is it? It takes work. It takes patience. It takes compassion, but Chris's story shows us that the work is worth it, and that it is possible to blend your family of origin with the one you create for yourself as an adult. Maybe not always, of course, but I think it's worth a shot.

Tyler Greene:
Thank you so much, Christopher, for joining us on This Is My Family. I want you all to go and download his new song Give Me A Holler. We've linked to it in the show notes. Fair warning, it is super catchy and awesome. I'd also love for you to check out All the Queens Men which you can find at WOW Presents Plus. I just got my subscription yesterday, and I cannot wait to binge. You can find us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram @timfshow, or our website which is timfshow.com. This podcast is a production of the storyproducer.com and it's made by me, Katie Klocksin, Tricia Bobeda, Jackie Ball, and Bea Bosco. It is edited and mixed by Adam Yoffe, and our music is by Andrew Edwards. Social Currant takes care of our social media, and show administration. You can find them at Social Currant. That's Social C-U-R-R-A-N-T. And last, but certainly not least our art director is my handsome husband, Ziwu Zhou.

Tyler Greene:
If you liked this show please help spread the world. Will you do us a favor. Give us five stars and a thoughtful Apple review. Very specific request. Shouldn't take you more than 60 seconds. Help us out please. Thank you so much for listening. I'm Tyler Greene, and until next time stay beautiful and messy. Is the podcast all done, Sam?

Sam:
All done.