Hey all, welcome back to Made It Out. Today I'm here with Amelia Montooth, CEO of Mutuals Media and creator of Gator. Thank you for being here.

Yes, thanks for having me. Yes, of course.

I'm so excited to talk about, today we're talking about friendship. Yeah. Which I'm really excited about because we get so many questions about how do I find gay friends and, you know, all of that. But I want to hear about you. Like, who are you? How did you grow up? And what was your journey with your queerness? Yeah. Oh my gosh. All the, all the questions at once.

Yes.

I, yeah, I'm Amelia. I grew up in Phoenix, Arizona, which was an interesting place to grow up queer because at the time I was like so competitive. I didn't really think about it. But I feel like it was because growing up in Phoenix, it was like I wasn't in a religious family, but the whole area was so conservative, especially back then, like, 20 years ago. And I feel like it wasn't that I was getting messaging that, like, gay people are bad or gay people are going to hell. It was just that no one was gay. Like, no one I knew was gay. Didn't exist. Didn't exist. Like, truly an imaginary, like, oh my God, I was going to say a seahorse, but I have to remember that those are real. Unicorn. A unicorn, thank you.

I'm like, i always think a unicorn thank you i'm like i always think those are fake but they're real um

this is an arizona kid thing i'm like know nothing about the ocean um but yeah i feel like growing up

it was just like there are no gay people but i like went to so i went to school i always had

boyfriends i was very like in that compette world of thinking, I was really just like a male validation thing. I was like, I want to have a boyfriend because that means that I'm like desirable. And it doesn't actually matter if I like like like them that much. Yeah, good enough. Yeah, good enough. And when you're like 16, it's kind of like nobody likes their boyfriend or like everybody's boyfriend is kind of crazy. So it kind of like didn't really occur to me. And then in college, I was in a sorority. Yeah. Right? For like two years. And so in there, I also didn't meet, I met gay men in college, but I didn't meet any queer women at all. There wasn't any queer women in your sorority? There was maybe one person who was like bisexual, but I don't think she was like bringing girls to the events and stuff. Got it. And similarly, the sorority, it was not like you can't be gay. It was like gay people didn't exist. Like that is crazy. It was so crazy. Like it was the were like, I lived in the house at 1.2 for a semester.

And it was like, you couldn't bring boys upstairs, but you could bring girls. And it was so funny to me because it was just like, yeah, like, gay people just literally don't exist. We're like not even bothering to make rules against them. Well, that's what's so funny is I've had a couple people on here who would tell me this same thing. and be like, it was perfect for us.

I know.

If only I knew.

Now, oh my gosh, once I graduated college, people on here who would tell me this same thing and be like, it was perfect for us.

I know. If only I knew. Now, oh my gosh, once I graduated college and I saw how many sorority girls were on Gay Hinge in L.A., I was like, you guys, we could have been having so much more fun. This is crazy. We missed out. We missed out. We would have had an amazing four years we all just opened up a little bit more.

But yeah, it wasn't until I, like, moved to D.C. right when I graduated college. We missed out. We would have had an amazing four years if we all just opened up a little bit more.

But yeah, it wasn't until I, like, moved to D.C. right when I graduated college, that I, like, met queer women for the first time and instantly was like, oh, totally. Yeah. Yeah. You were working in politics in D.C. Yes. Okay. And is that like a super queer? Honestly, yeah, more than we would think.

Yeah, I know.

I kind of didn't really realize that,

but I feel like that was also part of what helped me realize is actually people who worked in politics with me. I went to work on Elizabeth Warren's presidential campaign in Boston, and pretty much everyone there was gay, it felt like, and was young. I love that. It was just so fun, but I wasn't, like, fully out yet.

And again, I'm just like, oh, the good of times you could have had. I just spat it off a little bit. And I was so funny, too, because at the time they were like, do you want to join the, like, queer Slack channel? And I was like, I don't know if that's, like, the right place for me. They saw it.

Literally, I'm like,

everyone else knew.

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