Nathan Manske and Marquise Lee will be packing their suitcases soon for a four-month road trip to all 50 states. The pair will embark on an unusual kind of sightseeing, however: They are collecting true stories from all corners of the country about what it’s like to be gay today in America.
Manske, the creator of website ImFromDriftwood.com, which publishes first-person accounts from LGBT individuals, said the tour will take his site to the next level.
“We wanted to get out there and get beneath the surface,” Manske said. “We keep saying that there are gay people everywhere, and now we’re going to go out and prove it.”
Lee, a native of Texas who has lived in Philadelphia for the past six years, is leaving his job at Comcast — and won’t find out if the position is still available until he returns from the trip — to serve as the tour’s film director and editor.
Lee was one of several friends Manske enlisted to submit personal stories to the site when he launched it in early 2009.
Manske said the inspiration for the site came after he watched Gus Van Sant’s biopic “Milk,” about pioneering LGBT-rights activist Harvey Milk.
“The day after I saw the movie, I was thinking about this famous photo of Harvey Milk sitting on the hood of a car in a Pride march and he’s holding a sign that says, ‘I’m from Woodmere, N.Y,’” Manske said. “It made me think that gay people aren’t just from San Francisco or Chelsea. He was from this town on Long Island and I’m from Driftwood [Texas]. And I thought that that idea could be comforting to gay youth who are going through something, to realize that there are a lot of people out there who’ve been through something similar and who might even have lived where they live.”
Serendipitously, the following day, Manske was laid off from his advertising position, so he decided to move ahead with his idea. While he initially encouraged friends of his to post stories, submissions were soon coming in from around the country.
A new story is published each day, and Manske said he has a backlog of at least two-weeks’ worth of submissions.
The national tour, which will take Manske and Lee by van to each state — and by plane to Alaska and Hawaii — will allow the pair to visit 15 “anchor” cities, including Philadelphia, San Francisco and New York, but also to travel to towns with less of a public gay community.
“People will be able to make suggestions of where they want us to come. We don’t care what the sell is; we just want people to tell us why we should come to their town,” Manske said, noting the tour falls in line with his original mission for the site. “This is completely interactive: It’s for the community, by the community and from the community, so we want everyone to be a part of it. When I first launched the site, people kept asking me how my blog was going, and I had to keep saying that it’s not my blog, it’s more of a community website.”
Manske and Lee will collect both written and filmed stories on their tour and will hosting readings, special events and fundraisers on the road.
ImFromDriftwood.com held a fundraiser at Tavern on Camac last month, to which Lee said “Philly came out in force.”
“Philly’s been very supportive,” he said. “My friends here have gotten together and written stories, participated in video stories and have helped to get the word out for us. The home base for this is New York, but Philly is really the younger sister. On the trip after we hit New York, it’s going to be like a second homecoming when we come to Philly.”
The pair, who is expected to pull into the city in late November or early December, will be lodging with as many good Samaritans on the road as possible to cut down on costs, and is accepting donations through the site.
In addition to providing hope to struggling youth, Manske said, the tour will also serve as an important piece of living history.
“This is a very unique time right now, because people who are right now anywhere from their 60s to their 80s may have actually been arrested for being gay when they were young, but now we have kids as young as 13 coming out, sometimes to open arms,” he said. “If that wide spectrum didn’t exist 15 years ago, it’s not going to exist in 15 years, so we want to capture it now. We want to give people a chance to have their mark in history, leave their story behind and be a part of a snapshot of this wide range of LGBT culture.”
For more information, visit www.ImFromDriftwood.com.
Jen Colletta can be reached at [email protected].