Interviewee: Dre Tarleton                                                           
Interviewer: S.L. Ziegler                                                                       
Transcriber: Dre Tarleton    
Location of Interviewee: Baton Rouge                                                                 

September 4, 2020

[Interview transcript has been slightly edited for length and clarity.]

S.L. ZIEGLER:     This is S.L. Ziegler sitting down remotely with Dre Tarleton. Dre is nonbinary and uses they/them pronouns. Today is September 4, 2020, and we're meeting remotely using Zoom because the COVID-19 pandemic is still very scary. Dre, as we discussed before, this interview is part of the Louisiana Trans Oral History Project, and the goal is to gather real world examples of what it means to be trans in Louisiana, here in the early 21st century, and to donate these interviews to the T. Harry Williams Oral History Center at LSU, and to put them, in part or in whole, on the project's website. So, please know that you can stop this interview at anytime, and if you have any questions about this or anything else at any time, you can let me know. And please also know these interviews are a joint project between the two of us, so you'll have a chance to review the transcriptions and any portions of them can be deidentified or restricted as you deem necessary. Does all that sound good?

DRE TARLETON:     Yes.

ZIEGLER: [00:01:07]     Fantastic. Thank you so much. Now, with that out of the way, we mentioned before, as we were just chatting, you are our very first interviewee from St. Mary Parish at all, I think, but definitely from Patterson. And so, if you don't mind, we'll just start with your early life. So, you moved around St Mary parish for the first six years or so. Can you tell us a little bit about what kept you moving?

TARLETON: [00:01:29]     So, I don't really know much about what was going on the first like two and a half, three years. My mom is a single mom. She had me when she was like 19. I think we were just kind of bouncing around family members for a while, and then we moved in with her boyfriend. And he was quite abusive. And so, that was what made us move to Amelia, and then once my mom finally had enough dealing with the abusiveness, and she had another baby, we then moved back in with my grandparents. And then we kind of flip flopped a bit until we settled in on Patterson, which is where my grandparents live. My mom's still living out there. So, my whole family's out in the St Mary Parish area. I actually found out my whole family's been out there since end of slavery.

ZIEGLER:        All in the same parish? Like all in the St. Mary Parish?

TARLETON:     Yeah. Kind of just dispersed around the parish, but pretty much staying in the parish.

ZIEGLER:        Out of curiosity, how did you find that out?

TARLETON:        I was doing a bunch of genealogy stuff, and then I found the slave owner who has my last name that was in St Mary Parish, and I was like, "Oh, wow. Okay." And started looking into it a little more and it just made sense from what I found. Because I found my great-great-great grandmother in the census, and he said he was born in St Mary Parish. I'm like, "Okay, so this is pretty much..."

ZIEGLER: [00:03:17]     Yeah, wow. Well, are you still in touch with your family? You still talking to them?

TARLETON:        Yeah.

ZIEGLER:        Were you able to tell them that?

TARLETON:        I'm trying to build up a whole thing to be able to show to them. I'm not just doing it as saying it, or finding it.

ZIEGLER:        That's really neat. So, where do you call home now? Were you in Paterson up until you came to Baton Rouge?

TARLETON: [00:04:06]     Yeah. I've been in Baton Rouge for the last seven years now. I came out here for undergrad in 2013.

ZIEGLER:        And so before that, was high school in Patterson?

TARLETON:        Yep. I lived in Paterson from when I was six until I was 18.

ZIEGLER:        I wonder if you have any thoughts that you remember having when you first got here from Patterson. Had you visited before? Is it a very different environment?

TARLETON:        So, one of my aunts actually came to LSU for about two years. She ended up dropping out to be a bartender, and she's an amazing bartender. I spent a couple of years. I'd done a weekend visit with her and stuff like that, and I liked the campus. It was a toss up between LSU and UL, and LSU won out. I had another aunt who graduated from UL. I think I'd spent so much time at UL that I wanted to try out LSU.

ZIEGLER:         Yeah, I was going to ask what the deciding factor was. Yeah. Okay. I always sort of stumble through this part, but I do try to dwell on high school for just a little bit because it was such a, I mean, awful is leading, but it was such a formative moment, I guess, for so many of us. Could you say a little bit about the high school you went to?

TARLETON: [00:05:40]     We had about 500 kids in my high school.

ZIEGLER:         You mean in total? Like all grades?

TARLETON:        Mm-hmm (affirmative). I think my graduating class like 125 kids. The principal, she was very much all about the students. I think she knew every one of us by name, and if you needed to go to her about something, you could, and you'd know that she would do what she could to try and get things situated. I was, I wouldn't say rebellious in the constantly breaking rules sense, but I started identifying as an anarchist when I was 13, and started getting into activism things and stuff like that from an early age, so by the time I was a freshman in high school I was refusing to stand for the pledge. And she defended me for that. She said it was my freedom of speech.

Our school kind of became the place in Saint Mary Parish that all the gay kids wanted to go to. We had people that literally had their parents transfer them out to come to our school, but we still had our own issues with bullying. But earlier, like before my class got there, the seniors had done this thing. They tried to set up the cafeteria to where it would be kind of like a cafe, with individual tables, and the senior class when I was a freshman didn't like that. They wanted all the tables to be together so that people couldn't form cliques, and they stayed like that. And there was more, everyone kind of stayed to their own group and stuff like that, but nobody was really bothering anybody else too much. So, we had our group of friends and it was all the band geek, queer, nerdy, Magic the Gathering type group of people. That was what the high school was like.

ZIEGLER: [00:08:01]     Yeah. So, there was a queer presence at your high school in St Mary Parish in, I guess, like 2013, 2014.

TARLETON:        Yeah, I graduated in 2013.

ZIEGLER:         Did you identify as nonbinary at that time?

TARLETON:        So, I had no clue what transness was all the way up until I was about 15. I always tell this story about how I made this group of friends that nobody else liked and we couldn't quite figure out why nobody else liked us. And then come middle school, we all came out together.

ZIEGLER:        Actually, I would love to talk about that, but if you don't mind me interrupting real fast, you said you didn't know about transness until you were about 15. Can you tell me how you learned?

TARLETON:        So, I came out as bi when I was 12 to my friends. I didn't come out to my mom about that until I was about 17. So, I was on the website Autostraddle, and I was making a profile on there, and under gender they had all these different options. And I was like, "Wait, there's other ones?" And I started looking into it and I found the word genderqueer, and I was like, "Oh my God. This is me. There's a word for it." I marched into the school that Monday, walked up to my friends. I was like, "Y'all, I'm genderqueer. There's a word for me."
ZIEGLER: [00:09:45]     That's lovely. Do you still think of yourself as genderqueer?

TARLETON:        Yeah. I'd say genderqueer and nonbinary are kind of just interchangeable with those two.

ZIEGLER:         Yeah. And so at 12 you came out as bi. When was it that you found out from Autostraddle about...

TARLETON:     I was 15.

ZIEGLER:         Oh, that's right. That was 15.

TARLETON:     About to be 16

ZIEGLER:         And for the benefit of future listeners, Autostraddle is a online feminist magazine?

TARLETON:     It's a online feminist, femme attracted to femme oriented website. Or not necessarily femme, but like women and people identify as women, and also people who... It's just queer in general is [inaudible 00:10:53] how they describe themselves now.

ZIEGLER:         When you say that kids would try to get transferred to Patterson High, I guess that implies that things weren't the same at other high schools in St Mary Parish.

TARLETON: [00:11:17]     Yeah, there are a couple of people. My best friend when I was in high school, he dated pretty much every queer guy in the parish and I would get to know them and they would be talking about what it was like at their high school. Like there's an ongoing rivalry between Patterson and the neighboring town Berwick, and  the queer kids there, they would say they'd be getting bullied and there was a lot more cliqueishness at that school, so people would be picking on other people and things like that. I know one person who started getting into fights so that they would get expelled from their high school, so that they could transfer to Patterson.

So, it was just kind of like there would be students who would do that, but also other kids that would just be like, "I wish I could tell my parents about why it is that I want to transfer and everything like that, but because I can't give them the reason because I'm not out to them, because they may disown me, I'm stuck here, and I'm stuck having to deal with this." Patterson wasn't necessarily the bastion of everything, but it was better than what other places in the area were having to deal with.

ZIEGLER: [00:12:44]     And so you came to Baton Rouge for LSU. How did you find the community here? I guess what I'm thinking is, in high school you had the friends, the family that you made. I wonder if you could just talk a bit about when you first got to Baton Rouge and LSU.

TARLETON:     So, when I first got here, I got here about a week earlier because I had made it into the Tiger Band. I ended up dropping out after the first month. So, I got here, I got on campus. The Tiger Band people, for one it was overwhelmingly white and overwhelmingly just cis straight normative folks within my section, and I didn't quite feel there with them. But my first day, I've always been very obsessed with, whatever TV show I find, I latch onto it and I'm obsessed with it, and at the time, I was obsessed with Supernatural.

I was buying a poster at this poster sale, and there was this girl that was buying the same poster. We were waiting in line, and I turned. I was like, "I love that show." We started talking about it, and then she said, "I'm going to be late for my astronomy class." I was like, "Me too!" It was the same professor. And she was wearing a rainbow heart necklace, and I was like, "Other queer person!" And we just kind of became best friends, hanging out with each other every day, and she introduced me to a bunch of other queer people that she'd met on campus. It really just kind of blossomed from there. And then we both went to Splash for the first time together, which is, for people that may not know in the future, it's the gay club here, which is actually where I met my partner.

ZIEGLER: [00:14:57]     Well, that's fantastic. What was your undergrad major?

TARLETON:     Oh, that was a journey. Started out astrophysics, quickly changed it to anthropology.

ZIEGLER:         Astrophysics?

TARLETON:     I had a moment where I was obsessed with physics and things like that my senior year of high school, but then I realized how much math was involved and math is not my strong suit. Then I switched to theater, then creative writing, and then I finally settled on Women's and Gender Studies. And that's what I got my bachelor's in. And I had a minor in anthropology, and then I got my first Masters in cultural anthropology.

ZIEGLER:         And now you're still at LSU now for a Masters in Library Science.

TARLETON:     Yep.

ZIEGLER: [00:16:01]     I have so many questions about library science, but before I get to that, have you been active in any of the, I guess, established queer student groups? There's Spectrum and I think a couple of others that I'm forgetting about.

TARLETON:     QROMA and a couple of others, too. My freshman year, I was very heavily involved with Spectrum. I actually took over as the activism co-chair when a friend of mine had to drop out of the role. We didn't really do much of anything because I don't think they really quite trusted two freshmen with too much responsibility.

I haven't really been active with any other group since then, because I moved onto campus in August and I met my partner in October, and we kind of got latched at the hip and we were just trying to get a home situated because my partner ended up being homeless maybe three weeks after I met her. So we were just trying to figure out how to get the housing situation figured out because I had her living in my dorm room with me.

ZIEGLER: So you get your first Masters in anthropology, and then am I correct in understanding that you just finished that? That was earlier in 2020.

TARLETON: [00:17:53]     That was in May of this year.

ZIEGLER:         May of this year. And this year you started library school. So, I guess I'm just curious about library school, like whether or not your identity fits into that career path choice. Was that a consideration? Maybe if you could just talk a little bit about why you were thinking about library school.

TARLETON:     So, it's actually a very long story with this one. When I was in undergrad, the thing that made me switch from being a theater major is that they had someone come in who graduated from LSU's theater school, and they work on Broadway. He gave us a talk, and he was like, "If you can't see yourself starving for your art, which is a very real reality, like something I had to face for a long time before I got my job, you need to switch where you're at right now to something else." And I thought about it for a second, and I was like, "Alright, deuces."

I grew up not having a lot of money. The whole reason I'm going to school is so that I can be able to provide for my family and not have them having to live in the kind of situation. My mom tried her hardest to make sure that we had what we needed, but it was still a struggle and I could see how much it took out of her. And I knew that she was making those sacrifices so that I wouldn't have to, and I didn't want to put myself in a situation where I was having my kid feel like they were a bit of a burden, not because of anything that she did, but because I knew, financially, she couldn't afford us.

So, I switched over to creative writing and then WGS, and my whole goal there was to be a professor. I was going to get the PhD. I was going to do all of that. But as time went on, I just got diagnosed as autistic in March. So, I've gone my entire life without knowing that I'm autistic, and trying to figure out why I've been wading through water to do the same thing that everybody else is doing. And so, I was doing all this stuff. All of my chips got put into school, and my social life and my relationship kind of got put on the back burner because I was so focused on trying to make sure I was doing all the same stuff that everybody else was doing.

[00:20:27]     Because a lot of the stuff, I very frequently have this conversation about impostor syndrome. I'm very much with my own mental illness issues and things like that, I'm constantly struggling with impostor syndrome and being queer, trans, Black and neurodivergent all conglomerated into this feeling of not belonging, especially consider I just got that got this diagnosis at the last semester of my last Masters degree. Trying to figure out why I had a complete shutdown in October as I was in the middle of trying to write my thesis. Shut down for a month, couldn't do anything. And turned out that's a thing, autistic burnout. It's a thing. And I was like, "Oh, okay, so that's a thing. I understand it now." But I didn't have the language for it.

The semester before that, my partner went through something very traumatic with a psychiatrist who took her off all of her medications, and I was watching her pretty much wasting away in our bed from the issues it was causing to her body. And after all that was over, I took a hard look at my life and what I was prioritizing, because throughout that entire semester, not only did I write my thesis proposal, I got straight A's through all of that, and I was like, "What am I doing? I'm putting my partner on the back burner. For what? Grades? So I can get into a PhD program, so I can be a professor, but doing all of that is so that I can provide for my family, but I'm letting my family fall to the wayside."

I thought about it and she randomly, out of the blue, she was like, "Why don't you try being a librarian?" And I thought about it for a second. I laughed at first and then I thought about it for a second. I started thinking about it even more and I was like, "My biggest passion is trying to make sure that the people who need access to knowledge get access to knowledge." Being a professor, you're giving people who can afford to pay for or are smart enough, or were able to get the grades enough to get scholarships, have access to knowledge. But being a librarian, it's anybody. Anybody who can walk through your doors, you're helping them get access to the things they need. And that, to me, felt truly revolutionary, and that's what made me start going towards being a librarian.

ZIEGLER: [00:23:24]     Thank you for that answer. I know that was a lot. I appreciate you sharing that. I'm going to try, and I know our future listeners are totally going to roll their eyes, so I'm going to try not to totally geek out about library stuff, but I also went to library school. Do you have a library concentration in mind?

TARLETON:     I'm actually thinking about doing archives. But I'm also really interested in public librarianship, too, so trying to figure out how to balance those two. I'm kind of geeking out this semester because two of my classes, one's the young adult lit class and the other one's the adult lit class, so I'm just kind of reading fiction nonstop, just devouring it right now. And I get to choose the books, and I'm just rereading some books that I loved when I was younger, and I'm starting to understand them better because I'm an adult who's had more experience with the world. And I'm having so much fun with it.

ZIEGLER: [00:24:36]     That's delightful. And the last thing that I think I'll ask about this is, the program that you're in at LSU for library science is online, 100% online, not even because of COVID, but just because of the structure of the program. How do you find the online degree, I guess in relation to the degree you had just finished, what I'm assuming was an in person in MA in anthropology.

TARLETON:     It was. I actually find it less tiring because social interaction for me, like any time I come home from a day where it's a day's worth of class or just any class in general, I come home and I'd not want to talk to anybody for three hours because I needed to recharge. But typing out responses to people and talking to them through text and everything like that, it's like my brain has a lag whenever I'm trying to formulate what I'm trying to say to people, especially when it's subjects like we're talking about a reading or something like that, but when I'm typing I can get the words out the way that my mind is thinking of them.

And so, it's been a lot easier for me to be able to sit down. Plus no commute with it, too. I can sit down with my thoughts and work through everything, and not have to worry about like, "Oh..." I had a conversation with another person who's nonbinary about like the fear of are people using they/them pronouns for me because they're just being respectful, but they really just see me as a weird woman, or is it because they really see me as nonbinary? And having that in the back of my head as I'm in class or having the idea like, "Oh, is this cis white guy going to say something that is problematic, and is it going to fall on me as the sole personal color in this classroom to say something? Or is everyone going to turn to me?" I don't feel like I have to respond, kind of like if I'm on social media, I don't have to respond if I don't want to, to someone saying something problematic. And that takes a whole load off me. So, it's less stressful. 

ZIEGLER: [00:27:20]     Yeah, that's really insightful. I appreciate that also. And then I ask that question because I'm curious, but also I think it's just relevant as more and more education, especially now with COVID, is moving online. I think a lot of us are thinking about that, so that's really interesting. I really appreciate your insight there.

I'm going to do something that I hope you don't hate. So, in our pre-interview form that you were good enough to fill out with your name and your pronouns and all this, so that we can sort of come up with some discussion topics, we have that large, floppy question where we ask you what does being trans in Louisiana mean to you? And people right just the most amazing things. Like, honestly, I don't know what I would say if confronted with that, but y'all a're crushing it. So what I was sort of hoping I could do, we also, because of the way the technology is set up, I know that you don't actually get to see that after you submit it, so almost nobody remembers what they wrote. But if you don't mind, what I'll do is just read back what you wrote, because I feel like there's just a ton in there. And maybe I can ask you specific questions about it.

You write, "Being trans in Louisiana, to me, means walking a tightrope between desperately wanting to be in an area where your culture is all around you, but being afraid that your identity will result in you being hurt if you express your identity too openly. It's balancing my identity as a half Black Louisianan who practices rootwork and an African based religion that is very much tied to my Louisiana roots with the knowledge that my community isn't the most openly accepting of who I am. It also means being part of a family of other trans folks, a real community where people have you back and will sacrifice to help you through dark times."

[00:29:23]     And I thought that was really great, and I wanted to use that as a springboard to ask a couple of other questions. So, specifically about walking the tightrope between wanting to be in the area where your culture is around you, but also being afraid of being too open. I wonder what would expressing yourself more openly look like to you?

TARLETON:        I frequently get to disagreements with my partner about this because she's starting to live more openly as herself because she is a trans woman, and me, I still haven't changed my name on Facebook. It takes me a while before I broach the subject about my identity and what I prefer to be called and everything when it comes to professional things. I have a lot of fear about people not seeing me, but seeing this politicized idea of what they think that I am. And especially in Louisiana, I know there's a lot of folks out here that quite honestly think that trans people shouldn't exist and that nonbinary people are just, as my dad would refer to them, special snowflakes.

[00:31:10]     And it's also knowing, because my dad is a fervent Trump supporter, and he's very conservative, hardcore about all that, and all his friends are all about all that. I recently had to stop talking to him because of this, along with the racial issues, because a lot of his friends are racist, and he doesn't say anything. He also told me I can't be Black because I'm his kid.

ZIEGLER:        For clarification, is he white?

TARLETON:        Yes. My dad's white, and yeah, he told me I can't be Black because I'm his kid. So, it's just walking this tightrope, knowing that I absolutely love Louisiana culture. I love so much about it. The food ways, the music, the southern gothic nature of a summer night out here, being in woods out here at night, seeing swamps and stuff. I love that. But also, I know that I probably would feel more comfortable expressing myself and taking on more masculine traits that I would prefer to wear around in public, if there wasn't that strain of people that also may want to hurt me for it.

ZIEGLER:         My next question about the same quote was going to be about what is the culture that's around you that you like so much. You started to speak a little bit to that. Did you want to add to that at all?

TARLETON: [00:33:03]     I think, also, the religious aspect of things because, I'm not initiated into voodoo, but I do very much practice religion that's based around it. I have my altar and everything set up right there. My partner just spray painted it for me. That's such a big, major part of my identity, and I know that if I leave Louisiana, I'm going to lose that ability to learn under someone. Because yeah there may be voodoo practitioners in different areas of the country, but they're not Louisiana voodoo, and that's the particular branch that I'm interested in.

ZIEGLER:         Would you feel comfortable talking more about your religion? So you identify it as rootwork and African based religion. Could just say a little bit more about it?

TARLETON:     Yeah, so I actually did my thesis talking to a lot of different conjurors, root workers, people that practice stuff like Ifa and Santeria, hoodoo, Vodun, all those different branches of African traditional religions that have become diasporic, and that really made me start delving deeper into what I was already thinking about. So, right now, as it is, my biggest involvement with all of that is that I pray to the Orishas, primarily Yemaya and Oya. I called to them. I do, not so much rituals, because I've been a practicing witch for 15 years, at this point. There's a running joke within the witchcraft community that, when you start out, you're like, "I need to do all of this ritualistic, exactly correct." And ten years on, you're like, "I got a stick and some salt. Let's do this." But I light candles and I light the incense, and I ask them, like, "Hey, I need a favor here. Can you help me out?" Things like that. And I look to them for inspiration, like when I need help with a certain project, I think about like, "Okay, what would Oya do in this situation? If someone's bothering me, they won't leave me alone, what would Oya do? Oya would destroy everything, but what else would she do?"

ZIEGLER: [00:36:01]     And were you raised in a religion?

TARLETON:     My entire family is Southern Baptist.

ZIEGLER:         Do you talk to them about your religion?

TARLETON:     The only person on my mom's side of the family who knows that I practice is my brother, which that's only because he came and lived with me for a few months. Everybody else in my family thinks that I'm Christian.

ZIEGLER:         Just as sort of a default?

TARLETON: [00:36:33]     Yeah, it's just kind of a default. I think my mom kind of knows that I'm not because I told her when I was like 17, I was like, "I don't believe in going to church," and that turned into a whole thing. But if there were to be anything, I think my mom would probably think that I'm leaning more towards being an atheist than anything because that's where I was at when I was moving out, before I started really delving deeper into my Black roots and spirituality that dealt with that side of me.

ZIEGLER:         And the last thing I wanted to ask about is the last sentence that you wrote, which is, "It also means being part of a family of other trans folks, a real community where people have your back and will sacrifice to help you through dark times." Which I think is absolutely lovely. Is this a community that you have here in Baton Rouge, you feel like?

TARLETON:     I feel like I do. Obviously, there may not be people that you get along with who are good with being around you, but there's so many amazing folks out here.  It's like a mutual aid network. You need something, they'll give you the shirt off their back to make sure that you're able to eat for the day. They'll drop what they're doing and come help you out if, say, you're having a bad day and you're dealing with dysphoria really bad. Like, "Hey, I understand what that's like. I'll come over and we can watch some movies and stuff, and you can have some company," type of thing. Like people will throw down for you and it's such an amazing thing.

[00:38:15]     Because that's the kind of community I grew up with in Patterson. The Black community in Patterson, I think maybe, possibly because so many of us are related to each other, it's a mutual aid network. The churches, very often, the Sunday collection plates, they give that to somebody. It's not just going to the church or going into the pastor's pocket. It's, "Okay, well, Sister Soandso is having an issue. She needs help with this financial thing, so let's give her some of the collection this week."

And I see that happening within my community, too, even if you might have some personal issue with one person, like y'all might be arguing about something, you still are willing to give them information that might help them, that might make their lives a little easier, so that they're not having to, say, go experience discrimination because you withheld information that could have led them to one company instead of another, or help you avoid one doctor who treats you badly compared to another.

ZIEGLER:        'm wondering how you found such a community. A lot of the folks who have participated in the project to date have been active in either Louisiana Trans Advocates or some other organization or quasi formation of an organization. Do you feel like that's how you've met so many people, or was it less formal?

TARLETON:     Honestly, I've met most of the people that I'm friends with on campus, and as time's gone on because I've been at this school for seven years now, people have graduated and moved somewhere else, and then I end up getting introduced to somebody that they met somewhere else, and it just became this whole web of people that are there to help out, be supportive of each other. And then I also have a lot of friends that are in LTA. I have a couple of friends that were on the board at LTA. So, they know everybody and I'm just like, "Hey, people." I don't like leaving my house. I'm not very sociable much. I'll sit in my house and play Magic the Gathering on the computer all day if I'm given the chance.

ZIEGLER: [00:41:00]     Well, this has all been fantastic, Dre. I really appreciate you talking with us. Normally, what I'll do is finish with this sort of a reiteration that this project, among other things, is something of a time capsule. We want to be sure to tell our stories to each other, definitely, but we're also, it's a little optimistic to think that there will still be people around in 30 years to hear it, maybe, but if somebody were to, one of the other things that I've been asking is, if there's anything that you would like someone in the future to know about what it's like to be trans here in Louisiana. Anything that we haven't touched on that you think might be an important message to leave on. I wanted to give you that opportunity.

TARLETON:     One second. I'm trying to think of my words.

ZIEGLER:         Oh, sure. Take your time.

TARLETON: [00:41:58]     I think one thing that I'd like someone 30, 60, 90 years in the future to know about what it means to be trans in Louisiana at this moment in time, there's a lot of fear right now about this current president, this current state of existence in quarantine, this current state of civil unrest that is probably definitely going to be in your history books. But there's also a lot of hope for seeing a future where we are just accepted as ourselves and not having to deal with people not wanting us to exist. It's a balance between the two. It's fear and hope at the same time. It is very confusing and it's very odd and uneasy of a feeling, but that's kind of existence, for me, at least, right now.

ZIEGLER: Yeah. I think a lot of us might agree with that. Dre, again, thank you so much. I'm going to go ahead and stop the recording now.