Porter Gilberg is a featured human book at our upcoming Human Library event on May 31st. His life's human book title is "For Most People, My Pronoun is Porter." Porter currently serves as the Executive Director for the LGBTQ Center of Long Beach (LGBTQ stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer/questioning) and has lived in the City for 10 years. He also identifies as gender non-conforming and is one of the only openly gender non-conforming Executive Directors of an LGBTQ center in the United States. Porter grew up in a small town and came out as an LGBTQ person when he was 12 years old. He found the experience very challenging as there were no laws protecting students from discrimination at school during that time and he did not know anyone else who identified as an LGBTQ person. When Porter was 18 he moved to Long Beach to attend Long Beach City College and transferred to UCLA to major in Women’s Studies. Porter found learning about feminism, the 1970s Gay Liberation movement, and queer theory in school to be incredibly helpful to support him in developing a language to describe his sexual orientation (queer) and gender identity (gender non-conforming/butch). Porter believes that sexuality is way more fluid than most people believe and also that gender is more of a galaxy than a binary. Porter does not identify as a man or a woman, but as something else that’s completely separate and that his identity is just as authentic as anyone else’s. He does not identify as transgender, although that is usually how people think he identifies. Porter feels fortunate to be the Executive Director of The Center so that he can share this information with as many people as possible both within the LGBTQ community and outside it.
Hear more of his story personally by checking him out for 15-20 minutes at the Human Library event, Saturday, May 31st from 1-4pm at the Long Beach Main Public Library, 101 Pacific Avenue, Long Beach, CA 90802.