There is something therapeutic about reliving our awkward, turbulent adolescence, especially when those cringe-worthy moments are exposed to an audience. This is the underlying idea behind Mortified, a spoken-word series in which people read aloud the most embarrassing passages from their childhood journals in front of a live audience.
In honor of National Coming Out Day, Colorado Public Radio hosts Mortified: ‘Coming Out’ Edition on Oct. 14 at the Dairy Arts Center. Colorado Matters host Ryan Warner takes the stage for this special iteration, sharing passages from his own teenage writings — deciphered from old journals, which were written in a secret language combining Hebrew, Japanese and invented characters to protect his most intimate feelings.
“Before I came out of the closet, I invented this code as a kid that I used to write in my journal about being gay,” he says. “A fair amount of it was me wrestling with being gay, being pretty terribly bullied in high school and trying to escape that.”
Warner rediscovered his secret language after scrawling his romantic woes on the back of a Southwest Airlines napkin earlier this year. Little did he know that this seemingly random act would catapult him into the Mortified limelight.
“I am in a new relationship and have been journaling a lot,” Warner says. “I happened to be on an airplane coming back from a vacation and kind of overwrought about it, but it’s cramped quarters on an airplane. So, I started writing … in my code that I used to write in as a kid, so that my seatmates wouldn’t be reading about my romantic torment. And I thought, ‘Oh, this is such a fun little detail,’ so I tweeted out a picture of the napkin with my code.”
Shortly after Warner shared the image of his coded napkin, David Blatt, producer of Mortified Colorado, saw it and reached out to see if he was interested in sharing his story.
“This random tweet wound up landing me in the show,” Warner says. “I handed over mounds of my old journals to David. It was a very vulnerable experience; David essentially goes through it and chooses the most frankly mortifying aspects. But in this case, he couldn’t read a lot of it, so I had to sit down with him and interpret the code.”
To get the piece ready for Mortifed’s 2023 Pride Show at The Oriental Theater in June, Blatt first combed through Warner’s journals on his own to get a sense of how to frame the story. Then, he flagged around a dozen pages written in code to talk through in detail at the Colorado Public Radio station.
“It was a much different process with Ry than with any other Mortified participant,” Blatt says. “Since he was decoding his writing in the room with me, there was extra vulnerability.”
‘Things do get better’
Following this meeting, Blatt reworked Warner’s writing into something he could read aloud with images of the coded letters projected behind him. Warner first performed the piece earlier this year, and while it was overwhelming at first, the audience opened up as he shared more.
“It’s cathartic to have this thing that was a private, solitary pain finally be shared,” Warner says. “David kept saying that the audience has got you, and that was really true. The audience responded with greater support as the sharing became more mortifying, which is the exact opposite of how I felt while I was writing it; I wrote this in a place of alienation, but I read it in a place of acceptance. When you read these writings as an adult, it is a way of telling little Ryan that everything will be OK.”
The response to this year’s Mortified Pride show was so enthusiastic that Blatt immediately started looking for a slot to perform some of his favorite pieces from that show again.
“For anybody who’s queer in any way, there’s just a different dynamic to self-discovery, so the Pride shows have been near and dear to my heart because of that,” he says. “It’s also just therapeutic to laugh at yourself in hindsight. As a queer person, it’s been really fun to come together with people and share those stories that are very bonding.”
Mortified features a variety of voices in addition to Warner’s story, and a portion of all ticket sales benefit Camp Indigo, a Boulder-based camp for children who identify as transgender or gender nonconforming. Each story is a thread in the tapestry of queer self-discovery, like Keith Garcia’s account of having a crush on his creative writing teacher in high school, Katie Kramer’s elaborate lies to hide her lack of experience with women, and Erin Harrop’s journey of self-discovery gleaned from 87 of her childhood journals.
“I think anyone would enjoy it just because we all share experiences of mortification, but I would particularly like to speak to the parents of queer youth,” Warner says. “This show would have been extremely beneficial to my mother. I think if there are parents out there who have queer youth, they should come to this and hear that your kid, with some support, is going to be OK. I do not want to sugarcoat the high rates of violence against trans people in general and suicide rates among LGBTQ+ youth, but things do get better.”
ON STAGE: CPR Presents Mortified: ‘Coming Out’ Edition with Ryan Warner. 8 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 14, Dairy Arts Center – Gordon Gamm Theater, 2590 Walnut St., Boulder. Tickets here.
