But during his first semester, he blew a monthly allowance of $200 from his mother on cocaine, which he started doing on weekends. He found other ways to fill the void, including binge eating junk food like doughnuts when his stepfather died (he gained 70 pounds in three months).Įager to leave Quincy, he earned extra credit to skip senior year and attended the University of Arizona in Tucson. “I was too fat, too femme, too loud and too unlovable,” he said. He wasn’t exactly popular, and students spread rumors about his friendship with a closeted boy from his swim class. Never mind the beer bottles thrown at him during games. (They divorced when he was 5, and his mother remarried four years later.)Īt Quincy Senior High School (which he visits in the latest season of “Queer Eye”), he leapt over social norms to become the school’s first male cheerleader. She is the company’s vice president Jonathan’s father, Jon Van Ness, worked in sales. Winters’s family owns Quincy Media, a media company that operates 16 television stations in Illinois, Wisconsin and elsewhere, as well as two local newspapers. It helped to have a mostly supportive family, including a mother, Mary Winters, he considers a lifelong best friend. Van Ness grew up in Quincy, Ill., a small port city along the Mississippi River, where he was a self-described “little baby queen” unafraid to embrace his femininity. When he was much younger, he was abused by an older boy from church, during what was supposed to be a make-believe play session. He ordered another cup of coffee, his fifth of the day, and began tearing up as he spoke about a particularly painful memory, one of many that he divulges in his book. “These are issues that need to be talked about.”
He cracked his knuckles as he fidgeted from nerves. “It’s hard for me to be as open as I want to be when there are certain things I haven’t shared publicly,” he said. Subtitled a “Raw Journey to Self-Love,” the book doesn’t so much explode as offer psychological insight into the hirsute gay fairy godmother in heels or, as he puts it, “the effervescent, gregarious majestic center-part-blow-dry cotton-candy figure-skating queen” that he portrays on “Queer Eye.” Van Ness unspools with remarkable transparency. Van Ness, 32, has been mentally preparing himself for the release of his piercing memoir, “ Over the Top,” on Sept. Van Ness said.įor much of the summer, Mr.
“Given there is no federal law protecting LGBT either, this would mean that the wedding venue is free to discriminate.“I’ve had nightmares every night for the past three months because I’m scared to be this vulnerable with people,” Mr. “North Carolina has no state law on public accommodations not related to disabilities and no anti-discrimination laws protecting LGBT identity,” Su told NBC News at the time. Last month, for example, NBC News reported on a same-sex couple in North Carolina who were told by an employee of a wedding venue in Winston-Salem that the business does “not host same-sex marriage ceremonies.” Rick Su, a law professor at the University of North Carolina, said the couple had little hope of legal recourse. The project also notes that in states without state-level protections, municipalities may provide nondiscrimination protections at a local level. There are currently 21 states, including New York, that explicitly prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity in state law, with five more that interpret their existing sex discrimination prohibitions in public accommodations to include discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity, according to the Movement Advancement Project, an LGBTQ think tank.