"I'm From Driftwood" Wants to Hear Your Gay Stories!

AE: How many people have submitted stories so far?
NM: 268, to be exact, and IFD.com just celebrated its six month anniversary a few weeks ago. It's chuggin' right along, but it's still pretty difficult, as I assumed it would be, to get people to submit stories. Understandably, everyone's busy with their own lives and it's hard to get them to do an assignment or project, but I'm very happy with the number of stories I've received. It's exceeded my expectations.

There was one day, though, when I literally didn't have a story to post for the next day. I was really stressing out, because there's really nothing I can do to make people write stories, and then one popped up in my inbox. It was a great feeling. A lot of people are daily readers and I hope to always have a new story for them to read.

AE: Are there any that really stand out or maybe affected you personally?
NM: My favorites are always changing as I receive new ones. My current favorite is a story from a lesbian who writes about how she's a liar. What it's really saying, though, is how we in the LGBT community are frequently put in situations where we're almost forced to lie.

If someone's talking negatively at work about the LGBT community, and your job is at risk if you speak up, what do you do? She couldn't be honest with her students or even her family when they asked certain questions. Being born LGBT, we're given a unique burden of too frequently having to choose between a convenient lie or a damaging truth. It was really well-written and had such a powerful message and left you thinking. And then, of course, on the opposite end of the spectrum, are some fun, more light-hearted stories. One was all about an oboe and how the oboe makes everything a lot gayer. It was a real enjoyable read and very funny.

AE: Are there any stories you haven’t accepted?
NM: Very few. And the only reason is if the submission isn't an actual story. Some people submit opinion pieces or rants or just their thoughts, which I believe is important to share, but this is not the proper forum for it. I only want stories – an event or series of events from your life that involve you being LGBT. I want people to tell me something that happened, not particularly what they think.

AE: What’s next for you and Imfromdriftwood.com?
NM: My primary goal is the same: to get these stories in front of as many people as I can and hopefully help gay kids feel not so alone. I think the next step is to continue getting the word out online, but also in new forms of media. It seems so obvious to make a collection of stories into a book and I'm extremely close to making that happen, but I don't want to jinx it. I'm new to the book publishing world and it takes longer than I thought.

I also want to turn the stories into podcasts and really just keep making the site better and more accessible. I'm also really excited about how the Video Stories have turned out. Marquise Lee (pictured, right/Photo credit Michael J. Cargill), at Crush Deviant Media, has been working with me and has done some amazing things with them. We've had some interest in using them for TV in one way or another, but again, I don't want to jinx it, as it's way too premature to even talk about. But I hope many things are on the horizon and that the stories keep on coming.

And, in a perfect little world, I'd like having a story on IFD to almost be expected within the community. Like, "Hey, do you have a Driftwood story yet? Send me the link." Every story is so important and you just never know who's out there who might need to read it, or who it might help. One thing I hear frequently is, "Oh, I don't have an interesting story...", but you really have no idea. Everyone's story is unique but also everyone's story can be related to, and that's the important thing. Telling your story so someone else can relate to it.

AE: Do you have an IFD story?
NM: Two, actually. It seemed appropriate to launch the site with my story, so it's the first one. I later added another story, as well, which digs a bit deeper into my coming out story, even though I encourage people not to write coming out stories. I'm also hoping people submit more than one story. After reading a couple stories from one person, you really start feeling like you're getting to know a complete stranger. It's interesting.

AE: You live in Brooklyn now. What’s the biggest difference between Brooklyn and Driftwood?
NM: I've never had to use a bathroom shovel in Brooklyn.