Hey, this is LGBTQ&A.

I'm Jeffrey Masters, and this is a show where we get to know different members of the LGBTQ community.

Today I'm talking to Laith Ashley.

Laith is a model, a singer, an activist, and more.

Stay tuned. What's going on, Jeff? I'm happy to be here. Thank you for having me.

Thank you. Yeah, I'm excited to talk. So you've said that you never set out to be a model. What

did you think you'd be doing at this point? I'd be a therapist. A licensed therapist, yeah. I mean, I've always wanted to be an

entertainer since I was a little kid, always wanted to dance and sing and, you know, be the center

of attention, be on stage, and have everyone applaud at my greatness now. But I'd never thought that

it would actually happen. Like my dad would see me perform at home or like imitate Michael Jackson,

for example, or any of my favorite artist when I was a young kid. And he was like, wow,

she then was really good. And yeah, as I got older, you know, your parents put you on a certain

path and it was school in sports and

obviously dealing with gender identity was something that was part of my growing up and I

I kind of put it I wanted to push that to the back burner and I didn't think that I would ever be who I wanted to be because I wasn't my actualized self

and I think I knew that very early on. So I focused on sports, even though sports as a,

when you're growing up and you're in school, sports are pretty, they're gendered.

If you're, you know, assigned female at birth, you're playing girls basketball or whatever.

But I tried to, that was the way that I was able to escape any, anything, like, dating.

I didn't think about that until, like, my senior year in high school, the end of my senior

year in high school, I didn't want to focus on that.

There was a lot of stigma and a lot of, like, young people saying it was, I think I came out

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