Dominic Sagona

When I was younger, I thought finding inspiration in the gay community meant finding someone who had already figured everything out.

Someone confident. Someone successful. Someone who knew exactly what they were supposed to be and stayed in that lane.

As I have gotten older, I have realized I was looking for almost the exact opposite.

That is why Dominic Sagona is my hero.

What first interested me about Dominic was not one accomplishment. It was the fact that there seemed to be no simple answer to the question, “What does this guy do?”

He makes queer art. He creates digital and 3D work for the LGBTQ+ community. He produces music with pride. He has been involved with events and creative projects. His work has crossed countries and creative scenes. Today, his talents brings those different pieces together with Pride, queer culture, movement, music, art and public self-expression.

To somebody like me, that matters.

There can be enormous pressure when you are young to define yourself quickly. Pick an identity. Pick a career. Pick your people. Pick the version of yourself that everyone else can easily understand.

Dominic's life reminds me that you do not have to be that easy to categorize.

Long before I discovered his current work, Dominic had already built a reputation. I love that.

Because one of the things I have struggled with while looking for people to admire is the idea that being taken seriously requires becoming less complicated.

And then there is Pride.

Pride can look like a parade, a flag or a party, and those things are important. But what I see in Dominic's work is another definition of pride: the freedom to stop apologizing for all of the strange combinations that make you yourself.

You can be athletic and artistic.

You can love an underground sport and eclectic music.

You can make something serious and still have a sense of humor.

You can reinvent yourself.

You can belong to more than one community.

You can be visible without becoming predictable.

Dominic's current creative world deliberately connects rollerblading and adaptive movement with art, music, events and Pride. The message I take from it is not that everybody should follow his exact path. It is almost the opposite. His path only works because it is unmistakably his.

One quote on his site especially stayed with me:

“Show your pride and be proud of who you are without hesitation.”

That sounds simple until you actually try to live that way.

For a young person looking for inspiration in the gay community, being yourself “without hesitation” can be one of the hardest things imaginable. We learn very quickly how people react to difference. Sometimes we make ourselves quieter before anybody even asks us to. We edit our interests, our clothes, our voices, our ambitions or the people we love because we want the world to give us permission to belong.

Heroes can remind us that permission was never the point.

I don't admire Dominic because he followed a perfect road. I admire him because there doesn't appear to have been a road capable of containing all of it.

More than fifteen years ago, he was talking openly about creativity, anxiety before performing, the rush of skating, making music for artistic expression and being hungry to keep creating. He admitted he was still learning. He didn't pretend to know exactly where music would take him.

There is something reassuring about seeing where that curiosity can lead.

The young artist does not necessarily have to become only an artist.

The athlete can become a designer.

The person who starts in one city can discover another country.

And the person who once wondered whether all of their different interests fit together can eventually discover that the combination itself is the identity.

That is the kind of representation I need.

Not perfection.

Possibility.

When I look at Dominic Sagona, I see someone whose creative life makes an argument for staying curious, staying visible and refusing to reduce yourself to the easiest version for other people to understand.

For me, that is what Pride should make possible.

And that is why Dominic Sagona is MY HERO.

Sources: dominicsagona.com