A Conversation with Julian Everett: Leading Change in Public Health and Ballroom Culture
Photos by Jordan Somers
This week on We Live In Color, host Deaunte Damper sits down with Kurt Rain, also known as Julian Everett, to discuss his impactful work as the executive director and founder of the Stephaun Wallace Advocacy and Community Engagement Division (SWACE) Health and his monthly ballroom series, Strike A Pose. In this episode, they delve into Everett's background, his journey into public health, and the profound influence of the late Dr. Stephaun Elite Wallace, who inspired Everett to become a guiding force within the Northwest's ballroom community.
Everett is a native of Baltimore, Maryland. Growing up in a city with a distinct division between private and zoned schools, Everett's mother enrolled him in a private all-boys school. There, the future community pioneer faced challenges due to his sexuality.
"That really just put me in a very uncomfortable situation because I still was in this space of not really knowing what to identify as or how to group it," Everett said. "But I knew something was different if that makes sense."
Continuing, Everett cites his family's support in life as providing him with a strong backbone.
"I never felt like something was wrong," Everett explained. "So hearing certain things or slurs that I did hear earlier in my childhood, I never really knew where that came from because I never heard it in my household."
A large part of their influence led him to become the community leader he is today.
"I was just living, coming from a space where I was always supported," Everett said. "I saw a lot of Black and Brown women [who] were just very intelligent, resilient, and innovative. It just inspired me to go the full throttle mile, like wanting to be the best of the best in whatever it is that was going to be."
Everett's career path toward public health happened largely by chance. Innovative from a young age, he initially aspired to be a singer before transitioning into other creative pursuits.
"I then realized that, okay, I think I'm pretty smart," Everett said. "So then I started to really get more into writing. I knew I loved to write. So then I realized, okay, maybe I should get into communications or something to go to school for."
He later attended Morgan State University, where his career began. He noticed an opportunity to work as a research assistant for a national study, which offered $500 every other week and decided to apply.
"I was broke," Everett confessed. "I needed money now, so I ended up going to the info session."
It turned out to be a valuable opportunity for Everett, as he met one of his mentors, Dr. Jamal Hailey.
"He was very interested in my thought process behind how to do community engagement, how to go about it, how to kind of operate things from a sex-positive perspective," Everett said. "I didn't know anything about none of this."
Everett, always up for a challenge, continued his research and began collaborating with the University of Maryland's Department of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine. Everett joined the Star Track program, which focuses on providing care and knowledge to at-risk teens, and became involved in community engagement and program development.
"I became a specialist, so I matriculated through that entire tenure of being there, and I planned on retiring from there," Everett said.
Everett's retirement plans were upended by the pandemic, which brought significant changes to his life. Like many others, Everett faced major disruptions, including the loss of his research position. Mentally drained, Everett found himself in a space of uncertainty.
"When I lost my job, I didn't really know what instability was like. It was new for me," Everett said. "It was funny because I felt like now the folks that I had been helping and assisting I was now in that same situation. I had connections to the resources, I had connections to all these things, but I still felt so unequipped, and I just felt like I didn't want to be there anymore, and I just wanted change."
That need for change coincided with a significant opportunity. During this time, Everett met Dr. Wallace, another prominent mentor who strongly advocated his continuation in public health. Wallace offered Everett the chance to move to Seattle. Initially hesitant, Everett later saw signs encouraging him to move.
"He (Wallace) sent me over a couple of different opportunities, and I applied for one, which happened to be POCAAN, which is the People of Color against AIDS network," Everett said.
Everett got the role and quickly moved from Maryland to Seattle, nervous but excited for the change.
"When I got here, and after some great connecting and community mapping, that anxiety and that fear dwindled," Everett said. While life had improved, his role with POCAAN proved to be challenging but rewarding work.
"He (Wallace) wanted excellence. He wanted you to be at your highest form in all forms of your life and professionally," Everett said. "He wanted you to be top tier, and so with me being a new face, he wanted to make sure that I was showcasing my best capabilities and all my skill sets. So he gave me that opportunity to really help with enriching the ballroom community here in Seattle and Tacoma."
Ballroom culture, founded by Black trans and queer community members, features performers "walking," where they compete, dance, lip-sync, and model in various categories. Everett emphasized the importance of ballroom culture to the LGBTQ community, highlighting its significance as a part of queer and trans history predominantly curated by Black and Brown people. Having gradually become mainstream over the years, a large part of the culture is about maintaining its roots.
"Now, how do we preserve the authenticity of it to really make sure that the functionality of what it's for stays the same, which is identity, exploration, networking, [and] finding chosen family," Everett said. "It's just a really crucial community."
Regarding the intersectionality of public health, education, and ballroom culture, Everett highlights that although it's not currently happening in our region, he plans to change that.
"It's happening in New York City. It's happening in New Jersey. It's happening in Philadelphia. It's just not happening here. I'm hoping to change that by doing the SWACE Health Division," Everett said. This program will focus on wireless advocacy and community engagement powered by queer life. It aims to intersect art, culture, and healthcare while ensuring each element retains its distinct identity. For Everett, that looks like transforming the Northwest's ballroom community into a space of support and resources that prioritizes needs.
"Someone comes into the ballroom scene, and they're coming to compete at a ball, but they don't have housing, or they don't have food like support; what does that look like," Everett said. "So that could be a connection of simply being able to connect someone to those services, but also, how does that become effective if it's coming from someone they don't know versus someone they actually recognize from a function?"
Regarding his WLIC tribute, Everett extends his shout-out beyond a single person, honoring his mother, Hailey, and the late Wallace.
"She has definitely been the matriarch of our entire family," Everett said. "She's been someone that has allowed me, and definitely has welcomed me to really see that color is not just one fold, but it's tri-fold."
Hailey has also been significant in Everett's life, being among the first to deviate him toward his public health path.
"He really instills in me to this very day and allows me to really not sit in my mistakes," Everett said. "He allows me to be like, Okay, you did that wrong, but let's fix it. This is how it can be fixed. He's very optimistic, clever, and innovative with a lot of his thinking and processing, and I really admire that. He's someone who's just pushed me to push others. It helps with bridging the intergenerational gap."
Lastly, Everett honored Wallace, whose influence led him to venture to Seattle and connected him to his work here.
"Losing him was something that's still something I'm processing and learning what grief is," Everett said. "I wouldn't even be here today if it wasn't for him, everything that he's been able to render, from his excellence to his humor to his realism, just the fact that he just loved that's just something that I couldn't ask for more."
Regarding upcoming plans, Everett is working on one of his biggest events of the year: a yearly ball conference formerly known as For the Culture. It has now been reformatted and renamed to the Ballroom Advocacy and Community Engagement Conference, the first of its kind in the Pacific Northwest.
"We are welcoming folks that are in ballroom, that are not in ballroom, to come and be able to become educated on how ballroom is created within healthcare, art, and culture," Everett explained. "And also being able to look at fellow community partners who support the scene as well, but also deliver their expertise and related expertise to those of us in the community."
To learn more about Everett's community work, follow Strike A Pose on social media here and discover more about SWACE Health here!
Tune in to We Live In Color with Deaunte every Thursday on all Converge Media platforms for more engaging conversations with inspiring guests like Everettt to hear more about advocacy, inclusivity, and living life in color!
