Finding Community in Provo, Utah

There are journeys we plan carefully, marking destinations on maps, arranging where we will stay, deciding whom we will visit, and keeping track of the next train we need to board. Then there are the journeys happening underneath the journey, the ones we could never completely organize in advance because they are shaped by conversations, intuition, friendship, coincidence, and the unexpected moments that appear only because we allowed ourselves enough time to notice them.

I am currently traveling across the United States by Amtrak, moving from one part of the country to another at the particular pace that rail travel allows. Traveling America this way has already begun to change how I see the country. Instead of flying over communities and arriving hours later at another airport, I am passing through them. Cities gradually become towns, towns disappear into open landscapes, mountains rise in the distance, rivers follow the tracks, and communities I might otherwise have known only as names on a map become part of the view outside my window.

Provo, Utah, became one of those stops.

I came primarily to spend time with my friend Steeven, who happens to share the same birthday as I do. It is one of those small coincidences that has always made our friendship feel a little more interesting, and this journey across America gave me the opportunity to stop for several days, spend time with him, and experience a place I might otherwise have known only from a railway schedule and whatever assumptions I carried with me about Utah.

I knew Provo by reputation. I knew something about the broader cultural and religious identity associated with this part of Utah. But knowing the reputation of a place and knowing the place itself are two very different things.

Travel continually reminds me of that.

A community viewed from the outside is almost always more complicated once you walk its streets, meet its people, sit at its tables, and begin asking what exists beyond the images or expectations that preceded your arrival. Sometimes those questions come from research. Sometimes they come from conversation. And sometimes, for me, they begin in meditation.

Listening Before Moving

Meditation is one of the practices I use to create space for questions.

I sit quietly, ask what I need to understand, and listen.

I am not necessarily waiting for a voice or some dramatic revelation. More often, something much simpler happens. A thought remains with me. A question appears that I had not been asking before. Something I had overlooked suddenly seems deserving of my attention. Over the years I have learned not to dismiss those moments simply because I cannot immediately explain where they are leading.

I think of that process as listening to Universal Intelligence.

Someone else may have completely different language for the same experience, and that is perfectly fine. For me, it is the recognition that there are moments when we become quiet enough to notice questions, connections, and possibilities that might otherwise disappear beneath the noise of everyday life.

While I was in Provo, one of those questions came to me:

What is here for the LGBTQIA community?

It was simple enough, but I realized I did not know the answer.

So I started looking.

That search led me to Encircle Provo, a community space serving LGBTQIA people, families, and allies. As I looked through what was happening there, I found something on the Monday schedule that immediately caught my attention: a Gay Adult Friendship Circle for gay men eighteen and older.

It was not something I had planned before arriving in Utah. It had not appeared anywhere on my Amtrak itinerary. Yet suddenly, in the middle of a journey that had already carried me through several states and communities, there was another destination only a short distance away.

I told Steeven about it.

What made the discovery even more interesting was that he already knew the house.

He had walked past it.

He had noticed it.

He had wondered what happened there.

But after living in Provo for years, he had never actually walked through the door.

Now, strangely enough, his visiting friend traveling across America by train had arrived in town, sat in meditation, asked a question about Provo's LGBTQIA community, and found the answer inside a building Steeven had already passed many times.

That made me curious enough to go.

Walking Through the Door

There is an important difference between knowing that a place exists and actually entering it.

From the outside, an organization is easily reduced to a website, an address, a logo, or a description. Once you walk inside, it becomes human.

The Encircle house in Provo feels very much like what its physical structure suggests. There are hardwood floors, a sofa, familiar rooms, framed photographs, tables, chairs, and places where people can sit together and talk. It does not immediately announce itself with the institutional feeling of an office or social service agency. The atmosphere is intentionally domestic, and I found that distinction meaningful.

Much of my life and work has taken me into LGBTQIA spaces in very different parts of the world. I have seen organizations operating from offices, clinics, community centers, nonprofit buildings, campuses, houses, and spaces created simply because someone understood that people needed somewhere to gather.

The architecture changes, but the human need does not.

People need places where they can meet one another, speak honestly, listen without judgment, ask questions, find information, and experience something increasingly difficult to manufacture in our digital world: human presence.

Sometimes one of the most important things a building can communicate is simply that you are welcome to come inside.

Sitting in the Circle

I entered the Gay Adult Friendship Circle as a visitor.

I was not there to speak as an expert, deliver a presentation, represent an organization, or evaluate anyone else's experience. A question had led me there, and I wanted to understand what the space was by being present inside it.

There are personal things shared within community circles that belong to the people who share them. I believe those spaces only work when participants know that their experiences will not later become someone else's story to tell. For that reason, I will not recount what other men said during the gathering. Their stories remain theirs.

What I can write about is what the experience caused me to consider.

There is something fundamentally human, and almost democratic, about sitting in a circle. Nobody is elevated above anyone else. There is no podium, no stage, and no audience waiting to be addressed. People simply sit beside one another, speaking when they choose to speak and listening when someone else has the floor.

For a little while, people whose lives may look very different outside that room occupy the same physical space because there is some part of their experience that allows them to recognize one another.

That matters, particularly at a moment when LGBTQIA people are so frequently discussed from a distance.

We are discussed politically, legislatively, religiously, medically, culturally, and socially. Entire debates take place about LGBTQIA people without an LGBTQIA person ever entering the room.

There is value in spaces where none of that performance is required, where gay men can simply talk with other gay men about life without being asked to represent an entire population or defend their existence.

Community building does not always happen through a major campaign or public event.

Sometimes it happens quietly, one conversation at a time.

What Community Looks Like on a Table

As I moved through the house, I also found myself paying attention to the resources available there.

A table held information relating to mental health, crisis support, transportation, therapy, community events, books, music, art, crafting, families, parents, and supportive adults. Nearby, additional information directed people toward other resources and assistance.

At first glance, it could easily be dismissed as a collection of flyers.

I saw infrastructure.

We often measure LGBTQIA progress through landmark moments. A law changes. A court recognizes a right. A government adopts a policy. A public figure speaks out. A movement organizes. Those moments matter enormously and often determine whether people can live freely and safely.

But there is another layer of equality that receives much less attention.

Someone needs a therapist and does not know where to begin.

Someone needs transportation.

A parent is trying to understand what their child is experiencing.

Someone has moved into a new city and knows nobody.

Someone has spent too much time alone.

Someone would like to meet another gay man without opening an app.

Someone simply wants somewhere to go on a Monday evening.

Community is built there too.

Sometimes social change looks like legislation. Sometimes it looks like a table covered with information telling people where they can turn when they need help, friendship, or simply somewhere to belong.

Then Came Dinner

After the Friendship Circle, Steeven and I stayed for the community dinner.

It was during that meal that the experience returned me to the question that had begun the day.

We were sitting together eating when someone asked my name. I introduced myself and gave a small introduction to who I am, including a little about my husband, HRH Prince Manvendra Singh Gohil, and the LGBTQIA work that has become such an important part of our shared lives.

It was an ordinary conversation around a dinner table.

Then I learned that the person speaking with me was from Corvallis, Oregon.

My birth city.

Immediately the conversation changed. We began recognizing places, remembering pieces of geography, and sharing that peculiar pleasure that occurs when two people meet far from somewhere familiar and suddenly discover that their lives have crossed the same landscape.

There I was in Provo, Utah, far into a journey that had already taken me hundreds of miles across America, sitting inside a house I had not known existed the day before, talking with someone whose life connected unexpectedly to the city where my own life began.

I smiled because I understood the moment through the same spiritual language that had led me there.

For me, it felt like Universal Intelligence checking back in.

Not with some enormous declaration and not as proof of anything that another person is required to believe. It was simply one of those moments when the sequence of events becomes interesting enough that I pay attention.

I had sat in meditation and asked what existed for the LGBTQIA community in Provo.

The question led me to Encircle.

Encircle led me into the Friendship Circle.

The circle led us to dinner.

Dinner led to a conversation.

And that conversation somehow traveled all the way back to Corvallis.

For me, the message was simple:

Keep listening.

Steeven Had Been Walking Past the Answer

There is another part of this experience that may stay with me even longer than the coincidence at dinner.

I am leaving.

That is the nature of this particular chapter of my life.

In a few days I will return to the railway and continue moving across the United States. Another train will arrive, another station will appear, and Provo will become another place behind me while the landscape outside my window changes again.

But Steeven lives here.

He has been here for years.

And during those years, he had walked past this house and wondered about it.

What happened there?

Who went inside?

What exactly was Encircle?

The answer had been sitting within the geography of his everyday life, close enough to walk past but still outside his experience.

Until now.

That may be what I appreciate most about this entire sequence of events. I traveled across the country and stopped in Provo to visit a friend who shares my birthday. While here, meditation gave me a question. That question led me to a house he had already noticed but never entered. Together we walked through its door, met people, sat in community, shared dinner, and left knowing something about Provo that neither of us had known before.

The wondering is gone now.

The building has become a place.

The place has people inside it.

There are conversations, resources, gatherings, dinners, and possibilities for friendship.

I hope that after my train carries me away from Utah, Steeven walks through that door again.

Maybe next Monday.

Maybe many Mondays after that.

Not because I expect him to report back to me and not because an organization needs one more person in a room, but because friendship and community are built through returning.

We do not usually discover meaningful community in a single evening.

We build it by showing up again.

And again.

The Geography Beneath the Geography

Traveling across America by train has made me think that every country has at least two maps.

There is the map we recognize immediately: states, cities, rivers, roads, mountains, borders, and railway lines connecting one destination to another.

Then there is another map that cannot be printed quite so easily.

It is the geography of human connection.

A friend in Provo who shares my birthday.

A question that arrives during meditation.

A community house only a short distance away.

A group of gay men sitting together on a Monday evening.

A shared dinner.

A conversation with someone from Corvallis.

My birthplace.

A friend who had walked past the same building for years and finally discovered what was inside.

None of those things is especially extraordinary when considered individually. Together, however, they form the kind of pattern that makes a journey memorable.

That may be one of the deeper lessons I am discovering while traveling across the United States.

There is the America visible through the train window, but there is another America that can only be discovered by getting off the train.

It exists in houses, neighborhoods, conversations, friendships, community organizations, dinner tables, and people whose stories would never appear on an itinerary.

If I had remained only a passenger moving through Utah, I might have left Provo knowing exactly what I knew when I arrived.

Instead, I asked a question.

And the geography changed.

Keep Listening

Soon I will leave Provo and continue across the United States.

There will be another station, another train, another stretch of American landscape moving beyond the window, another city, another conversation, and undoubtedly another question.

But I will carry this Monday evening with me.

Not because anything spectacular happened.

There were no cameras, no ceremony, and no grand announcement.

I sat in a circle and listened.

I ate dinner with my friend.

Someone asked my name.

A conversation unexpectedly returned me to Corvallis.

And a house Steeven had passed many times became a place he now knows from the inside.

That is enough.

We sometimes imagine that meaning will announce itself loudly enough that we cannot possibly miss it. My experience has often been the opposite. Meaning can arrive quietly, almost inconspicuously, as a question that enters the mind and refuses to leave.

What is here?

Who should I meet?

What is behind that door?

Why am I thinking about this now?

The wisdom may not always be found in immediately knowing the answer.

Sometimes it is found in becoming curious enough to follow the question.

I began that day sitting quietly and listening.

By the end of the evening, after a meditation, a search, a friendship circle, a dinner, and an unexpected connection back to the city of my birth, I understood something I have experienced many times before.

The conversation had never stopped.

The universe had simply changed the way it was speaking.

By DeAndre, Duke of Hanumanteshwar