EXCLUSIVE: Pride Month Interview with Social Media Stars Dylan Geick and Jackson Krecioch

The month of June is a happy month, it is pride month. It is the month for the LGBTQ community to celebrate who they truly are without feeling judged, which is how it should be all year. Social media stars, Dylan Geick (19) and Jackson Krecioch (20) are two social media stars who have been dating for a year now. Krecioch has over one million followers on Instagram and Geick is known for being one of the few out college athletes, as a wrestler, he only knew one other wrestler who was out before he came out. CelebMix had the chance to chat with Krecioch and Geick about pride month and their own coming out stories.

What does Pride Month mean to you guys?

Jackson: “For me it’s obviously pride; being proud of who you are and being you, whoever that is, whether it be transgender, bisexual, gay, anything like that. I think it’s really important to have that because some people don’t feel proud to be that because even though everyone is pretty accepting, there are still a lot of people stuck in the past and who are very homophobic, and just anything not them phobic. So I think it’s really important and it means a lot to me.”

Dylan: “I think pride month is a time for me to look at how far we’ve come but also remember that there’s still a lot of issues being tackled.”

What were both of your coming out experiences like? 

Jackson: “I never had to come out to my family, my mom asked if I was gay and at that time I was 17, I was like ‘yeah’. She just asked and I was at a point where I was like ‘yeah’, I’m not going to hide it anymore, so I was pretty lucky. I was out to everybody in my hometown, before I even started social media and then I had a second coming out six or seven months later on social media. It was kind of hard because I was out, then I was back in the closet and then I finally came out again.”

Dylan: “I was a junior in high school and I just kind of came out at my lunch table one day and the whole school kind of knew and then I came out to my mom a week later.”

Dylan, you’re a college athlete, what’s some advice you would give to current college athletes struggling to come out?

“I would say that it’s really important to know you’re not alone. When I was in high school, especially with wrestling I had literally heard of one other gay wrestler and everybody knew who he was and it was kind of one of those, everyone would give him shit about it so I was like ‘wow is there only two of us in the world?’ As soon as I came out I had messages from people that I knew over the years that I had no idea were also struggling with their identity and their sexuality and were in the closet. Since then I’ve gotten stories from dozens of other athletes. Just to know that sometimes it’s not visible but those people are not alone and if you have the strength to come out you can make a change, you can be that person to kind of be visible to other people.”

Jackson, you’re going on a Love is Love tour, what will that be about? 

“The whole ‘Love is Love’ obviously. Everybody on tour has some connection to LGBT. It’s kind of like the whole theme of the tour is to have a happy place, where everyone is accepting. It doesn’t matter what you look like or who you love or whatever. I think that’s the biggest message of the tour, anybody is welcome, it doesn’t matter who you are, who you like or what you do.”

Dylan, you’re also working on a novel, what will that be about?

“The novel doesn’t have any focus with the advocacy that I do or anything like that. The novel is actually just a western novel kind of just a combination of everything that I love in literature. That’s kind of a separate pursuit from my LGBT activities. I’m super excited about it. I just think having any work out there by LGBT creators is really important.”

How did you guys meet?

Jackson: “We met through a friend, but we grew up an hour away from each other and we don’t know how we didn’t meet before this. Freshmen year, he went to a military school that is literally in my town and I used to message the kids that went there. It was just really weird that we didn’t meet up with each other before. So my friend, who lived in Chicago, was like, ‘Hey there’s this gay guy and he’s really attractive.’ and I messaged him and he completely shut me down and did not want anything to do with me and then six of seven months later he said, ‘Hey come to LA let’s hang out.’ and I was like, ‘What? Now you want to hang out?’ It was super random, out of the blue and then we met up and literally from that moment on we’ve lived with each other. I think for both of us it was really out of the blue, but it was a cool way.”

You guys just celebrated your one year anniversary, do you have a memorable day since being together?

Dylan: “A lot of things that are memorable for me are things that we shared with other people. I think back to EDC and the first photo we took in the heart, it was the first photo he posted of us together. It was a really wild ride for me because he had been doing this social media thing for a while and it was like a whole new world for me.”

https://www.instagram.com/p/BVdMMBEjfZx/?hl=en&taken-by=jackson_krecioch

Jackson: “I think for me it’s just more milestones, like us flying to NYC and finally moving in together. We literally had one thing, we had a broken chair that was on the side of the road in our apartment, that was literally the only thing we had there because I got there that night. That was a memorable day because we literally had nothing in our house yet and we’re still having fun and laughing to this day.”

How do you guys deal with the negative comments?

Jackson: “Me, personally, I think the biggest thing is literally just not giving it the time at all. I don’t think about it, like Dylan said, I’ve been doing this for almost three years now so I know that most people that are doing this don’t have a life or they are angry at themselves so they’re lashing out. A lot of the time they just troll looking for a reaction, they want the attention, and even some fans want attention and they don’t know how to get it. I usually just don’t give it any attention because otherwise people, if I address hate comments, they’ll be like, ‘Oh, if I comment that he’ll reply to me and he’ll message me.’ so I just don’t even pay attention to the hate comments.”

Dylan: “It was really challenging for me, I had a whole breakdown at one point. Those hateful comments kind of stick with you more. You’ll read hundreds of positive comments and then you read one mean one. It’s really important to remember that love totally outweighs the hate 100 to 1 and not to let those one or two comments get to you. It can be challenging.”

Jackson: “It made our relationship a little harder because people who have been in a relationship are so open on social media. The only reason I do that is because there’s not a lot of big gay couples or people, LGBT wise to look up to. That’s why I think it’s important, to normalize it, make it like every other couple that posts.”

What’s some advice you would give to those who aren’t as educated on the LGBTQ community? 

Dylan: “I would say use this month as a time to learn stuff and learn about the history of the movement and learn about it’s biggest challenges today. I think a lot of people are kind of blind to what goes on and even people in the community tend to thing whatever is going on in their life is the experience for everyone. I generally think of my coming out as very blessed but I also know and I’ve talked to a lot of people, in the south and other places in the country or around the world, where they still can’t come out, or when they did they had to leave their home or something else. I think it’s important to see that there’s a lot of different aspects to it and that people have very different experiences depending on where they’re from or their families and things like that.”

Jackson: “I think just education, I think a lot of homophobic people are people who are uncomfortable by it but they don’t get it, it’s foreign to them so they push it away. I think what a lot of people, outside the community, don’t realize is that we’re just like the people outside, we’re the same people, we’re just people just going through different struggles.”

You’ve inspired so many fans, of all ages and backgrounds, what inspires you about them?

Jackson: “My fans are super supportive and just super crazy and awesome. I think they’re all super positive and anytime I say anything bad about myself or anything negative, they’re always there to cheer me up and be there for me, so it’s kind of like a family.”

Dylan: “I think for me it’s hearing why they follow me or how we’ve affected them. Knowing that a lot of these kids, even some younger kids and some adults, they just have really wild experiences and knowing that we were able to help them through that and knowing that they’re able to move on and be positive in some way because of us is really humbling and really inspiring, that something so small can get them through something like that.”

Jackson: “Being an advocate for LGBT is getting a message from someone saying, ‘hey I got the courage to come out to my parents because of you.’ I think that’s really really amazing because that’s what I do. If I could do one thing, it would be spread positivity.”

Jackson Krecioch will be going on the Love is Love tour that starts on July 17th in Atlanta, GA. Buy your tickets to the tour here.

If you end up gong one the shows make sure you tag us on Instagram or Twitter @CelebMix. Also let us know your thoughts on our interview with Jackson Krecioch and Dylan Geick.

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