Oz Powers: An advocate for LGBTQIA youth

By JULIANNE HOMOKAY

Special to the Alpine Mountaineer

 

Most everyone has seen the iconic movie and its climactic scene: The great and powerful Wizard Of Oz may be a man behind a curtain, but he enables young Dorothy to find the courage within herself to finish her hero’s journey and the wisdom to help her friends find their courage, too.

Oz Powers, who goes by the moniker Iconic Punk Oz on social media, is both characters rolled into one. His journey through trauma led him to discover the power within himself. Now, he strives to help young LGBTQIA people uncover their strength and courage, discover their self-worth. But he’ll be damned if he’s ever going to hide behind a curtain again.

Oz is wide open about his life and his struggles, in the event that will help any youth going through similar experiences: “It’s helpful to young people to see someone who came out the other side.” Born Robert “Robbie” Powers and brought up in a small town outside Asheville, N.C., that he describes as conservative and traditional, he knew he was creative, he knew he was different, but he didn’t have the language to process it back then. He told me when we first met outside a coffee shop in Lake Arrowhead Village, “I grew up being beat on by homophobic rednecks.”

Two faithful companions that helped him get through his childhood were television and movies, the more visually fantastic the show the better, although at the time he didn’t have a clue as to how this passion would translate into a life. Then, “I was seeing this thing on TV, a behind-the-scenes at The Dark Crystal” when the stirrings of a plan began to form. The “little kid who had hopes from North Carolina” started following his passion for visual art. “Sometimes you follow your passion, you don’t know why… it will give you everything you need to get your ruby slippers.”

His passion first landed him at the film school at the University of Southern California, and graduate school at the American Film Institute, two of the most celebrated film programs in academia. But the ruby slippers didn’t quite fit yet; the film industry and visual arts fields back then were more conservative than he was expecting. “I did a gay movie when I was at USC and everyone flipped out.”

He continued to accumulate quite an impressive resume, though. He started as a script reader for Lucasfilm. He taught himself 3D animation and eventually began working as an animator and visual effects artist on many well-known projects, including Aliens Of The Deep, which was his first collaboration with director James Cameron, and Race To Witch Mountain. His second collaboration with Cameron brought him to the pinnacle of this stretch of his Hollywood career, the 2009 film Avatar, on which he was the Supervisor: Virtual Environment, and performed uncredited visual effects and animation technical direction duties.

Equal parts creative and technical, following his stint in film he was brought into a Texas-based company to develop digital animation software. All the while, even though he was out of the closet in his personal life, Robert Powers remained mum at work.

Little did he know that a huge sea change was coming via a series of traumas. His mother began to fall ill, but his father banned him from seeing her due to his sexual orientation. His family took a restraining order out on him to keep him away. He was also subject to a vile campaign of sexual harassment at work when a colleague found out he was married to a man. After he left the company, “I barely got out of bed for three years,” he said.

On the heels of all of that, the pandemic hit, and his case of long COVID landed him in the hospital for several months, eventually dragging him into a coma. It is quite the emotional experience to hear him describe his transformation after he woke up. He felt “Robert Powers” fall away. “That’s when the great and powerful Oz was born,” he says. Oz was going to be fearlessly, unapologetically himself. “It’s a decision to live.”

The transition became an outer one as well as an inner one, as he then felt perpetually connected to his creativity, and he began expressing his authentic self fully in his dress, his makeup, his hair and his accessories.  You’ll know Oz when you see him; his look is vibrant and exuberant and original, just like the man on the inside.

His unconventional look drew him some negative attention at times, but he credits that experience for his adoption of a technique he describes as “a profound way to manage how you receive energy and how you give energy back” called Mirrorball. If someone is trying to intimidate him or harass him based on his look, his orientation or his lifestyle, he doesn’t internalize that energy. He refuses it and sends it playfully back with a musical mantra. Oz wants everyone to ride on the “joy train.”

Which is why he wants every project he works on now to be relevant to those young people in pain that remind him so much of himself when he was a kid. He is writing a science-based television series featuring characters struggling with these very issues. He is developing companion hardware and software that he feels could greatly reduce bullying if he could get it implemented in high schools.

But Oz feels that his most important work is with the young people themselves. While a great cheerleader of organizations like PFLAG, Oz works more organically, responding to the many young people who reach out to him directly via social media. He shares his story, he shares the Mirrorball technique, he lends his ear.  He is unafraid to share their pain, ultimately hoping to help them heal from their trauma and encourage their creativity as a survival technique.

For example, a teenage girl ran up to him that last time he was at the mall in his Carolina hometown: “I saw the video when your Dad kicked you out of the house…my family disowned me too! You saved me!” Oz is also unafraid to take on the legal system to combat homophobia, as he did with the restraining order his family served against him, or intervene when he encounters anyone bullying anyone else for any reason. “I’m going to be the great, joyous, loving person.”

His ruby slippers finally fit.