Kayden Brockman

[Brackie]

Name: Kayden Brockman
Gender: Male
Age: 18
Grade: 12
School: George Hunter High School
Hobbies and Interests: Football, partying, LGBT+ activism, reality television, Instagram, working out

Appearance: Standing at 5'8", 161lb, Kayden possesses a toned and muscular physique, one he maintains through rigorous training at football practice and the gym. He has a fair Caucasian skin tone, complimented by his strawberry blonde hair and diamond-shaped face, with a prominent jawline, narrow chin and bow-shaped lips making up the lower half of his face. His nose is a strong nose of average size, sitting between a pair of deep blue, deep set eyes, which themselves sit beneath low soft-angled brows. Kayden's complexion is almost perfectly clear, but he has a few small acne scars from his early teenage years around his ears and where his sideburns would be. He gets his hair styled and barbered short on the sides, but long on top, often styling the top with either a messy styled look or simply combing it over, depending on the occasion.

Kayden's clothing is often on the more expensive end of the fashion spectrum; he does a lot of his clothes shopping online, being quick to discard or send things back if they don't fit or arrive broken or in disrepair, and tends to lean towards brands such as House of Fraser, Selfridges, A&F, and Hollister, but his closet is fit for any occasion. He has no piercings due to his schedule involving sports and working out, a lesson he learned when his lobe piercing almost ripped through the entire lobe during football practice, the scar of which is noticeable if one looks at his left ear. Kayden's usual outfit is a pair of Michael Kors Black Glitter Irving Lace-Up shoes, a knock-off pair of black ripped skinny jeans, and a white unisex t-shirt with the words "sashay away" written on the front in lower-case thick block cursive.

Biography: Kayden was born to an unknown mother and father on November 6th, 1999, and at the age of one month old was left at St. Paul's Episcopal Church early Sunday morning. A rough note was found with Kayden, detailing his full name, Kayden Oakey, his date of birth, and reason for abandonment: the mother was unable to feed both herself and her child. He was quickly inducted into foster care, spending several years moving throughout the system before ending up in the care of Kendra Parker and Audrey Brockman, who became his new parents.

Kayden's early life with his moms was one of relative luxury. Kendra was a headhunter for one of the biggest businesses in the county, while Audrey was an investment banker. The two met and hit it off at a singles event, moving in with each other several years later and adopting Kayden soon after that. Both of them had busy, but profitable lives, that saw them able to live within Chattanooga's gated community by the time Kayden was their child. However, having both come from relative poverty, Audrey having even spent a year homeless after being thrown out of her parents' home for being gay, they were relatively well grounded compared to many other rich families of the community, and made sure Kayden was as well. While they couldn't be there to raise Kayden all the time due to their work, the nanny they hired to take care of him when they weren't around made sure to keep him as grounded and unspoilt as his parents. For the most part, they were successful; while Kayden has become accustomed to being able to have whatever he wants bought for him at a moment's notice, he was raised into an otherwise kind, empathetic, well-mannered child.

As a child at school, Kayden was very friendly and social with all the other children, spending near equal amounts of time running around outside and being physically active, and playing with dolls with mostly the other girls of his grade. The latter earned him some bullying and being picked on by other students, and while at first he felt ostracized and inferior because of this, both of his parents taught him the importance of never letting it bother him due to there being nothing wrong with having interests that not all the other boys were interested in. It took a few years for him to understand this fully, as there were always days the bullying would get to him and he would return home upset, but he would never let his parents know about this, maintaining a facade of happiness in order to not let them worry about him. After this period, however, he learned to let it roll of his back and never let the words hurt him.

The further Kayden went through school, the less he cared about what the people who picked on him thought, and as such the less of an affect the bullying had on him. What also helped was a growth spurt near the end of elementary school which saw him gain size on his fellow students, and as such meant his bullies were less likely to lay a hand on him as they were before. It was also around this time that Kayden started to become more indoor oriented with his hobbies and activities. Soccer and playground games were replaced with reading and drawing, activities that gelled naturally with Kayden's like of dolls due to the way both activities let him work his imagination. While Kayden was never the best at drawing, a fact he never tried to believe of himself, he did well enough that it kept him interested in the art well through his next stage of schooling.

Kayden's parents were both fairly hard-left leaning, and as such this meant that they dedicated a lot of their time to activism in their community. There weren't many other gay or lesbian couples living in the gated community, but those who were willing would always attend rallies, community meetings, council meetings and anywhere they would be able to put forth common fights and goals for the LGBT+ community at large with them. Both Audrey and Kendra would always bring Kayden along whenever they could, and it was through this frequent attendance at rallies and the like that Kayden was instilled with a strong passion for what was originally his parents, but would also later become his own fight for equality, a passion which remained throughout his entire childhood and teenage years. Even after same-sex marriage was granted and the Democratic presidency of the time granted protections to LGBT people not afforded before, he remained committed to fighting for a cause he'd be raised towards being passionate towards, even as he began to lose the time for it at the end of his schooling.

Middle school was much of the same for Kayden as it was in elementary - while the rest of the children in his grade eventually caught up to his growth spurt, he never let this become an opportunity for the previous bullying to return, being incredibly willing to either defend himself to anyone who tried to come for him, or otherwise making himself uninteresting enough to them that bullying him wasn't worth the effort. For the most part, this worked, and middle school was an otherwise uninteresting period of Kayden's life; he made a solid friend group, including friends he kept all the way through to the end of high school, he kept attempting to improve with his art and reading, with his interest in dolls and the like being dropped by the time he was 11. He even eventually came out as gay when he was 13 years old, something he'd known for a while but waited until he was sure to make it official. While this lead to the bullying returning, the fact that he was actually gay now held even less weight than the previous attacks, and it only encouraged him to keep staying his course. It wasn't until he was 14 years old that Kayden decided he would make a major change.

During a discussion with his friends about the school's sports at the start of the year, Kayden declared that sport had no real skill involved and that anyone could be a footballer if they wanted to. To this end, his friends encouraged him to put his money where his mouth was and get on the football team. While football season had already begun and the chances Kayden would be able to get on midway through were slim, Kayden set his potential joining date for the start of high school the next year. Most of the 8th grade for Kayden was spent in a combination of studying everything he could find about American Football, including knowledge about the current state of the NFL as well as everything about how the game was played, and getting fit and in shape enough to be able to stand a chance; his statement about no real skill being involved was long since proven false, but his statement about how anyone could be a footballer if they wanted to still stood true. In fact,  By the end of middle school, Kayden was visiting the gym three times a week, was running several miles every morning before school, and had packed on almost 30lb of muscle to his previously slim frame, a stark change to his previously indoor-oriented lifestyle. It was a big change to his previous lifestyle, and it was mostly brought on due to the years of bullying he recieved. while the bullying itself had no immediate visible impact on Kayden, he eventually began to feel that it wasn't just enough to feel adequate or know his adequacy, he had to show it to everyone and prove it by attaining something previously thought unattainable to people like him.

Soon after Kayden began high school, he achieved his goal by making it onto the junior varsity George Hunter High School football team, although he was very clearly outmatched by those who had been playing football since their youth. While Kayden technically had no obligation to the team now that he'd proven his point to his middle school friends and could very easily have quit right away if he wanted to, he'd invested so much time and energy of the past year into achieving his goal that he wasn't able to let go so easily. Rather than giving up after getting onto the team, he instead poured more energy into becoming an even better player, showing up consistently for practice and increasing the intensity of his workout regime. Gym was now five days a week, and the distance he ran each morning was doubled. While the previous goal was to prove that anyone could get onto the football team, the goalposts had shifted: now his goal was to become one of the key, star players of the football team. Much like his initial goal to join the team in the first place warped into something new, this goal was all to prove that someone who acted like himself could achieve something previously thought unachievable. To this end, he lost a lot of his free personal time, and that on top of the normal high school workload meant he lost any real time he had to keep reading and drawing as he once did, instead putting that time and effort into getting better at football.

The locker-room culture was a huge shift from the relative safety and comfort of his direct friend group. Kayden over the past year had envisioned a place where he would be treated no differently from the straight members of the team, but this being high school in Tennessee, and these being teenage boys, he encountered a group far worse than even his most dogged middle school bullies. Not everyone was difficult to him, but those who were went above and beyond. While he at first tried to treat them as he had his tormentors in middle school, ignoring them and pretending he was impervious, he started to let the ignorant, aggressive and sometimes homophobic comments from his worst teammates get under his skin, and his previously laissez-faire attitude warped into a prickly defensiveness, sometimes dotted with anger. However, this got him nowhere quickly, and earned even more ire and bullying in the locker-room due to the fact they were now goading a reaction out of him, so he eventually learned to shift his approach; rather than learn to defend himself against these new attacks, he instead went on the attack himself, learning to tone up his camp tendencies and mannerisms in order to get under his teammates skins before they could get under his. This was in the form of turning his otherwise normal attitude and personality up in group situations, or whenever Kayden felt too much like an outsider due to the overt heteronormativity of the team, and only when his worst enemies were involved; to those on the team who were otherwise fine with him or at least didn't treat him badly to his face, Kayden acted the same as he always did, and was always quick to note that how he acted had nothing to do with them and everything to do with certain others. The main goal of his behaviour was to let him get to them before they got to him, and for the most part he was very successful. He was also never one to let this affect his on-field performance, something he achieved by dedicating himself even more to improving his skill and never giving his teammates even the smallest excuse to deride him for any good reason. However, the prickly defensiveness and anger problems that germinated early in his football days never really went away, and stayed with him all throughout high school, even as he made it onto the senior team.

The further Kayden went through high school, the more high school parties began to become a frequent part of his social life. He always attended these with any number of his close friends, ostensibly so he would have someone to hang out with but more so he would have a ride home, although he very much did hang out exclusively with his friends at the terrible parties. He would nearly always drink at these, and he would also nearly always hook up with other male students in bathrooms or closets, his first kiss being at his very first party, and even eventually lost his virginity to an especially handsy senior student. Kayden saw this as making up for lost time that he never spent physically exploring his sexuality as a pubescent due to his mostly female friend group and inwardly oriented personality and interests, and was often at as many of these parties as he could manage, friends in tow when he could. The only downside to this ended up being the effect it had on his football practice and gym attendance, as he would often be too hungover to reliably attend, and one morning when he forced himself to the gym anyway he ended up throwing up on himself after an especially gruelling leg day. It was after that embarrassing incident that he decided to stay away from alcohol until he was of legal age, as he didn't want to give way to any possibility of failing to become a star player.

Due to the lack of free time in his life due to being caught up on both his studies and his football practice, he had no time to continuing reading enough to consider the practice a hobby - he did, however, eventually start making time so he could reliably enjoy a number of reality television programs. This interest began when he caught an episode of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills when he was 14, and only expanded from there. He frequently watches and catches up on a great number of reality shows when he can manage the time, including nearly every series of Real Housewives filmed in the United States (although he has seen The Real Housewives of Vancouver and Melbourne), RuPaul's Drag Race, America's Next Top Model, and the various series of Love & Hip Hop. For the most part, he considers a number of these shows to be real-life soap operas, which appeal to his sense of drama, although he has a special vested interest in the outcome of RuPaul's Drag Race each year due to his penchant for investment in LGBT causes and media, which themselves stemmed from his near lifetime of activism.

Just before Kayden turned 16, his parents bought him his own smartphone. To Kendra and Audry, while they were not entirely alien to them and in fact owned the latest ones whenever they were released, they were both of the mutual belief that anyone 15 years old and younger did not need one, due to how much of a distraction it was for someone of their son's age. However, due to the change in their son's life he had brought upon himself, they were impressed and convinced enough that he deserved to own one, and bought him his first iPhone as one of his early birthday gifts. With this came easy access to his social media at a moment's notice; before this, Kayden was already big on being on everyone's Facebook pages, and even occasionally used Twitter to follow reality show contestants, but the biggest change was the fact he could now use Instagram. While not completely vain by any means, Kayden was prone to feeling the empowerment a good photo of himself would provide, and sharing that and gaining likes/comments from a crowd that was mostly his classmates would make the empowering feeling last longer. He frequently posted pictures from games, pictures of his breakfast or lunch, and even some landscapes of Chattanooga he liked, but he began to notice that the most frequently liked and commented on photos were that of himself. He even began to notice that the more skin he showed and the better tagged his photos were, the more likes he ended up receiving, to which end he started posting frequent shirtless photos and even photos of only himself and his underwear, which seemed to get the most attention. While very much aware of the sleaziness involved behind many of the likes of his more risque photos, as he was still a minor by law, he continued to post anyway, until he was made aware of how this could affect his career as an adult. Most companies and businesses saw their employees as extensions of themselves, and as such an employee with nude photos on his social media could possibly reflect badly on them and thus decrease his likelihood of employment. To this end, Kayden made his Instagram page private some time after achieving roughly 1200 followers. while this meant having to approve anyone who wanted to follow him, this also meant that his photos couldn't be found by googling his name. Kayden was also often prone to deleting photos he didn't end up liking, in spite of how popular or unpopular they were or how many likes they received, which often lead to him seeming like he had a lot more photos than were actually on his account.

Kayden has been aware since he was young that he was adopted, and has sometimes entertained the notion of finding his birth parents. However, he has no intention of meeting with them, as to him they are nothing but strangers who happened to conceived him. He has also mulled over the possibility that they would be homophobic, which would mean to him that the entire endeavour of finding them in the first place would have been nothing but self-inflicted pain on his behalf. In his mind, Kendra and Audrey are his true parents, a notion he made clear in his mind when he surprised Audrey on her first birthday after her and Kendra's wedding in 2015 with the news that he changed his surname from Oakey to Brockman, matching both of his parent's. Kayden remains fairly close with both of his mothers, who themselves are incredibly supportive of the positive choices Kayden makes in his life and his ability to self-motivate, which they both believe will carry him through his life to achieve anything he wants.

The way Kayden was raised, including his accepting parents, passion for activism and causes, penchant for reality television and tactics accrued from dealing with the football team, has shaped Kayden into a sharp individual unconcerned with presenting himself in any conventional masculine sense. Not only that, he actively abhors toxic heteronormative culture aspects such as the way many straight men talk about women around each other and the way he percieves both sexes treating LGBT+ people of any persuasion. Growing up in a very activism-heavy household has made Kayden ultra-critical of what he percieves as microaggressions, such as the stereotype of straight women treating openly flamboyant gay men as accessories rather than people, and he tends to be very vocal about this in situations where he believes this is the case. He also regularly surrounds himself with individuals and friends who think mostly the same way, which is enough to keep him socially happy and satisfied, and he regularly looks out for these people in his life. This all means that while Kayden is very much known as the flamboyantly gay footballer of his school, it is such on his own terms. However, he still has not properly dealt with his underlying anger issues, which while not entirely making him aggressive, tend to make him lose his cool a lot and is a button certain people can push in order to get to him.

While Kayden's main goal throughout high school was to become one of the star players of the football team, he was slightly disappointed when football season came and went and he was not scouted for a football scholarship. However, he was satisfied with how far he came in his time at George Hunter High School and counted that as a victory on his and his friends' behalf. He did start looking into improving his academics, however, and began researching good universities and colleges to apply for in order to continue his studies after high school. While he initially chose business-related subjects to study in his junior and senior years, such as business law, marketing, and finance, in order to attain help from his parents if he was stuck on homework or assignments, he did end up finding them more enjoyable than many other subjects he took during his high school years, mostly due to being able to understand the concepts of what he was studying better than most due to growing up in a fairly business-oriented household.  

While his parents were perfectly capable and able to pay his way into a good private university like Vanderbilt, he still wanted to at least try and get in through his own merit, as that was how he ended up altering the course of his life back in middle school; to that end, he ended up applying for a wide spread of business-related degrees and diplomas across Tennessee, including Finance and Marketing. While his academic results aren't the best, he's among the better of those on his football team and will be aiming to improve on all fronts as he heads closer to graduation. However, if he fails to improve in a meaningful way, he intends to ask his parents for financial aid anyway, as while he has grown into his own person, he is still very used to his parents being able to buy whatever he needs. Kayden has next to no idea what he's going to do once he leaves college or university, but he is sure he will know once he's finished his tertiary studies.

Advantages: As a member of one of George Hunter High's sports teams, Kayden is strong, fast, and far more athletic than most of his grade, which is an immediate advantage in the SOTF environment. Kayden is also quite good at getting under people's skin and making people lose their cool, which could easily be used as a tactical weapon in an alien situation.
Disadvantages: Kayden sometimes lets his temper get the better of him, and is very prone to losing his cool when someone gets under his own skin just as bad as he does to others, which is a huge disadvantage in a situation like SOTF where keeping a cool, level head is usually the safer option. Kayden at his core finds it hard to get along with non-LGBT people without actively trying so, and even with his school's comparatively liberal student base this can very easily work against him due to being in the minority. Finally, as an athlete, Kayden has a very high calorie requirement, and as such he can very easily either run out of food quicker than his competitors, or lose essential energy through rationing.