This article has been updated since it first appeared in print.
It was supposed to be a fun side gig — making jam to sell at local markets.
But in the eight years since its founding, Dayum This Is My Jam has evolved. Now, along with making artisanal jams and pickles, the company advocates for and supports trans people.
Founder Andy Waller, who came out as trans a few years ago and uses they/them pronouns, says the outreach and advocacy arose from their experiences at work and elsewhere. “It’s not that this was a conscious effort or a specific action,” Waller says. “It just organically happened.”
The 38-year-old owner and “chief jamming officer” says they have seen and lived the challenges and joys of expressing one’s true identity.
First, Waller helped launch Safe Space Market, which organizes community pop-up events highlighting LGBTQ+ and underrepresented small businesses.
Waller, left, planned the family-friendly Dragstravaganza held at Diversity Richmond in February. (Photo by Jay Paul)
More recently, Waller started TransJam Events to highlight and bring together queer and trans people, including youth. TransJam’s second Dragstravaganza event in February, for example, was a family- and kid-friendly festival featuring a drag story hour and maker’s market. Proceeds support groups such as He She Ze and We, a local nonprofit offering support and resources for families with nonbinary and trans children. “I want to support organizations ... that care for and support trans people and families, because I never had that growing up,” Waller says. “It certainly would have made a difference to me.”
Fast-talking, with a lively manner and a mind that bounces from idea to inspiration to connection, Waller was raised in a military family. Like many so-called Army brats, they lived many places as a youth, including an uncomfortable period of time attending a strict Southern Baptist church where Waller had to wear a skirt. “I struggled with that and with LGBTQ thoughts and feelings,” Waller recalls.
In 1996, Waller’s family moved to Richmond. Soon after, their parents split up. Fortunately, a friend’s home across the street was a welcoming and encouraging refuge for the young Waller.
“My mom was the one who fed all the kids on the block,” recalls that friend, Lindsay Larkin. Family traditions often involved food. One was canning and pickling fresh produce, using a worn collection of recipes passed down by Larkin’s great-grandmother.
A policy analyst at the United Network for Organ Sharing, Larkin remembers Waller from their years at J.R. Tucker High School in the late 1990s, long before support systems like gay-straight alliance groups were established. Despite regular bullying and teasing, “I don’t think Andy ever wavered from who they are,” Larkin says. Eventually Waller dropped out of school and held various retail jobs and worked at the Richmond SPCA.
In 2015, the longtime friends were both working nonprofit jobs (Larkin worked for the Medical Society of Virginia at the time) when Waller suggested they come up with a side gig.
“What do we know how to do?” Waller recalls asking.
“I can make jam,” Larkin answered. The duo turned to her great-grandmother’s book of recipes.
After some experimenting, the pair made a strawberry jam with a touch of balsamic vinegar, which they dubbed Strawberry Zeal Forever in honor of The Beatles. The business name arose just as whimsically, this time inspired by lyrics from a Flo Rida tune: “I just was like, ‘Hot damn, this is my jam!’ ” Waller says.
Soon after, the duo started selling jams at Lakeside Farmers Market.
A few years later, Waller, who at the time had yet to transition, took a job with a small state agency — largely because former Gov. Ralph Northam had set out policies protecting the rights of transgender state workers.
Efforts to repress or eliminate what physicians know as gender-affirming care range widely across a spectrum from legal to criminal. This year, the ACLU has determined that 184 pieces of legislation across the country are anti-trans. In Virginia, legislators introduced more than a dozen such bills in the latest session, including several that would make it illegal for minors to be prescribed medications to delay puberty, but all failed to move forward.
Under Gov. Glenn Youngkin, Virginia’s Department of Education updated its “model policies” for the treatment of transgender students in the commonwealth’s public schools in September 2022. The new policies state that parents must be informed if students ask to use different pronouns or in other ways diverge from traditional gender roles. It also says students must be called by the pronouns in their school record unless legal documentation of a change is submitted; teachers cannot be forced to use different pronouns for students, no matter how much the students or parents would prefer they do so.
A decade or so ago, everything felt different around such issues, recalls James Millner, program director for Diversity Richmond. The LGBTQ+-affirming nonprofit began advocating for issues affecting the gay and queer community in the early 1990s. “It felt like we were riding this wave,” Millner says, citing forward momentum with the legalization of same-sex marriage paired with the cultural impact of shows including “Queer Eye” and “RuPaul’s Drag Race” and the high visibility of successful celebrity trans people such as Chaz Bono and Laverne Cox.
What happened? “The folks that disagreed with all this, they got scared,” Millner says. “They started to fear that our lives were being treated as a normal part of society.”
GLAAD, a national gay-rights organization, recorded 141 protests or attacks against drag shows or events in 47 states last year. These ranged from picketing to the firebombing of an Oklahoma doughnut shop and a horrific mass shooting at a drag show in Colorado Springs. Some protesters have gone so far as presenting the attacks as “protecting” children from trans people, implying that they are all pedophiles or attempting to “convert” children to be nonbinary, gay or trans.
This outrages many LGBTQ+ people and allies, who point out that an overwhelming proportion of child sexual abuse happens within families or from authority figures such as clergy. “It is complete and utter B.S.” Millner says. “You can’t groom anyone into being anything that they are not inherently. You can’t make a straight person gay or trans or nonbinary if they are not. ... It’s a wedge issue now, and they are hammering that wedge.”
Last year, when Waller’s plans to include a family-friendly drag story hour at Lakeside Farmers Market were derailed by online threats, Millner contacted Waller and offered to host a drag-themed afternoon event dubbed Dragstravaganza at Diversity Richmond. The event was a success.
I want to support organizations ... that care for and support trans people.
—Andy Waller
During the first months of the pandemic, Waller — by then married, with a young child — was inspired by the social activism and Black rights protests they saw in Richmond and around the world to take a more outspoken stand, largely because their transition had not been as protected as they had hoped.
Since coming out in 2018, Waller had experienced a lengthy and discouraging struggle with co-workers and superiors. The slights were constant: being called “she” instead of “they” no matter how often people were corrected; experiencing once friendly officemates pulling away; having their former name listed in the phone directory. “I gave them years to figure out my pronouns and get them right. And they couldn’t do it,” Waller says. “At the end, it was just so lonely.”
Following the birth of their second child in 2022 and with the blessing of their wife, Jesse, Waller got advice from a financial planner, left the state job and leaped into entrepreneurship full time. Busy with a young family and active career, Larkin bowed out. “I told Andy, ‘Take this as far as you can go. This is now your baby.’ ”
Waller now employs four part-time workers — two cooks, an events planner and a bookkeeper — and makes jams, pickles, salsas and pancake mix. Working in a commercial kitchen at Lakeside Farmers Market, the team goes through 50 to 60 pounds of locally sourced fruit a day. Their wares are sold at markets and local businesses.
So far, so good, Waller says, as gross sales have grown from $14,500 in the first year to more than $100,000 in 2022.
And they are building a supportive, collaborative community around trans rights. Nic Carwile, 18, started with the company two years ago as a weekend salesperson at farmers markets and now studies biology at community college and spends days cooking jams. “I love working in a kitchen,” Carwile says.
Carwile, who started using male hormones at age 16, says the work and Waller’s advocacy have given him a model as a younger trans person. “Before I met Andy, I would try to keep my head down,” Carwile says. “Andy was really never afraid to speak up. Now I am more comfortable doing that. I think it’s a great source of pride to know you’ve been totally honest. And Andy has brought a lot of that to the business.”
Millner of Diversity Richmond also praises Waller for finding a way to use a local small business to give back. “How brave it is of Andy and the folks that work with them to look at the opportunity they have and use it to create change,” Millner says. “That’s terrifically admirable. ... Andy is a role model for me.”
All this talk is all fine, Waller says, but the advocacy succeeds best if the product is good. “Please don’t buy our jam to pat yourself on the back,” Waller says. “Buy it because it tastes good, too.”
