Editor’s note • This article discusses thoughts of self-harm. If you or people you know are at risk of self-harm, call or text 988 to reach the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline for 24-hour support.
For Alexandre Cutini — the new executive director of the Utah-based LGBTQ+ youth and young adult resource center Encircle — shame is one part of the LGBTQ experience that he wants to eliminate.
“When you really think about what the experience of being LGBT is like, in the beginning for me there was a lot of shame around it,” Cutini said. “When you think about shame, and what that means, it’s a social construct. It’s how you see yourself through the eyes of somebody else.”
Shame, Cutini said, is a “social wound that requires a social balm.” That balm, he said, is empathy, or the act of “feeling with you.”
“This is what Encircle does. It’s this sense of community, of ‘I know what your story is like, and I can walk with you because I know what that pain is like, and how difficult it is,’” Cutini said.
(Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake Tribune) Encircle's new CEO Alexandre (Alex) Cutini in Salt Lake City on Friday, Aug. 2, 2024.
Cutini is the third person to take on the role of executive director at Encircle since its inception in 2016. As Cutini starts in his new job, he said he’s most excited to learn the stories of the youth that visit Encircle, and to get to know them and their families.
“When I think of leadership, and especially in this position, I think of leadership as an opportunity to serve, to lift up everybody that’s around me,” he said.
He said he wants Encircle — which maintains four houses across Utah that serve as community centers for LGBTQ+ youth and young adults, with a fifth under construction in Ogden — to be the first thing that people think about when they have that experience of coming out and accepting themselves, whether it’s a young adult or a parent trying to support them on that journey.
“Our entire model is no sides, only love because that’s really what we believe in,” he said.
Cutini previously worked for Goldman Sachs for eight years in various capacities, most recently as a vice president.
He said his time at the company was amazing, but there was “something inside of me that knew that I needed to do something of service.” When the opportunity at Encircle came around, it’s what he was waiting for.
Cutini was born and raised in a small town in Brazil, where, he said, “I didn’t have any kind of gay friends, or anybody that I knew that was a gay couple, no reference, no role models.”
Cutini moved to the United States for college and during his last semester, he said he started to explore and understand what was different about him, something that he had “been suppressing for a really long time, that I could no longer suppress.”
“A lot of people in the community will tell you it’s almost like the same story, but like different versions of that same story,” Cutini said. “I knew that I was different when I was about 12 or 13 years old. But once I noticed that difference, I also at the very same time realized that, ‘Hey, this is something that people cannot know about.’”
He said he became good at suppressing who he is. “When you suppress a feeling like that, it doesn’t go away,” he said. “You’re just packing it down and it metastasizes and changes into things like physical or mental illness, irritability, depression, all kinds of things.”
After graduating from college, Cutini said he was hired as a tech consultant, a position that required a lot of travel. During one trip, he said he had a realization.
“I was flying back from somewhere and there was a lot of turbulence on the plane that day, not just the regular turbulence, a lot of it and people are starting to freak out, [asking if] the plane is going to fall,” Cutini said. “I remember looking at that and thinking, ‘If this plane falls, awesome, because I don’t have to tell anybody.’”
He continued, “I looked at the opportunity of that plane falling, and me dying in my 20s, like a child would look at a gift at a Christmas. It was in that moment that I had a little insight. Once everything was fine again, I realized that I don’t think that’s OK, that’s not healthy.”
Cutini said he finds himself lucky for having that moment of clarity, because a lot of people don’t. After it happened, he said he was able to reach out and get the help he needed. A group like Encircle, though, would have helped him tremendously, he said.
“Because again, there is a lot of shame around it, I had a lot of shame,” Cutini said. “My family was a very traditional Catholic family in Brazil. And they’re great and very supportive. But the thing is, when you don’t know how people are going to receive you, you just kind of dress rehearse tragedy in your head, and you default to the worst possible scenario. … You end up giving that feeling of shame everything that it needs to grow and take over your entire life.”
Cutini first learned of Encircle when founder Stephenie Larsen was receiving an award some years ago at a gala, where Goldman Sachs had bought a table. He learned more about it by searching for the organization online, and coming across a video of Broadway star Kristin Chenoweth and Utah pianist John Sergeant performing at the John Williams house in Salt Lake City — in what is now Cutini’s favorite room: the music room.
Now, Cutini has been married to his husband for 10 years. He said he doesn’t think of Encircle as a healer, or the kids that visit the houses as wounded, but as equals.
“We have the same experiences,” he said. “This is just somebody that’s walked down the path a little bit further, that can hold up a torch of motivation, of hope, of more education and understanding to really just kind of pave the way for these kids to, to be their whole selves.”
Cutini says his goal with his new position with Encircle is to create a space where youth can blossom and flourish for who they are.
“We’re raised to think that we have to mute, to quiet, to hide, which I did for a very long time,” Cutini said. “It’s actually a beautiful reason to be celebrated and this is the place where they can begin to feel that way.”
When it comes to remaining relevant as an LGBTQ nonprofit in Utah, given the turmoil other organizations (such as the Utah Pride Center) have seen in recent years, Cutini said it’s unrealistic to not expect change to come up.
“The only constant thing, really, is change,” Cutini said. “The relevance of Encircle, that’s exactly why an organization like this needs to exist, because as people navigate change, they have difficult things going on in their lives, whether it’s because of the community, their schools or families, legislation, whatever that is. That is exactly why a place like this needs to exist so that people can come in, take off the armor, be themselves [and] find community and a way to walk through it.”
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