By Megan Smith
It’s 9:45 at night and my phone buzzes. “I want blueberry pie,” the text reads.
“That sounds delicious,” I respond.
There’s a long pause.
“Do you want to get some?” I reply again.
“I was waiting for you to ask. I’ll meet you at House of Pies in 10.”
A short drive later, I’m sitting across from one of my best friends, digging into a slice of blueberry pie à la mode at our favorite 24-hour diner, laughing about the ridiculousness of it all. It’s these moments that we cherish.
Fans of Rooster Teeth’s Always Open know that feeling. Each week, host Barbara Dunkelman and friends sit around their own favorite diner booth to talk life, love, sex, and everything in between. And on the side of that booth—almost always without fail—is co-host, producer, and “friendly neighborhood queer,” Mariel Salcedo.
Salcedo has become a Rooster Teeth fan favorite, previously producing and guest starring on the now cult classic, Free Play, before taking on her current role on Always Open. For the production company’s LGBTQ devotees, however, she’s more than a comedic Internet celebrity—she’s someone they can connect to on a deeper level, someone they can call their own.
But Salcedo hasn’t always been the confident, out sensation that she is on screen. Born in Roswell, New Mexico, she moved with her family at age seven to the small town of Plainview, Texas, where her parents co-own a dairy farm. “As long as I can remember, we’ve lived out in the middle of nowhere. I grew up being a farmer’s kid,” she says, as she describes working on the dairy. She raised bulls for auction as early as age 10.
Her growing up experience was typical of a small town, she says, with church and football games driving the social scene. And while she always had lots of friends, she also knew she was different from those around her. “I always knew from a small age that I had a ‘weird’ feeling towards girls, but didn’t really understand it,” Salcedo explains. “But I remember knowing it was ‘wrong,’ and having a little bit of self-hatred because of it. Here I am, with this huge group of guys and girls—and everyone is dating each other—and I’m the one not interested in anyone.”
Her high school, she says, had no resources for LGBTQ students. “We had one teacher who was very masculine presenting, and everyone made fun of her,” Salcedo recalls. “It was clear she was gay and being ostracized for it. So it was terrifying for me.” Salcedo eventually became close with a few other LGBTQ kids in town, but continued to keep her sexuality and relationships hidden from her other friends. “I kind of lived a double life there for awhile,” she says.
It was a double life she continued to lead during her first year of college at the University of Texas at Austin. She started dating her first serious girlfriend, and, while she hid their long-distance relationship from her roommate, she longed to be open about her true self.
Ultimately, Salcedo credits Tumblr’s queer online community and UT’s LGBTQ student organizations with helping her to come out. Once a week, she would attend HangOut, a time when queer students would meet at the campus Starbucks to mingle. “There was no kind of agenda,” she says. “It was simply a place where people who were different could go and have some coffee and talk to other people who were also different. That was like church for me.”
She also found another home on campus—Texas Student Television (TSTV), a volunteer-run organization that allowed students to create and produce content that aired on Austin television. Then a biology major, TSTV was a creative refuge for Salcedo. “Pretty much all my life—ever since I could work a digital camera—I was always making my friends shoot short films with me, making music video parodies, and all these other silly things,” she says. “I would go to TSTV and feel so much better about everything. I fit in. And it got to the point where I knew that this is what I should be doing.” Despite hesitancy from her family, she switched her major to Radio-Television-Film.
Although she didn’t know it at the time, TSTV would also lead her to the next big chapter in her life—Rooster Teeth. After scoring an internship with the company during her senior year, Salcedo was hired on post-graduation. While she began as an associate producer, she was soon single-handedly producing Free Play and helping co-hosts Meg Turney and Ryan Haywood with the show’s gags.
Salcedo never really worried about how to come out to Rooster Teeth audiences—her on-screen time on Free Play was relatively limited, and her sexuality never came up. Then, the Pulse shooting happened. “After the Pulse shooting, I was completely devastated,” she says. “That was the first tragedy that hit me in a way that I truly felt it, because those affected were queer people of color, and that’s who I am. I pictured that happening at Barbarella, Rain, or Kiss n’ Fly—these are [Austin] places we basically grew up in. I couldn’t sleep, so I got up and I knew I had to get what I was feeling out. Maybe then, I could process how to heal. So I just started typing.”
What followed was a heartfelt letter to our lost LGBTQ siblings and a call for love and acceptance, which she posted on her Rooster Teeth profile. “I was terrified to press send,” she says. “This was my coming out. This was me claiming these people as my community and saying that this was an attack on everything that I feel I am as a human. But I just got this rush of comments and messages. My co-workers shared it and were messaging me, telling me they were there for me. I was just showered with so much love and acceptance that I knew it was going to be okay.”
Salcedo’s coming out also helped her comfortably transition into her new on-camera role on Always Open, a show focused around the women of Rooster Teeth. While her co-host and guests chat casually about male love interests, Salcedo freely brings up her girlfriend. “There’s a huge queer community at Rooster Teeth, so I was never worried about coming out and losing my job or having people judging me,” she says. “It’s a super welcoming community—not just within the staff, but the Rooster Teeth audience is one of the most welcoming, sweetest group of people I’ve ever met.”
“I want to keep doing what I’m doing,” Salcedo says about her future at Rooster Teeth. “I want to keep producing more shows and hopefully continue to be on camera because I do feel people can relate to me—and that’s incredible for me to hear because I’m just a little country bumpkin who came from a dairy farm. It means the world to me that people can relate to me in any way. Plus, I get to drink and make a show with my best friends. Who wouldn’t want that?”
Catch new episodes of Always Open Mondays on Rooster Teeth or Tuesdays on YouTube. Follow Mariel Salcedo on Twitter at @MarielSalcedo.
