"When I was 17, I decided my vice of choice was going to be to drink. I was going to be really good at it, but I wasn't going to do anything else—no drugs, nothing else like that. I spent a lot of my 20s at the bottom of a bottle, and basically I used alcohol as a great unifier to bring my friends together, to make friends, and my song lyrics were all about it, and to really embrace the lifestyle as a toxic way to present a male persona because I didn't feel comfortable in my own skin," she explains. "I thought that if I came out, then my own friends would turn against me, and I would put myself at risk, and I would disappoint my own family, and so I said, 'Alright, if I can't be that person, then I can still be funny, I can still be the center of attention— which I still love to be [laughs]— I can still be on stage, and still be in a band, and still be larger than life.' But guess what? [After you] party hard all day, you go to bed at night and still feel like the same woman. And you wake up the next morning and it's still the first thing you think about: 'how come I'm not her? How come I can't live this way?"

It took her until 2013, but once Roem did finally feel the time was right for her to come out, she says she was blown away by the level of support she received. As she explains, the wellspring of love and understanding that greeted her came as quite a surprise, given her thwarted first attempt to come out.

"When I was in college in 2005, I won my university's 'gender buster.' It was basically a drag show, so we'll call it home field advantage," she explains with a snicker. "The student newspaper came out, and the photo of me was there. I went online, and I was getting slammed. It was bad, it was really really bad, and it violently shoved me back into the closet. That was supposed to be my tip-toe out— not just gay clubs, not just going out seeing an industrial band, but, 'Alright, are we ready for this?' And so, in 2005 I didn't think that my friends were there yet, I didn't think society was there yet. And you know what? I was probably right."