Earlier this month, LAX studios rolled out the red carpet for a unique performance.

Funded by a grant from the Kentucky Foundation for Women, Kentucky Unmasked featured local performers sharing their stories of identity, hardship and authenticity.

We take you to hear these stories and this week's Art and Culture, a segment we call Tapestry.

The Kentucky Foundation for Women offered a one time grant last year that can span one year or two, and it was called the radical timely urging Grant.

So I applied for this grant with the idea to do a show with a slate of storytellers.

We have a variety of performers, each talking about living their authentic life.

It's people with body differences, people with narrow divergences, trans people, gay people, queer people, people who have had procedures like abortions or mastectomy and that sort of thing.

The kind of stories that aren't often heard.

No physical fix can fix something that begins inside of us.

I'm sharing my glitter bomb journey to self-love.

So that's my story.

In living in a body that is not accepted in society as the beauty standard.

As an overweight person, a fat person.

And my journey to really embracing and loving myself as I am most people.

They're like, Live your life.

I don't care.

That's Kentucky.

I grew up very evangelical Christian.

Southern Baptist spent ten years of my life in the ministry wearing a mask.

And so tonight, I want to talk about how I was able to take that mask off and find community here in Kentucky and how Kentucky truly is a very friendly, very welcoming place.

Even though some of the voices that are the most hateful are the loudest.

My story is about realizing at age 38 that I'm gender fluid.

That's right.

Everyone else is Marie Kondo in the closet and I'm totally fine.

A lot of people have difficulty, I think, empathizing with trans people and with the things they struggle with because they don't think they know any trans people.

So for me, coming out was saying to the hundreds of people in my life, surprised, you already know and love a trans person.

People don't realize that Kentucky is as diverse as it is.

There are many different stories out there and they're vibrant and they're entertaining or they're important.

And we got to preserve those and share those stories, too, because representation is important.

I hope that the people in the audience who walk away from the show have had a fun time, that their heart has been opened and their mind expanded to recognize that some of these diverse stories that are being told are people in your own family.

They're your neighbors, they're your students teacher.

They're the person at church or the son of your best friend that you grew up with in high school.

I really hope that someone hears this.

That is maybe a young, young, gay growing up hears this and realizes that there is hope and there is again community here in Kentucky.

Diversity is what makes our country so vibrant, so beautiful.

And without that diversity, we lose.

We lose ourselves.

We lose the American dream.

The American dream should be accessible to all.

So when my students in the morning are standing to say the pledge and they say with liberty and justice for all, I want them to know that that really does mean for everyone.

These stories are, in a way, everyone's stories.

Everyone has at some point felt excluded or left out or ignored or lonely.

In my opinion, when you hear someone's story from their own mouth and their own words, it is very, very hard to hate them.

It is very, very hard to do.

Dancing and burning, literally.

We are all human beings.

We all have our struggles in a world where technology or leadership seems to becoming overbearing.

We're going to need each other and we're stronger together than we are apart.

Skin one.

I'm pretty excited.

Kentucky Unmasked is being made into a documentary as well, using a mix of the live taping footage and individual interviews with the performers.