feel the impor-
tance of them, then of course, converting
someone would be very gratifying and
rewarding,” he says. “I didn’t feel that. I was
doing it to do my mission.”
Among the many rules for missionary
behavior is a strict ban against traveling
outside of the geographic boundaries of
one’s assigned area. It is perhaps telling that,
although he says he was never rebellious,
Williams broke that rule in his own way.
“I went to the Getty,” he says, then paus-
es. “A few times.”
In hindsight, he sees that period as the
origin of his discontent with the church. But
it wasn’t until after the launch of Kinfolk that
he and Searle decided to break with it. King
remembers the moment she realized that
Williams was no longer upholding some of
the church’s key practices. “Nathan and I
were alone in the oce working late, under a
deadline. He silently slid a glass of wine onto
my desk. And then without saying a word,
walked back to his oce with his own glass
in his hand, turned, and smiled at me.”
Doug and Paige Bischo remained active
in the church, and although they were sad-
dened thattheir friends’ decision meant they
would no longer share a religious life (“There
were tears,” Williams recalls), it didn’t under-
mine their friendship. “The four of them
were a pack,” recalls King. “They were so
close and intertwined. Friendship, roman-
tic love, familial love—it was all wrapped
together. They were their own community.”
AND YET. ALTHOUGH he couldn’t fully
articulate why, by around 2014 Williams
felt like he was at a breaking point. Kinfolk
was doing better than ever; its print run had
soared to 75 , 000 for the U.S. edition alone.
But its creative director felt suffocated.
“There was so much energy going into
something that wasn’t what I wanted it to
be,” he says. “I was absolutely convinced I
needed to be somewhere else.”
He meant it literally. The founders
agreed that Kinfolk’s headquarters should
move somewhere more cosmopolitan than
Portland. The team examined the obvious
options—Paris, London, New York—but
Williams had his heart set farther aield.
“Copenhagen is Nathan’s soul city,” Searle
says. “He felt so connected to everything
about it. It was one of the rst places that
felt like home to him.”
From a business perspective, the Danish
capital made a certain amount of sense. Kin-
folk’s pared-down aesthetic owes a clear debt
to Scandinavian style, and the magazine and
agency already worked with a number of
photographers and designers in the region.
But there were serious obstacles as well. Nor-
dic taxes and salaries would make producing
the magazine far more expensive than it had
been in Portland. And they would all be far
from home, from the friends and family who
constituted their support network.
Searle had doubts about the wisdom of
the move but quieted them by chalking it
up “to one last adventure before we settled
down and had kids.” The Bischos had two
small children by then. As the two partners
in charge of the operation’s bottom line,
they had a far more intimate knowledge of
the inancial pressures than Williams did
and were even more concerned.
“The other partners knew either I was
going to make a change,” Williams says, “or I
was out. And for them, that would mean los-
ing their company. It was not a great, ‘cheers’
moment. They agreed, but they also made it
clear that if it backred, it was my fault.”
After eight months of uncertainty (and
one very Kinfolk-esque going-away party
complete with craysh boil), the team was
nally installed in Copenhagen in the sum-
mer of 2015. Williams felt, he says, “like I
had relled the tank.”HOW DO YOU know who you really are? It’s
impossible to say whether the magazine
changed Williams, or Williams changed the
magazine. Even before the move, both had
gradually grown more worldly while retain-
ing a tone of guileless sincerity. (Issue 17 ,
the last published from Portland, reassured
readers that it was okay to carve personal
space from their relatives.) But the identity
that Williams had constructed for himself
would not survive the transition, or the
trauma to come.
At the time of the move, Searle was four
months pregnant. After a routine ultra-
sound, Searle and Williams were referred
to a cardiologist who made an o¡and com-
ment about the baby’s heart defect. “I was
pretty far along at that point, so the doctor
just assumed that we knew about it already.”
But that was the rst time they learned the
baby suered from a syndrome that would
require him to undergo multiple surgeries
before he turned two; if their child, whom
they would name Leo, survived, he would
likely not reach his 20 s. Most parents who
learn their baby has this condition decide
to terminate the pregnancy, the doctor
informed them. Searle and Williams could
choose to do the same, but because thepregnancy was so advanced, they would
need to decide within 48 hours.
The couple had already concluded that
the faith in which they grew up could no
longer hold them. But they had never truly
articulated—to themselves most of all—
which beliefs they took with them. “It was
as if a magnifying glass shifted onto my
ethics,” Williams says of the intense hours
during which they shut themselves away to
talk out the decision in private. “Our oce
in Portland was neighbors with Planned
Parenthood. I would drive past, and there
would be picketers and protesters, but I
never took time to chisel out that corner
of my ethics. And within 48 hours I had to
decide—we had to decide—how we actually
thought about it.”
Searle and Williams had learned of Leo’s
illness on a Monday; that Friday, Katie was
induced and the pregnancy terminated.
After, the distance that had emerged in
their relationship worsened. As the preg-
nancy progressed, Searle had cut back on
her work; now she withdrew entirely. Wil-
liams, meanwhile, threw himself ever more
deeply into Kinfolk. He also began drinking
more frequently. Searle, in therapy for her
bereavement, didn’t have enough experience
with alcohol herself to know how much was a
problem. “It was only when I explained what
was happening that my therapist said, ‘Oh,
that’s an issue,’ ” she says.
Until the move, Williams and Searle had
been, in his words, joined at the hip. “I think
from our early days in school together we
were on a shared crusade to just be who
we were and pursue what felt right to us,
regardless of how our school told us to
behave, regardless of the expectations of our
families.” But now, she couldn’t seem to
reach him. At rst she attributed the distance
to his style of grieving, but at some point that
ceased to feel convincing. One night, she
insisted they talk about the thing that was
eating at him, and it came out. He was gay.
“I hadn’t been planning to tell her then,
and it wasn’t the glorious, self-enabling
moment,” he says. “It was more ‘This can’t
go on, for our relationship or for me.’ It was
harboring a lie to myself and to her.”
It hadn’t always felt like a lie. “I was
attracted to Katie, I was in love with Katie,
I absolutely saw our future together,” Wil-
liams says. “That doesn’t mean I wasn’t
also physically attracted to men, and that of
course continued throughout our marriage.”
For the longest time, he believed the attrac-
tion was only sexual and pushed it down.
“It didn’t feel like shame. It was more like
an absolute secret.”
But Leo’s death had an annealing eect
on him, making the internal con§icts harder
to tolerate. “Physical need or sexual desire is
easier to suppress. But when it goes beyond
that to feel like self-identity, that’s harder.Kinfolk
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