November 28, 2025 | Michail Takach

Dan Terrio: walking a tightrope between two worlds

After navigating a lifelong divide between his Native and white worlds, Dan embraced his Two Spirit heritage as a sacred ancestral gift.

Dan Terrio

"Resiliency is in my DNA. I will always persevere. My people have been through far, far worse."

On a Friday afternoon in eighth grade, Dan sat in the back seat of his family’s van, heading toward Shawano, Wisconsin for the weekly grocery run. There was nothing unusual about that day; in fact, they’d taken this same trip many, many times. They always took a country road near Morgan Siding, a place known for railroad history, although in all their years of driving that route, they had never once seen a train.

As they approached the railroad crossing, there were no lights, no gates, and no warning bells. There was nothing to indicate there was danger ahead. Dan doesn’t even remember crossing the tracks.

But he does remember the darkness.

Dan Terrio

Dan and his family

Dan Terrio

Dan Terrio

"I blacked out," Terrio recalls.

"I remember hearing screaming and the grinding of the train on the tracks. The next thing I remember is waking up and feeling the warmth of blood on my head.”

The train had caught the front of their vehicle, dragging it half a mile down the tracks, ejecting all three passengers (Dan, his mother, and his younger brother,) and bursting into flames.

In the chaotic aftermath, amidst the wreckage and the smoke, Terrio, suffering a severe head injury and a body broken in multiple places, found himself screaming for his mother. She had been thrown so violently that she hit the train before landing in a ditch.

In a strange twist, Dan’s father was an emergency medical technician. His equipment, stored in the back of the van, had been scattered across the crash site. When the emergency responders arrived, they saw the gear and assumed help was already on the scene, unaware that the victims were the family of one of their own.

Fortunately, all three survived. It was the first time in fifty years that everyone involved in a car-train collision in that area had lived to tell the tale. For Dan, a thirteen-year-old boy who had already begun to flirt with a destructive path of drug use and self-harm, the accident wasn't just a brush with death. It was a hard reset: the universe had seized him by the shoulders and shook him awake.

"We didn’t know if I was ever going to walk again,” Dan said.

His knee was so destroyed that it looked like someone had shot him at close range. As he spent the next six months healing, going to physical therapy, and relearning how to walk, something shifted inside him. He found himself filled with a voice he didn’t even know he had.

"I felt compelled to speak. I didn't know what I wanted to say. All I knew is that I had something to say."

Little did Dan know this violent intervention was just the prologue to a life defined by resilience. For most of his life, Dan has been walking between worlds, navigating the spaces between life and death, white and Native, masculine and feminine, silence and truth.

To understand the person who emerged from that wreckage, one must understand the soil he grew up on.

Born in Green Bay in 1984, Dan is the son of a German mother and a father who is an enrolled member of the Stockbridge-Munsee Community Band of Mohican Indians. His parents met at the King James disco in Shawano, which Dan jokingly credits for his own orientation.

“Disco is embedded in my DNA,” said Dan.

“It’s no accident that I’m gay.”

When Dan was four, the family moved to the reservation. The family needed a fresh start from their financial struggles, but for Dan, it was an introduction to the complexities of identity politics.

He was a pale-skinned boy with indigenous roots, living in a community where blood quantum (the federal government’s metric for “Native-ness”) was a constant, silent measure.

"I was the palest kid out of all of the reservation kids," Dan says.

"I didn't really fit in because I was too white. And because I grew up on a reservation, the white kids in the school thought I was too Native. Being bullied for not being enough can really take a toll on a child.”

Dan was also known as a "sensitive soul," a boy who preferred Wizard of Oz Barbie dolls to monster trucks, and in the masculine culture of rural Wisconsin, that made him a target. In addition to being bullied for not being Native or white enough, he was now being bullied for not being male enough.

Thanks to friends, family, and neighbors, Dan survived these aggressions to learn the true meaning of community. It was about the open door, the shared meal, the stories being told, and the common ancestral experiences of his people – good and bad.

"Resiliency is in my DNA," Dan asserts.

"I will always persevere. My people have been through far, far worse."

But resilience often comes at a cost. By ten years old, Dan was already looking for an escape from the bullying at school and a volatile situation at home. He started doing drugs to numb the feeling of being an outsider in his own life. He started cutting himself.

Then came the train.

Following the accident, Dan didn't just walk again: he ran. Taken under the wing of mentors like the late Dorothy Davids and Dr. Ruth Gudinas, pioneers in social justice, Dan channeled his trauma into advocacy.

At fourteen, he began training as a motivational speaker.

By sixteen, he was elected to the national board of UNITY (United National Indian Tribal Youth), traveling to Washington D.C., advocating for Native youth, and serving on national commissions.He became a "golden child" of sorts: a young leader articulating the pain and hope of his generation. But, underneath it all, the fracture in his sense of self was widening.

For nearly two decades, Dan Terrio lived a double life.

Publicly, he was the Youth Development Manager for the Green Bay Chamber of Commerce, a rising star overseeing leadership programs for seventeen area high schools. He was the man officiating weddings, writing grants, and shaking hands with politicians. He was a success story.

Privately, he was a ghost in his own city.

"I knew I was gay, but I couldn’t let Green Bay know I was gay," Dan explains.

"I was in a very public role in a very conservative city. Being outed could destroy my career, and I was terrified of the backlash. I knew I would have to leave Green Bay to be myself.”

If he wanted to have drinks, go on a date, or hang with gay friends, he would travel to Appleton or Milwaukee to avoid being seen. This wasn’t just panic or paranoia. Growing up, he watched gay kids come out only to be banished by social stigma.

During his college years at St. Norbert, Dan had a traumatic experience. Walking home intoxicated one night, he accidentally entered the wrong house. The residents, who were college hockey players, didn't ask him to leave nicely.

They brutally attacked him.

"Even though these guys knew me,they beat me up pretty badly," Dan said.

"I remember the pain, the blood, and the homophobic names they yelled at me, as I was running out of the house.”

Instead of punishing Dan’s assailants the college protected them. Dan was the one who got punished.

“I was not allowed to walk across the stage at my graduation,” he said.

The assault, and the injustice that followed, triggered old traumas for Dan. He buried his anxieties under work and food. He ballooned to nearly 300 pounds, pre-diabetic and in constant pain, carrying the weight of his secrets every day. He became a master of compartmentalization: acting as a charismatic leader by day, and a closeted, secretive gay man by night.

"When it was all over, I felt like I had to go on an apology tour," he said.

"Here I was telling people to be their authentic self at work, but I couldn't even be it myself."

The tension eventually became unsustainable. In 2019, on his birthday, Dan drove to the shores of Lake Michigan, a place he calls "the waters." He had gone there many times to celebrate milestones or mourn losses.

This time, he went with the intention of ending his life.

"It was a gloomy day," he remembers.

"It looked like it was going to rain all day. I’m sitting on the shores, about to take my life, when suddenly, the clouds parted above me. A beam of sunshine suddenly broke through the overcast sky."

"I watched the light conquer the darkness.”

For a man raised to believe that the universe speaks in signs, the message was deafening.

"I felt the universe was telling me, ‘This is not it,'" he said. "Like that car accident, I was given a second chance to live. This was my next chance to be my true self."

He made a pact with the universe on that beach: he would live, but he would no longer hide.

The transformation that followed was both physical and spiritual. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, locking the world down, Dan used the isolation to dismantle the armor he had built. He focused on his health, shedding over 90 pounds in a single year. But the weight loss was only a complement to the heavier lifting he had to do emotionally.

While still forming his coming out strategy, Dan attended a tribal Pow Wow with his father. They were discussing a local pastor who was openly gay, and Dan, testing the waters, asked his dad how the community was handling it.

"He goes, 'Well, there’s some that are supportive, some that are a little iffy,'" Dan recalls. "'But me personally, you are who you are, and we need to love and respect people for who they are.'"

It was the permission Dan hadn't realized he was waiting for. He now knew he could come out and be honest with himself, his family, and his community.

By September 2020, he was ready. He needed new headshots for his professional life, but he also needed a visual declaration of his new reality. He traveled back to the reservation with a photographer friend, returning to a specific pathway in the woods—a spot he had run to as a child to escape abuse, a spot where he had plotted his escape from the reservation.

"I was walking down this pathway... and my friend Kate realized what was going on," he says.

She snapped a photo of him walking, looking back over his shoulder. He was wearing a t-shirt that simply said: I’m Gay.

He went home, wrote a long Facebook post detailing his journey — the assault at St. Norbert, the depression, a lifetime of hiding who he was — and attached the photo. He hit send, closed his laptop, and waited to see what the world would bring.

"I sat for a while in total silence – and then my phone started buzzing nonstop," he said.

The response was an avalanche of love. But the most profound reaction came from a source closer to home.

After Dan came out, his father offered a cultural reframing of Dan’s entire existence that would reshape his understanding of himself.

Dan Terrio

Dan Terrio

Dan Terrio

Dan Terrio

"He said, 'Dan, you have always been Two-Spirit, and being Two-Spirit is a gift from the Creator. It is reserved for someone born with both masculine and feminine energies. Our tribal elders have always known this about you.’”

His father broke it down: Dan had been a warrior for youth in Washington D.C., fighting for their rights in the halls of power. This was traditionally a masculine role. Yet, he had also been a nurturer, a caregiver, a "father figure" to countless young people who had none. This was traditionally a feminine role.

"He told me, ‘You’ve always embodied the life of a Two-Spirit person, but you had to realize it and discover it for yourself.'"

The revelation was earth-shattering.

For years, Dan had viewed his sexuality as a defect, a deviation that made him "too white" or "too weird." And now, his otherness was revealed as a sacred gift. Dan held a high-status role within his culture, and he had been fulfilling all along without even knowing it.

“I couldn’t understand why the community was so thrilled with me coming out,” said Dan. "And now, I knew."

“And I also knew I didn’t have to walk in two worlds anymore, because I was whole.”

Today, Dan Terrio walks a path guided by self-acceptance, confidence, integrity, and strength, while living the values of his ancestral heritage.

While closeted, Dan was rejected for one job after another. After coming out, his career path opened for him. In 2021, he accepted a position as the first Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Manager for Milwaukee County. In March 2024, he was promoted to Director, making history as the first Native American director in the county's history and the highest-ranking Two-Spirit person in the state of Wisconsin.

The move to Milwaukee offered him the final piece of his liberation. He recalls the first time he walked into This Is It.

"I walked into the bar and realized nobody knew who I was," he says. "I didn't have to worry anymore because the truth was mine, not someone else’s, to own. I didn’t need to put up a front anymore. I didn’t have to pretend to be someone I was not. I could just be Dan.”

His work now is deeply informed by his journey. He speaks of "intersectionality" not as a buzzword, but as a lived reality. He challenges the "identity politics" of blood quantum that once made him feel small, advocating instead for a definition of belonging based on resilience and community. Today, he is proud to sit at legislative tables, leading discussions and decisions that Native Americans were once banished from.

"When I sit at those tables, I sit there for my ancestors that never had that opportunity," he says. "I speak for Stockbridge. I speak for my community."

He acknowledges the weight of being a "first" — the first Native director in Milwaukee County, the first openly gay official in Green Bay — but he is determined not to be the last. He views his role as a clearing of the brush, a way to flatten the path for the Two-Spirit youth, the "too white" Native kids, and the "too sensitive" boys who will follow him.

Looking back on the boy who was dragged by a train, the teenager who numbed himself with pills, and the man who almost ended it all on a Lake Michigan beach, Dan sees a single, continuous thread of survival.

He is no longer walking in two worlds, splitting himself to fit into boxes that were never designed to hold him. He has merged all those people he had to be – into the person he always was.