Jake Shears

Shears was born in Mesa, Arizona, the son of an entrepreneur father and a Baptist mother. He grew up on San Juan Island, Washington, where he attended school at Friday Harbor High School and was bullied. At the age of 18, he moved into a dorm at the Northwest School in Seattle, Washington, to finish high school. Shears later attended Occidental College in Los Angeles, California. At the age of 19, he traveled to Lexington, Kentucky, to visit a classmate, who introduced him to Scott Hoffman.[citation needed] Shears and Hoffman hit it off immediately and moved to New York a year later.\n', '

Shears attended New York\'s Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts,[citation needed] where he studied fiction writing and was a classmate of Travis Jeppesen.[citation needed] He also wrote pieces for the gay magazine HX.[citation needed] In 2000, he worked as a music reviewer for Paper magazine.\n', '

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