Today we’d like to introduce you to Jorge Zambrano and Hector Castaneda.
Jorge and Hector, let’s start with your story. We’d love to hear how you got started and how the journey has been so far.
We both fell in love at a very young age, and luckily it was to each other. Being high-school sweethearts since 2009 made us experience many of life’s ups and downs together. Since then, we have learned to be a stronger unit, especially after surviving our teens and college years together. Currently, we are excelling in our careers, Hector as a project manager for Amicon Construction, and Jorge as a research associate for the University of Miami. While settling in our day jobs, a desire to own a business started clouding our heads. So we decided to start simply by selling minimalist style shirts online from our site called House of Trouble (HOT).
In an effort to promote our brand, we started hosting small events which became so successful that LGBTQ+ bars opening in Miami started reaching out to us to bring our events into their locations. This leads us to expand HOT to a social club where we provide a safe place for people to create meaningful connections. We are currently at this stage in our development of HOT and are excited to see what new events we will be creating in the near future. A sneak peeks for one of HOT’s upcoming events is a road trip to the Great Smoky Mountains, where we will be providing transportation, sleep accommodations, and food for a group of 20 people to explore the wilderness.
Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
We have luckily received great support from our friends and local queer community. However, as we try to expand, limitations from our day jobs have been an obstacle in our progress. We are stuck choosing between growing slowly and maintaining our careers or putting more time and effort into growing House of Trouble.
Funding for our events has also been a struggle, but we are determined to continue reaching out to community leaders and businesses that we feel represent our mission. Our goal is to find financial support or receive perks that enhance our events.
House of Trouble – what should we know? What do you guys do best? What sets you apart from the competition?
House of Trouble is a social club that hosts events in South Florida for people to meet and socialize in the physical world. We have hosted picnics at the park and beach, private house parties, watch parties for whatever show is trending on TV, and now we’re moving into group travels. We are mostly known within Miami’s queer community as the “HOT boys who throw amazing parties,” or at least that’s what we have heard from people who have yet to come to our events. We have opened our home to our peers, providing them a place where drag queens can take off their heels, makeup and wigs, and where gay boys who have never even thought of performing, feel free to play pretend and give the rest of us a fun lip-sync show.
Although hard to accept, Miami’s LGBTQ+ community is well divided into sub-groups, and the gay world can sometimes be cruel when categorizing its own members. At HOT, we don’t believe in any of those labels, and we only believe in meaningful, fun, and long-lasting connections, where “circuit queens” can freely interact with “queer kids”. We get such a joy from seeing new friendships and relationships form.
A part of our funding comes from merchandise sales, like t-shirts and stickers sold through our online store. The shirts are all screen printed by us in our studio apartment, where we have the liberty to create any designs we want. The designs we have offered, are mainly focused on representing a little bit of the inner jargon often seen in the queer culture, with quotes such as daddy, sucia, 0 feet away, looking, and la q no es puta no disfruta, among others. That last one surprisingly has been one of our top sellers, as it perfectly combines the expectations of promiscuity other people have on gays and humor.
What moment in your career do you look back most fondly on?
At one of our events, someone we are very proud of today, took us aside to pour her heart out. She told us how safe and welcomed she felt at our event, something to do with the energy flow of everyone present that made her feel part of a family. She explained that being a trans woman, there are very few places for her and others alike to socialize openly without some form of fear (unfortunately even at some of Miami’s gay bars). In that moment, we knew we were making a difference, and we had to continue creating more gatherings or events that would give people the opportunity to speak to one another. The more people we meet the less prejudice we’ll have for each other.
Contact Info:
- Website: houseoftrouble.org
- Instagram: @hjdoubletrouble
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