Moore was born in Central Islip on Long Island, New York. His father is the Christian artist Danny Hahlbohm, best known for his religious painting Footprints in the Sand, an interpretation of the poem by Mary Stevenson written in 1939. Moore’s mother Danise also wrote many poems that went with her husband’s paintings, the most famous being “Welcome Home”. As a child he attended Jimmy Swaggart’s church and also Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker’s, where his father often spoke about his gift from God. “It was hard to be around that as a young queer kid. I was very out. I don’t remember a time when I officially came out to my family, I was just never really in.” Nobody ever tried to ‘shake the devil out of him,’ but it must have been a difficult time growing up in an evangelical Christian family and within that fervent religious framework. Moore ran away from home at age sixteen and moved to New York where he eventually studied restorative painting at Cooper Union. But, essentially, he became one of the club kids. That whole scene fell apart when Michael Alig and Robert “Freeze” Riggs were convicted of killing fellow club kid Andre “Angel” Melendez over a drug debt. After this, Moore decided it was probably time to change his lifestyle.
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