Travis Blue’s earliest memories are of car crashes. His family lived near a curved bridge in Federal Way, Washington, and it seemed to him that every other weekend, kids from the neighborhood would hear a collision and run down to see the dead bodies of drivers who lost control of their vehicles. One of these accidents sticks in Blue’s mind more than the others, but it wasn’t because of the wreckage. He was six or seven years old and returning home from a crash when an older boy he knew chased him into the surrounding woods. It was after sunset and Blue soon became lost.

“I couldn’t get back home because he was just chasing me deeper and deeper into the woods after this car wreck,” he says. “I was just scared to death.”

It was particularly terrifying because this was the same boy who terrorized him on a regular basis. Blue’s mother was a flight attendant and would send him to the boy’s house to be babysat when she went away for work. It all started when he was five years old. Blue recalls the neighbor locking him in the basement, dark except for strobe lights, and blasting him with heavy metal music; the boy would occasionally don a horror mask and chase him around. Other times the neighbor and his friends would break into Blue’s house with nylon stockings over their heads and pretend to kidnap him. Once, they led him into the woods in the dead of night, tied him to a tree and left him there until morning. The abuse ended when Blue was 10, after his tormentor died in his sleep.

It was around this time that a camera crew in nearby Snoqualmie and North Bend started shooting the pilot episode of what would eventually come to be known as Twin Peaks. Blue was in town one day with his father and remembers seeing a man with a camera perched opposite the Snoqualmie Falls and asking what he was doing—it turns out he was filming the opening credits. From that day on Blue became something of a regular on the set, hanging out while they filmed. He even took the day off school to watch them shoot the infamous scene where a woman’s body is found washed up on the rocky banks of Puget Sound.

The boy and his friends weren’t the only ones tormenting Blue. Though he is quick to note that his father was warm and loving, other men who had married into the family mercilessly teased and bullied him throughout his childhood. Between them and the neighborhood boys who made him afraid to leave his house, he began to withdraw. His mother noticed something was wrong and sent 10-year-old Blue to a psychiatrist. It was over an ostensibly trust-building game of Ping Pong that the psychiatrist first molested him.

“That was really when I went inward more,” Blue says. “It definitely felt like, ‘Oh, here’s a safe space. No, just kidding! You can’t have a safe space.’ I was like, ‘Okay, got it, there are no safe spaces.'”

Blue's father, who would often accompany his son, took this photo on the set of the pilot episode.

When the show aired a year later, Blue became obsessed. “It was everything, I was hooked,” he says. “I lived and breathed and talked Twin Peaks for the next three years. I mean literally, it’s all I talked about. I drove my parents crazy.”

He was captivated by the “magic happening on the screen.” Not only was he present during much of the production, the finished product captured a world he knew: A small town that butted up against sloping mountains thick with spruces and firs, the trees meeting the hazy gray sky which sometimes turned a deep and delicate purple. And then there were the characters.

Though Blue was intrigued by several of the show’s now-iconic figures—Audrey Horne, Donna Hayward, the Log Lady—there was one who he felt a special connection to: Laura Palmer, the character whose murder underpins the series.

“I thought it was interesting that there was somebody that an entire town cared so much about. I was not a popular child in school. I was very, very interested in becoming popular,” he says of her allure. “I loved how she was confident but entirely flawed. And I felt, of course, kind of flawed and unusual and alienated.”

Blue explains that he felt so isolated he was subconsciously looking for someone to lose himself in, that it could have been any character on any TV show that rolled into town (“It could have been Inside Amy Schumer and I would have been making jokes about how fuckable I am or not”). However, there were parallels that extended beyond simple chance. Viewers learned in the show and the prequel film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me that Palmer had been subjected to a long history of abuse at the hands of a mysterious figured named BOB, as well as other characters. Blue, who would tape the episodes on VHS and watch them over and over, says he could relate to “her abuse and the darkness she endured.”

Blue reenacting the scene, at the same spot, where Laura Palmer's body was found, wrapped in plastic.

Twin Peaks fans were treated to more of this darkness with the release of The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer, a spin-off book by Jennifer Lynch, the daughter of series co-creator David Lynch. The diary chronicles Palmer’s teenage years and it gave fans insight to an adolescent life marred by secrets. Readers learn of her coke problem, her sexual awakening and her penchant for risk-taking.

Blue’s life was also starting to take a dark and potentially dangerous turn at the same time. He was in the eighth grade when he started doing drugs. He describes himself as “troubled,” adding that he started acting out, sold his father’s guns to a kid at school, and wound up living on the street. In some ways, his ongoing infatuation with Twin Peaks, and his shadowing of Laura Palmer’s life, was both the root of and perceived solution to his problems.

“They were kind of my only friends. I wanted to be close to them. I wanted to be feeling their struggles. I wanted to go through the screen and into Twin Peaks. People were curious and really wanted to help this girl after the fact,” he says, adding that he was also drawn to Palmer’s fatalistic nature. “Her persona was very intoxicating. It was kind of romantic to emulate this terminal character, when I myself felt very terminal. I was convinced I was gonna be dead by 20.”

Even when he wasn’t consciously trying to mimic Palmer, she found her way back to him. By 15, Blue was homeless and living in Seattle, where he fed himself and slept at a shelter downtown. Many of the kids who lived there were addicts and turned tricks to get by. Blue began soliciting customers at the nearby Timberline Spirits—the same bar used to shoot The Roadhouse’s interior scenes, where Palmer would pick up men for cash.

“Twin Peaks kept coming to me,” Blue says. “It was a gay bar, one of the few places you could be underage and get a drink or at least sit there and have something over your head. It felt nice to sit there, sip my Shirley Temple and have men just look at me. The pathway Laura Palmer took, I could identify.”

Blue also stripped in Portland. This self-portrait was taken when he lived at the historic Clyde Hotel.

But it wasn’t all teenage drug use and hustling, Twin Peaks provided Blue with a community that went beyond the screen. In 1992, Blue attended the first Twin Peaks fan festival near Seattle, where he met not only the actors, but also a ragtag group of people who he became close to over the years.

He flew back from Hawaii, where he was living with his father, when the second festival rolled around the following year. It was during this time that Blue came into his own, sexually, and began sleeping with other teenagers and older men. He eventually returned to the Pacific Northwest and over the next three years became a figurehead of the festival, and gave guided tours to new attendees. Scared of being caught after he stole $200 from the event organizers, Blue threw in the towel in 1996.

These years became the impetus for the upcoming documentary about Blue’s life and his connection to Twin Peaks. Director Adam Baran met him at a film festival in 2005, and the pair bonded over their love of Twin Peaks and queer cinema. They were both living in New York, where they became friends. They stayed in touch when Blue moved back to Portland to look after his sick father. In 2009, Baran was an editor at BUTT magazine, the influential gay quarterly, and was looking for interesting sex stories for an upcoming feature. He remembered that Blue had mentioned having sex at the Twin Peaks festivals, and reached out to see if he’d be interested in writing something. He was, and he did. When Baran got the copy he realized there might be more to Blue’s story.

“He had told me some cool stories about being on set but I didn’t know that he’d had these crazy experiences,” Baran says. “There were some crazy experiences, some dark experiences, some good experiences, some bad experiences, but I didn’t know the extent of it.”

Two years later Baran was at a writer’s residency in upstate New York, where he had just finished a script and had 10 days left before he had to return to the city. He wanted to do something productive with his time and thought about his friend. Blue had filled in the gaps over the years, recounting the drug use, the sex work and how he had essentially modeled his life on the experiences of a dead fictional character. Baran thought he might have a feature film on his hands but eventually set his mind on making a documentary. Blue was reluctant.

“I thought everyone would be bored by my story. He disagreed,” says Blue. “Now that I look at it, it’s strange, it’s sad, it’s lots of things… I look back at this stuff and think, wow, how did I not see how this would end up?”

Blue with Catherine Coulson, aka the Log Lady, at the Twin Peaks Festival in 1993.

Baran seems to think it is interesting enough, and so do the 1,082 people who backed the funding of the documentary on Kickstarter (it reached its goal on Wednesday). The documentary, called Northwest Passage, after the pilot episode, traces Blue’s development from the moment he finds the crew shooting the opening credits and follows him over the next 12 years as he goes from “obsessed to dangerously obsessed” with Twin Peaks and Laura Palmer.

“When you have someone who is tormenting you in the same way that BOB was tormenting Laura, I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to say you identify with that character,” Baran says, “And, of course, Laura Palmer was glamorous and beautiful and what gay boy doesn’t want to be glamorous and beautiful and have a rich sexual life, a secret sexual life, as a teenager?”

Northwest Passage will also show how Blue was eventually forced to form his own identity without drawing from Palmer or other characters; but neither Baran nor Blue will get too specific ahead of the release of the documentary, which is slated to coincide with next year’s highly anticipated third season of Twin Peaks—the timing of which Baran describes as a happy coincidence.

Blue is now a filmmaker and photographer and splits his time between Portland and L.A. He is currently working on his own web series called Cathedral Park, which looks at the lives of people living along the border of a haunted park that is loosely based on Portland’s park of the same name.

However, while Blue is no longer the scared boy he once was—it’s been 25 years since Twin Peaks first aired—Palmer hasn’t loosened her grip on him entirely.

“It’s like Donna [Palmer’s best friend] said in one episode, ‘You’re dead, but your problems are still hanging around. It’s like they didn’t bury you deep enough,'” he says. “Now with this movie it’s like I have to answer to Laura still.”