the possibility of existing outside
how being queer saved my life
TW: suicide mention, abuse
In 2017, on the anniversary of the Pulse massacre, I penned a poem containing the lines:
I heard of it first looking
into that garden
shrouded in brick, stared
hard at the bridge spanning
lilies and mud, thought, oh
to be a lily
in water, to be a gardenamong stone
I was five or six years old, passing the garden that sat at the center of my elementary school, and another kid had explained to me what “gay” meant. It was a fact I ate up like all other facts: with great hunger, filed away much like how Mac computers use Time Machine, a slice I could access again in the future. I often go back to that slice, reverting to the smells and sights and beliefs and hopes that I had in that exact moment, like they had unfolded not yesterday, but seconds ago.
I go back to that place because I frequently wonder how I escaped shame about my sexuality. I was surrounded by gender. Gender was a rule that could never be said aloud because it was supposed to be baked into your skin, and when I somehow missed the message — every day — I received the repercussions. If it wasn’t a harsh, shaming tirade, or a cutting remark, or an impossible standard to meet (clothes that were uncomfortable, limiting, prevented play, just weren’t me), it was physical violence. If it wasn’t at home, it was school, where being a sole brown body, on top of an inward-turning, awkward nerd, made me even more grotesque and strange, ugly ugly ugly. Just weeks into middle school, a whole set of bullies decided I was so grossly childlike, so unaware of the “adulthood” expected of sixth-graders, that they taunted me about my ugliness for weeks and weeks — which turned into years. It was the first time I was suicidal, but not the last.
I was surrounded by gender.
My autoimmune condition was sneaking up my whole childhood, and started to present as skin issues when I started high school. Shaving became excruciating — not the process itself, though. I could, and still can, feel every single hair regrowing, breaking skin as it erupts, like pinpricks except lasting for about five days straight at a time. Nothing helped — steroids, antibiotics, different razors — except simply not shaving. But it was high school (with the requisite gym class) and I had the big “ugly” target on my back all the time, and so I just put myself through the pain. Every few days, I was feeling the sharp pain of being surrounded by gender. The sharp pain of wearing things I didn’t want, shaping my identity around things that weren’t me, inventing crushes I didn’t have to please and assuage the white friends who didn’t care about me. When I came out to a friend while away from home, I had to physically hide from their terrorizing me for the whole summer, turning everything I said into a game of “how do you know if you’ve never tried…”
Engulfed by gender. Drowning in gender.
It took me fifteen years after that sixth grade bullying experience to realize that the middle school bullies had mapped “lesbian” onto me. This had continued into high school, much more out of my direct view, targeting my close friendships with other girls. And when I realized those many years later, I laughed.
Despite all the gender, that slice of awe, that hungered-for fact by the garden in my elementary school, remained tightly protected in my heart. A beloved high school history teacher (may she rest in peace) also read something gay in my close friendship with another bisexual girl (something we laugh about fondly to this day), and every time she would give me a knowing, supportive, warm smile, I snapped back to that feeling I had when I was little — that there was something precious in not being straight.
I recall in middle school thinking that lesbians must be the most powerful, beautiful, wonderful people in the world — they were like superheroes to me. Imagine getting to say “no” to the expectations around you. Isn’t that the definition of power? Getting to have your own standards of beauty, of rejecting the requirement that women need men, that girls have to have to have to have to
Adrienne Rich writes about the “lesbian continuum,” a radical reframing of friendships between women (which makes her transphobia all the more disappointing and baffling) that became like a religion for me in college as I tried to figure out who I actually wanted to be. After years of pretend, I was getting to choose my friends, and I formed deep, new, different connections with other queer people, largely women, who had C-PTSD and had had enough of being surrounded by gender.
Nothing about these friendships made me feel obligated to gender. I didn’t have to sit a certain way, to shave, to pretend. When my illness meant I had to cut my hair, they didn’t make me feel like I had to brush it in a way that read “feminine pixie cut” and not gay. A lot clicked for me as I listened to the way trans friends articulated what it’s like to be surrounded and terrorized by gender, how lesbians would point to how sexuality is a gendered expectation, how Q/TPOC in particular described having to embody the meeting point of sexuality, gender, class, and the state/borders. Gender is surveillance.
Around this time, I began to embrace “ugliness,” or at least a political framework of “ugliness” — rather than having to define “beauty,” to constantly qualify it against “Western beauty standards” (with a million asterisks about patriarchy outside of whiteness), I chose to just…opt out. Beauty, like all trappings of gender, relies on shifting goalposts that no one, particularly women and gender minorities, people of color, disabled people, trans people, poor people can ever meet.
So much of the “beauty” I had learned was about assimilation and respectability — deference. To have beauty articulated by a community that I choose and which chooses me, which has no expectations for how I should perform gender, which ascribes nothing to what I wear or how I talk, is entirely different. Any time that I feel grotesque or ugly or unlovable, I remember that we get to exist outside of all of that, that we get to be illegible, we get to find beauty in the rejected, we get to be superheroes, we get to have the power of existing outside.
I live proudly in a body of my own design. I defend my right to be complex
Leslie Feinberg, Trans Liberation: Beyond Pink or Blue
I was 20 years old and sobbing from having my legs forcibly shaved, knowing the pain that would terrorize me the days after, but inside I knew that the little kid by the garden was right. That for all the gender, I didn’t have to be.
I say that being queer has saved my life. I mean that having queerness protected deep in my heart, safe from the shame I was surrounded by, nurtured like a pearl away from the currents of gender and race and whatever else, allows me to live. I am lucky that it remained untouched and protected through chance and quirk, and think always of how to ensure that the next generation can feel that kind of freedom, no gender cop in the head, no chains around the heart, even as the world tries to eliminate them.
Knowing that the goalposts aren’t just made up, but that they’re bullshit, is a vital anchor in a world that is attempting genocide on LGBTQ+ people. Even in my interpersonal relationships, knowing the bullshit of the game has protected my heart — even in a relationship with a man, whatever I do brings shame to my abusers, because I got an education and live independently; I made peace with betraying gender a long time ago.
I’m still learning to live. The conditions that generate C-PTSD shatter the self, force the identity to grow like tree roots around stones and cement in ways that don’t exactly facilitate happiness or well-being, just panicked survival. I have been doing the diligent work of picking out the stones one by one; tearing up sidewalk and rewilding the earth. Whatever “me” emerges is by my own hand. It is a joy and a gift to be able to do this — but it’s also not OK. It saved my life, but I am having to learn how to live.
But a big part of my embrace of illegibility is making sure that everything is on my own terms. Right now, including regarding that pesky thing of “being out,” my terms are “whatever” — to anyone outside my community. I’m still protecting that pearl.
