Note: The term I use as a self-descriptor (queer) in this post is still often used as a hateful slur in some communities. I'm sorry if it is a reminder of painful times for you. However, I use it because I was exposed to many slurs, and queer not being one of them, was first exposed to it in a positive, reclaimed light. So here I will continue to use it in a positive and affirming way, because I feel that although the struggle continues, reclaiming slurs is both a rite of equality and a good way to remove power from those who would be hateful.
So I've mentioned queerness before, but I'm going to elaborate on what I mean by that in two parts.
The part I'm going to talk about this week is attraction, romance, and sexuality.
As you can probably tell from the title, I don't quite fit into the cisheteronormative schema, nor do I want to. But let's start at the beginning. Having been raised in a fundamentalist religious family, I always was bombarded with the notion that sex was wrong, lust for women was wrong, etc. The only acceptable outlet was within the bonds of marriage, and anything else, even just responding to a body's natural urges, was the utmost of sin.
For some reason, modern Christianity is hyper-obsessive about sexuality being sinful. Men are considered to be inherently lustful (sinful) and women who don't protect their virtue are just the same (sinful). This is a twisted view of biology, but there you go.
So growing up in this environment, I was pretty strongly affected. It was continuously engrained that attraction to women was lustful and thus sinful. So around puberty, and exploring of romantic feelings, heterosexual attractions were completely forbidden.
Now, I'm not saying my sexuality is due to this. Later I'll explain what I mean. But it did affect how I developed into what I feel today.
In part due to curiosity, in part due to subtle attraction, and in part due to wanting to further understand myself and the body I was in, I became increasingly interested in all aspects of male sexuality. And the more I learned, the more I was able to make sense of the attractions I was feeling.
But in religious fundamentalism, same-sex attraction is the ultimate taboo, to the point that many people even avoid acknowledging that it exists. Or if they do, it's considered a willful sinful choice, the devil's perversion of god's perfect beauty.
So although for a while, I satisfied my curiosity under the mindset that without lust for women, there was no sin, the external homophobia directed at others that I was exposed to started to be internalized inside myself.as deep feelings of guilt and shame. I consistently prayed that god take away my "illness" and hid it from everyone. And I continued to pass as non-queer. But this just exposed me to more vitriolic attitudes about LGBT people in general, because no one felt the need to self-censor.
It would be shocking to more liberal religious groups just how regularly vocally hateful the conservative fundamentalist religious crowd can be. We were warned to steer clear of our gay neighbor, for fear that he would rape us as children. Yes, the "gays are pedos" myth is still alive and strong, even though numerous studies have shown otherwise, that the majority of child sexual abuse is committed by heterosexuals, and that pedophilia is a condition separate from any queer identity, but a mental disorder.
One result of this is that I find the F-slur (commonly applied to gay men, but also to lesbians and anyone else seen as nonconforming) to be offensive when used flippantly. I'm not talking about in a reclaimed sense; for example the show Queer as Folk used it pretty often as a way of desensitizing it, and I laud that. No, I'm denouncing the trend of high-school and college age kids saying things like "that's so gay/queer" or "don't be such a f*g" if one of their friends is seen as behaving too far outside the cishetero norm. That's really offensive, and I don't care if they're just kids, they need to stop.
But anyway, back to my story. So from about the age of 13 until the age of 20, so 7 years, I kept this part of me hidden out of misplaced guilt and shame. Due to reaction formation (psychological thing, look it up, it explains like 90% of everything ever), I bought fully into the conservative mindset. Until community college.
Being exposed to typical people (i.e. not conservative religious fundamentalists) who were accepting of others, or at least not caring about others' sexuality, slowly my walls began to break down. I started reading more online resources about self-understanding and acceptance, and right around this time the "It Gets Better" Project was launched.
Here's where I write a brief aside about that. Although it was inspiring to see so many people who had come to terms with themselves and led fulfilling lives, it was bittersweet, because to the people they are really trying to reach, those trapped in situations where things look bad (like, say, in an unaccepting religious family), it's almost like being teased. To have someone say "yes, my family is totally fine with me" when you know that yours wouldn't be tends to inspire some despair. Which is why the trend of "so and so comes out and their parents are totally cool, isn't that cool" videos going viral is still troubling to me. Because to kids whose families would react poorly, it's just another emotional blow. And actually, in my experience, the most inspiring thing was actually depictions and stories of people who had succeeded despite the lack of acceptance.
Suffice it to say, around the same time I came out as an atheist, I (erringly, I'll explain why) came out as gay. I still use the circumstances as a bit of bittersweet humor: "Pain is when your mother tells you she wishes you'd never been born. Humor is when you come out, and she's already played that card on atheism".
Fast forward about a year, while at university. During the interim, I had moved out of my parents house and rented a room in a very queer-friendly house with a group of amazing 20-somethings. A story for another day.
But anyway, I have a tendency to have long periods of confusion and soul-searching, followed by partial breakthroughs. I wish they'd just come all at once, but whatever. So the one I'm going to talk about now is how I realized I wasn't gay.
No, that doesn't mean the attractions went away, it isn't in any sense an endorsement of the horrible idea of conversion therapy. No, it was more like an uncovering of unconsidered feelings. You see, due to the "lust for women is sin" mantra of fundamentalism from so long ago, I had unconsciously blocked out all attractions to women.
And the breakthrough was realizing this. That I was something more like bisexual/pansexual. Now it doesn't mean that I'm attracted to everyone ever. In fact, it seems that I'm attracted to a lower percent of people than most, but I've found that I can be attracted to anyone, regardless of their sex or gender. This is in the sense of "anyone can cook" like in that one pixar film. It doesn't mean everyone can, but there's a chance that anyone can.
I'm still attracted to more men, but it doesn't mean that I don't find women attractive, or that I disregard possible relationships with them. Because people are all people. Everyone has an aesthetic that they're attracted to, everyone has personality styles they're attracted to, etc. And I feel no need to limit mine when I've already realized that my attractions (and relationships) can and do transcend the inaccurate binary model.
So this is why I consider myself queer. Get over it.
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