June is Pride Month, and to celebrate the occasion, I got honest with myself and took a deep dive into my queer origin story. Paid subscribers, please scroll to the end for the video version. (Want to join the paid community but not able to invest? Just send me a message, I’ll comp you right up.)
I was an 80s baby in a sleepy Vermont town. If you were to point your time machine toward a destination of progressive queer coolness, I’d suggest you direct it to some point other than when I grew up.
My neighborhood was lower-middle-class, back when that meant that while your family could definitely afford a house, it wasn’t going to be the nicest one on the block. I felt safe, if stifled, in my suburban neighborhood. I was surrounded by people who told me what a well-behaved, beautiful little girl I was. My neighbors watched out for me as I rode my bike up and down the street. The mothers baked cookies and cut sewing patterns traced onto old newsprint. All the fathers I knew wore flannel. Their hands were patinaed with the grease of a thousand car engines. (When you know your mitts are just going to get dirty again tomorrow, what’s the point of scrubbing them all the way clean?) The one thing that might get those men scouring away with the Lava soap? A beautiful woman.
My gal pals and I were raised to be good girls who would one day be good wives. This does not mean we were raised to be ourselves. From our mothers, we learned that a good girl has a vanishingly quiet demeanor, feelings incapable of offense, and hands both manicured and ready to serve. (“Very mindful, very demure” has existed for a long time.) A good girl always has the energy to supervise others and herself for offenses against the protected idea that a woman cannot survive without a marriage to a man and a crop of children to care for. In my education as a good girl, I heard many versions of the same dogma: men are men, women are women, and each gender has its purpose as defined by the Catholic Church.
There were no openly queer people around me when I was young. I could tell by the way people used gay as a catchall for anything undesirable that gay was something I wasn’t supposed to be. The boys at school seemed intent on calling gay out in a way that I didn’t hear from the girls, who were more focused on staying thin and beautiful than on policing anyone’s sexuality. Just offscreen, the nonbinary kids were doing our 1990s best to pick a lane and make it work. Gay seemed like an arbitrary, moving target, the way most hatred does.
Pants too short? Gay!
Mom dropped you off at school? Gay!
Chose the wrong favorite color? Gay!
Said hi to a teacher? Gay!
Got a haircut? Gay!
Took a shower? What are you, gay?!
Having a girl-body myself, I wasn’t personally subject to this kind of criticism in the way that the boys around me were. Instead, it became a constant murmur in the background of my life, the way traffic evolves into white noise after years of city living. I used to let the school bus rock me as waves of hatred washed over the seats. I kept my head down, and let others seek their own safety among the waves. Kids are hardwired to survive, and I promised myself that I would never be stupid enough to be gay and get myself hurt. I wanted to be safe. I wanted to live.
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