some queer thoughts
on this last day of pride month: simply let people vibe, please, i beg of you
When men dress particularly well or demonstrate above-average levels of general enthusiasm, they are often assumed to be gay. Being gay means you’re sexually attracted to men. Why would your fashion sense correlate to that? Why do the men I know who are more emotive and enthused have way more people asking if they’re gay? This says more about the narrow, suffocating, deadly boundaries of conventional masculinity than anything. But it’s worth contemplating here too, in terms of how we collectively define queer identities.
Everybody’s queer journey is of course their own, but a common stop seems to be reckoning with the performances of certain identities that have seized cultural dominance. If I ask you right now to imagine a gay person, a nonbinary person, a trans woman, etc. are there certain other demographic traits that seem to follow too closely?
I understand that some of this is just the phenomenon of people finding and forming community and identity and that some stereotypes are silly and not to be taken seriously (although nearly every bi person I know does love a pair of cuffed jeans…). Increased visibility and understanding and acceptance of entire identity groups will allow for the possibilities to feel more expansive.
But the dangerous part is when we tie all these different facets of identity together, and only allow ourselves the space in our imaginations for a certain type of person to be a certain type of queer. We want to rapidly and definitively categorize people. The academic definition of queer (and the right one, in my opinion) refers to anything that breaks from the heteronormative. This is very broad for a good reason. Rather than finding new subcategories and micro-identities to police and falling into heteronormative dynamics of a different flavor, ideally queering a relationship or queering your own identity involves envisioning something new and free. Recreating restrictions on identities and policing the boundaries of gender, but with more genders this time, does not help us all that much. I think of when you have to click a dropdown menu for gender and they have three categories: male, female, nonbinary. The point is missed.
I understand why in the fight for marriage equality, many adopted the argument of being “born this way” as a way to argue against discrimination. Being gay is not a frivolous lifestyle choice. But the problem with the hard line here is that now we’re coming around to accepting gender and sexuality as fluid; our self-understanding shifts depending on context, growth, and trying different things. People love to use the left-handedness argument in response to conservatives crowing about the increase in young people identifying as LGBTQ+. By this, I mean pointing out the fact that reports of left-handedness increased when we stopped trying to force everyone to be right-handed. There are, as far as I know, a set number of left-handed and right-handed people and once we stopped caring about it then everyone revealed their true identity. To apply this logic to queerness, however, attempts to pin down what is not meant to be pinned down. The words, pronouns, and identities that one finds favor with will change throughout the course of one’s life, precisely because gender is a social construct that is constantly being negotiated in society and in ourselves.
I have a complicated history with the concept of vibes (largely because I struggle to find, listen to, and trust my own intuitions), but one of the things I’ve come around to most strongly is the concept of gender as vibe, as articulated in this essay from Real Life Mag:
“A vibe is neither something intrinsic, nor something that can be externally acquired or dispensed. It’s all-encompassing, if ephemeral, describing both an atmosphere and oneself in relation to that atmosphere — a self and its context, each mutually informing the other. This happens to be a decent working definition of gender itself. Vibes are a potentially more accurate way of describing how gender feels and operates — as something simultaneously transient and ineffable, absolute and all-consuming.”
True freedom and self-determination allows for not just one choice one time that you have to commit to and make internally consistent with everything you do. True freedom and self-determination in the realm of gender and sexuality allows you to accept yourself as a constantly dynamic, complex person interacting with the people around you.
I am not here to suggest that anyone shed the labels and identities they’ve found comfort in; the experience of finding an articulation of yourself and your experiences where you can rest is why writing and reading and all forms of art are truly so wonderful. Subcommunities are important, and different subgroups within the LGBTQ+ community have varied struggles and challenges. The experience of queerness is also, of course, mediated by factors like race, socioeconomic status, disability, body type, etc. and people are treated very differently as a result. My hope is that we allow the lines to be blurry, allow the boundaries to be porous, allow gender to be a vibe and an exploration and ultimately a joy rather than an obligation or a badge or a comparison with others.
Some Content I Recently Consumed (and Would Love to Discuss!)
“The Fight for Abortion Rights Must Break the Law to Win” by Melissa Gira Grant
“Fashion Has Abandoned Human Taste” by Amanda Mull
“On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog” by Parker Malloy
Conversations With Friends adaptation on Hulu
Vox Conversations: The racist origins of fatphobia podcast episode