queer

A little over a week ago I got off the phone with my somewhat-long-distance partner after we decided to "make it official." At one point in time you'd give a partner your letterman jacket or your class ring. Not being sporty enough or blingy enough in high school to have either, and not being from the right era for that to effectively communicate a romantic relationship, I knew I'd have to settle for the 21st-century option.

I texted him about an hour later: "You know this is going on facebook, right?"

"I was about to say I expected you to do it while we were still on the phone."

At least he knew he was dating a social media addict.

Although I've been out to my friends and to any acquaintances I happened to mention it to for a couple of years, many people who I hadn't spoken to in a while, or with whom I had networked with professionally, and certainly the majority of the people I grew up around didn't know I was queer (suspicions aside).

My only direct mention of queerness on facebook prior to this point (that I can remember) was in response to the Pulse massacre in Orlando. I was living at my parents' house at the time in short period between graduation and moving into my next apartment. The morning after the shooting, I was sitting in my parents' small rural church and my dad got up to prayers and announcements.

"And finally, please keep the families of the victims of the shooting in Orlando last night in your prayers."

I hadn't heard about this yet so I took out my phone. Googled "Orlando." Saw the pictures, images, headlines, tweets.

23 dead. Gay club. SWAT team. Dancing. Gunshots. Terrorist. Not a terrorist. LGBT community. Latinx. Thoughts and prayers. Bodies being carried out. Update: 50 dead. Families. Tears. Blood. Can't donate. Please donate. Fuck your thoughts and prayers. Queer.

This moment was strange but not new: sitting in a white evangelical church--a familiar, well-intentioned environment I had been accustomed to growing up--while learning about another world I knew I was also a part of through the electric glow of a screen. I held back tears as we sang a song I had never heard before:

Bind us together, Lord
Bind us together, Lord
Bind us together with love 

There wasn't anything I wanted more than to be bound up as one with the beautiful people softly singing around me, but I knew that this wasn't possible as things were. I knew I couldn't be united with anyone from whom I actively hid my membership in this other world where the price of love was blood. And even then, if they knew, would they have loved on and healed these queer wounds, or would they have left me on the side of the road?

At some point in the last week I was accused by a family member of slowly driving a wedge between myself and my family. And true, in high school and college I became more and more withdrawn, struggling to converse or share anything of importance with my family. What I wish they knew was that this was never intentional, that I fought against it, but any conversation too real or disclosure to deep may have contained enough truth to reveal that I was something I had been taught to fear. This may have placed a barrier between myself and my family, but it was a result of the barriers I had carefully placed within myself. Jagged pieces of whatever I could find to make sure that no one, even myself, knew that I was queer. I couldn't just block of dating men, as if that one desire could have been put in a separate box and forgotten about in a corner. With straight people we take it for granted that the desire for romantic love and intimacy infuses itself into every part of life beginning in puberty. For queer folks, this desire is boiled down to sex.

As I've come out to more and more people over the years, I've found myself doing things like reading and writing more, things I once loved but had stopped almost completely, and I never understood why. Leave it to American Horror Story to tell me something about myself. Liz Taylor, the show's first transgender character, was asked why she read after she publicly transitioned and not before.

"I don't think you can shut down one part of yourself without shutting down everything else."

My queer wounds didn't draw blood, but they were (and are) definitely real.

This is why I am using the word queer. This word emerged out of a few different languages hundreds of years ago, with roots as benign as "off-center" and as stigmatized as "grotesque." It was only applied to LGBT communities relatively recently as a term of abuse, but was then reclaimed in the 80's and 90's because really, it fits. We are grotesque to the world. We are off center from the systems that regulate gender and sexuality at the expense of free souls. The symbol claimed during this era of queer activism was a pink triangle, the symbol placed on people identified as homosexuals by Nazis during the Holocaust. Queer claims this history of endured violence.

If you want to know very simply, I identify as gay (with a side of genderqueer, which I'm still figuring out). I usually use this gay my everyday life, because I don't have time to rattle off a blog post every time someone asks me to explain my word choice further. But I prefer queer. Gay is a sexual orientation. Queer is a political orientation.

An identification of queer, as I define it, says more about the world than it does about me. The fact that I am off center from these systems shows there's a problem with the systems. The fact that people find me grotesque shows there's a problem with the world that taught them.

The fact the world has and does abuse the beautiful souls that claim this word shows that it's better to be out of line from it, better to be detestable to it, because it has to be pretty fucked up to come after heavenly bodies like us.

Queer is about deconstructing this world to make way for new ones that still have yet to be imagined. It is imagining, rebuilding, protecting and cultivating the seeds within each of us and seeing what grows. As put by Rinaldo Walcott, it is "the unthought of what might be thinkable." It is a constant cycle of laying down what is old and decaying and resurrecting what is new, taking barriers and pain and blood and turning them into something that dazzles.

And that's what I knew had to happen when I saw that flurry of headlines following the Pulse massacre. I knew, somehow soon, I needed to take down any walls between my queerness and the world. Because the world needs it. It needs to see love--both love of self and of others--take forms it isn't expected to. I don't know what my seed of love can do, but who am I to stop it from growing?