Some
people face a lot of hostility when they come out. They lose friends.
Their parents disown them. They get beaten or killed.
I
am not one of those people. All of my friends were super-cool; my
parents were a bit weird at first (well, they still are sometimes),
but they mostly got over it; I've been threatened, but never subject
to physical violence. I've had the tremendous good fortune to live in
queer-friendly communities.
I
am very, very lucky. The biggest obstacle in my coming-out process
was myself.
The
hard part of coming out to myself was not actually figuring out my
attractions. It was entirely clear to me quite early on that I did
not want to have sex with boys and that I did want to have sex with
girls. That, to be honest, was never in doubt.
That's
why one older queer person's advice to me when I admitted my
confusion about my sexuality – “Have sex with a guy and have sex
with a girl, and see which one you like more” – was so profoundly
unhelpful. Which one I would like more was definitely not the issue.
What
was the issue – what I mean when I refer to “coming out to
myself” – was deconstructing my internalized heterosexism.
By
“internalized heterosexism,” I mean the deeply ingrained idea
that straight is default and gay is Other. This idea pervades our
culture like air, and is similarly taken for granted. I feel like a
lot of straight people don't ever think about it.
Take
my parents. They're good upstanding bleeding-heart liberals; they'd
be horrified if anyone had ever suggested that they were homophobic.
“We have gay friends!” they would say. “We'd never dream of
saying there was anything wrong with being gay.” And of course they
wouldn't; but they brought me and my brothers up with the assumption
that we would be straight – that we would be like them. When we
were small, they would talk about “one day when you get married,”
“one day when you have kids.” My mother would give me unsolicited
advice about dating men, which I would remember and be grateful for
“one day.” And, sure, as we got older we were periodically told,
“If any of you are gay that is totally okay,” but there was an
almost dismissively hypothetically tone to it. If you were
gay, we would be totally fine
with that. But you're not, because being gay is something that
happens to other people.
I
honestly believed that. When I was a teenager, I would write shit in
my diary like, “I'm not gay – I'm just homosexual,” because I
couldn't be gay. Gay
was Other; straight was default; to myself I am the ultimately
default, and therefore I cannot be gay. The fact that I fit all the
apparent criteria for
being gay – 1. be gay; 2. oh wait that's it – was not sufficient
for me to overcome the internalized heterosexism that told me I
couldn't be gay. There
must be some additional criterion, some test you had to take, some
qualification you had to earn, some card
you had to have… something that granted you gayness the way a
power ring makes you a Green Lantern.
It
took me a few years, but eventually I realized that there is no
external criterion of gayness. There's no gay Guardians
of the Universe, bestowing the quality of being gay on those who
have proved themselves worthy. I had been unnecessarily
problematizing my gayness by positing a false consciousness whereby
the Otherness of “gay” required external validation before I
could self-identify as such; but there is no difference
between “I think I'm gay” and “I'm gay.” The
only thing telling me
there was a difference was my internalized heterosexism: the
mechanism whereby gay was Other, and therefore Not Me. When I finally
let myself participate in gayness – visiting websites for gay
people, watching TV
shows with gay
characters, simply writing down “I am a lesbian” – I was
able to dissolve that mechanism. Goodbye, internalized heterosexism.
Hello, self-actualization.
It
was tremendously freeing, letting all that deeply ingrained ugliness
go like so much dust in the wind. Now I just have to figure out how
to do the same thing with my internalized cissexism.
Really well thought out ! I can remember doing a lot of the same deconstructing myself, minus the liberal parents.
ReplyDeleteYou lost me at; "I had been unnecessarily problematizing my gayness by positing a false consciousness whereby the Otherness of “gay” required external validation before I could self-identify as such..." the rest I got, I think.
ReplyDeleteThat was basically just a pretentious way of rephrasing what I was trying to say with the Green Lantern / Guardians of the Universe illustration: the idea that I needed somebody else to tell me I was "gay enough" before I could call myself gay. Sorry for the obscure phrasing - I try to be clear in my writing, but I *am* a grad student, and sometimes that side of me takes over!
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