Read on Twitter
I decided to go ahead and try and make a twitter thread out of this anyway since I& #39;m really proud of what I wrote yesterday and I figure most ppl (myself included) are less inclined to click a link than to read a thread on-site, so here goes: https://twitter.com/sophygurl/status/1315407764278128641">https://twitter.com/sophygurl...
Yesterday was #NationalComingOutDay 
https://abs.twimg.com/hashflags... draggable="false" alt=""> and I know I make it a point to come out every year, but I have something new to talk about this year!
First, I want to acknowledge and validate that not everyone can or wants to come out, that coming out is a process not a one time event -
First, I want to acknowledge and validate that not everyone can or wants to come out, that coming out is a process not a one time event -
- and that I come out as often as possible to as many folks as possible because I can do so safely, and am emotionally comfortable doing so, and I think it’s important for those of us who can and want to to be public about our queerness.
I do this to help educate people, to help closeted and/or questioning people feel more comfort, to offer my solidarity to my fellow queers, and because I just generally enjoy talking about myself and my life!
Second, a quick word about my choice of the use of the word queer. Queer is not a dirty word. It’s been used as a slur, but then every word my community has used to describe ourselves has been turned into a slur.
Queer communities and activists worked long and hard to reclaim the word queer and I honor their hard work by using the word. It is also, as you’ll see if you keep reading -
- the best word for me to use because it’s inclusive and means many things and it’s difficult for me to sum all of my queerness up any other way.
On to the point of this https://abs.twimg.com/emoji/v2/... draggable="false" alt="🧵" title="Thread" aria-label="Emoji: Thread"> – which is to 1st lead you down a bit of memory lane of all of the different times I’ve come out. And I don’t mean, by that, each & every time I came out to someone – but rather the different identities or labels or what have you that I’ve come out as.
The first wasn’t even about me. I was a teenager, living in the late 80s/early 90s in a very conservative and conformist area. I knew my dad was gay, and I knew that some in my community knew that. But it wasn’t public knowledge, and so I didn’t tell anyone.
It wasn’t due to shame – I’ve never had an issue with my dad being gay (we’d had gay family friends around all my life, and I often had conversations with both parents about different kinds of people in the world in ways that were matter-of-fact and accepting).
But I was being bullied in school on a daily basis as it was, and I knew that if my bullies had that information – it would become one more club to beat me with, as it were.
So, slowly, over time, I chose one or two friends to confide in. But most of my friends didn’t know until I graduated from high school and went on to college and got some distance between myself and the bullies. That was the first layer.
When it comes to myself, I remember being that teenager, and thinking about how my dad wasn’t always out – even to himself – and asking myself if it could be possible that I was gay? And I’d always dismiss that, because I knew I was attracted to boys.
Now, I knew bisexuality existed, I just didn’t know to apply it to myself. But I got to college and met people who were out as bi, and maybe that’s why it finally clicked when, one day, I caught myself checking a woman out and had my light bulb moment!
For awhile, I still didn’t tell most people. It didn’t feel important, especially as I was entering my first romantic relationship and that relationship happened to be with a man. But I told him, and some of my college friends, and probably my mom.
When that relationship ended, and I was looking to start dating again, that’s when I started to tell more friends. Because I thought it was possible I might date women as well as men, and I wanted them to know.
It still wasn’t something I made a point of being public about, although I did have my rainbow triangle pin on my backpack and would share “the nod” with other queer folks on campus.
Anyway, so that was my first queer identity. The next came around the same time. As I was looking to date again in the wake of my first big relationship ending, I was thinking about how I knew a part of me would always love him -
- and how it felt weird to think about being in love with someone new, knowing that. Because our society puts so much into the idea that monogamous relationships should have all of our love and energy and attention and that didn’t feel right to me.
I couldn’t go from loving someone to suddenly not loving them and then just transfer all of my love onto a new person. That didn’t gel with how I felt.
So I started thinking about the possibility of (romantically) loving more than one person at the same time, and how that could work in terms of relationships.
And then one day I read about polyamory and that was my second light bulb moment. I read and read and read and joined online forums and bought books and it was like – yes, this feels right to me.
Again, I started talking to my close friends & mom abt this new thing & prepared them for the possibility that I might date more than 1 person. I explored different kinds of polyamory & discussed what made the most sense to me & started applying it to my life.
Later on, as I joined more communities and networked with more people, I started learning about more concepts that helped me to make sense of who I was and how I felt about relationships, sexuality, gender, etc.
The next on the list was learning the term pansexual instead of bisexual. I identified as pan for awhile, thinking it was a more inclusive way of saying that I was attracted to multiple genders.
Then went back to bi, then toyed with just “non-monosexual” and I guess I’ve never quite settled on the right term for me there (but queer works really well as a good catch-all).
This is also around when I first learned about the term genderqueer, and I loved it! I was like oh! Yes! This is me! This explains why I’m so comfortable inhabiting different forms of gender roles and expressions.
There are parts of femininity that I adore & parts I abhor, same for masculinity & more non-binary forms. I also just loved the very idea of queering gender, of not putting my gender into any one box or other but being free to explore any expression of gender that I encountered.
Genderqueer is one of those lovely umbrella labels that can mean different things, have many sub-categories, and cross over with other labels. I also enjoy terms like gender weird, gender fuckery, etc.
These days, a lot of people use the word non-binary, which is another lovely term that can be a catch-all for many things, but it’s never really resonated with me personally. I’ve stuck with genderqueer.
Genderqueer, non-binary, and similar terms are often put under the trans umbrella. I never felt that the trans experience fit for me, so I would often call myself a cis (which is just a handy word for not-trans) genderqueer woman. (More on that in a moment)
I believe the next identity that resonated with me was when I started to learn about asexuality/aromanticism. I’m still not entirely sure how I feel identifying as ace because I don’t know how much my lack of interest in sex is due to PTSD, psych meds I take, or other factors vs.
- an actual orientation. But I’ve done a lot of reading about ace identities and listening to ace folks and, once again, there are a lot of sub-categories or identities and crossovers into other identities.
For example, learning that someone might be asexual but still want romantic relationships or vice versa, that someone could be romantically attracted to certain genders but sexually attracted to others, etc. helped me clarify some things.
What really perked my attention was reading about a specific type of asexual/aromantic orientation - sometimes called akiosexual/romantic or lithromantic/sexual.
Reading about this type, which can mean a few different things but what clicked for me was having attraction but not wanting that attraction returned - helped me to understand that ace might fit for me even though I’m both sexually and romantically attracted to people.
Because it turns out that while I can enjoy that attraction, and I can enjoy reading about or watching fictional depictions of romantic and sexual relationships – I don’t want to act on that attraction or be in a relationship of that sort myself.
I’m perfectly happy forming platonically intimate relationships and leaving both sex and romance off the table for myself.
So I’m still sort of one toe in and one toe out as far as identifying as ace – but, once again, since asexuality and aromanticism are included in the nifty umbrella term of queer –
- I also don’t feel the need to necessarily lay it all out there every time I talk about my queerness in a larger context. I’m queer. That’s enough most of the time.
Queerplatonic is another great term that was a light bulb moment for me when I first heard it because it’s about those really intense, intimate, passionate, close but platonic relationships that are my jam!
In fact, I’ve combined that term with the polyamory that makes sense to me and I often refer to my found family group as my queerplatonic poly family – I feel like that better describes who we are to one another than just “friend group”.
This last piece is a really new 1 for me & 1 I’m still working on understanding & giving context to as far as what it means for me. I’m not entirely sure how to talk about it, yet, but in the interest of talking about the complexity of coming out & queerness & identity - I’ll try
You can glance up a bit & see how I’ve embraced the term genderqueer but still called myself cis. That’s the part I’ve been questioning recently. It sort of relates to that 1st big 1 when I finally realized I could be attracted to boys & still not be straight.
I never thought the trans experience related to me because I’ve always been comfortable in my (assigned-female) body. I’ve been happy to explore outside of the female gender norms but never felt that my physical body needed altering to fit how I saw/experienced my sex or gender.
And to be clear – I still don’t. I’m still fine with my body that society deems as female. In fact, I’m still perfectly fine being female – body parts aside.
The piece that’s taken me longer to understand is that I’m also fine being a man. And, in fact, that I feel like I’m just as much man as I am woman.
I didn’t feel a deep longing or need to explore this because it didn’t occur to me that just because I was comfy with the parts I was born with – that I might also identify outside of those particular constraints.
If this sounds confusing, it’s because as I said, I’m still sorting out what it means myself! I’ve just been acknowledging to myself in recent months that I’ve always felt this way to a certain extent and just didn’t have the language to talk about it or -
- understand that I could be both. That just because I am comfortable being a woman it doesn’t mean I can’t be comfortable being a man 2. Like with bisexuality early on, I’d heard of terms like bigender/dual-gender/genderfluid – I just hadn’t thought to apply any of it to myself.
And I think a big block for me on this has been that I’ve had a lot of traumatic experiences with men in my life. That and the toxic forms of masculinity that exist in the world around us, with the message that those are the only acceptable ways to be a man –
that this is what it means to be a man, or to be masculine – have hampered my ability to think about myself in terms of maleness.
What’s helped is getting to know more men (as well as non-binary folks and masc women) who eschew those toxic expressions of masculinity. It’s been especially helpful to see how queer and trans men have embraced new and different ways of being masculine -
- as these are often men who have been harmed by toxic masculinity themselves. Watching ways that they have found to be manly without that toxicity has helped me to realize that I can choose that for myself, too.
That to embrace my masculinity doesn’t have to mean embracing the things that have directly or indirectly harmed me.
So, that’s where I am on this particular Coming Out day – coming out to you all as a bi/pan/non-mono-sexual/romantic ace polyamorous queer genderqueer possibly trans bigender individual (but you can just call me queer).
And feeling very grateful to all of the out queer and trans men and masc folks who have helped me to have a deeper and more full understanding of myself, and my place in the queer community.
To wrap this up, let me add that this is exactly why I find it so important to come out publicly in the ways that I do. If I hadn’t had so many queer examples throughout my life to learn from and feel comfort from and to get educated by -
– I would be lacking in the language and the expressions that have helped me to be more fully me.
Finally – I want anyone reading this to know that if you need someone to come out, I will do my best to be a safe and secure person for you to do that with.
And if you just have questions about any of this, or anything about queerness, I will do my best to be an open and safe person for you to ask those questions of.
