Straight, Gay, or Lying

Some days it feels like a lie, this thing I tell myself: that queerness, however it has come to me, through conditioning or some movement of the blood, through a violin in another room or an errant DNA sequence, is worth it.

Some days it feels like a liability. To shuffle around gender pronouns. To scan a space mentally before I enter it. To wonder: Who will hate me? Who will say they don’t hate me but tell a joke that makes me feel like I should not exist in the world?

Some days it feels like a superpower. I get to love, I tell myself. I get to love in so many directions. I get to feel pleasure. I get to live a thing I did not know was possible, as Adrienne Rich says, “as a succession of brief, amazing movements”—slowly, miraculously—“each one making possible the next.”

They never tell us sex with someone of our gender is possible.

The knowledge was epiphanic. If this could be, what else? 15, summer sweat slicking down my June thighs, breasts taut. I was hanging out with a girl a couple of years older than me. Her car smelled like sandalwood. On rainy days we smoked pot in the garden shed.

Swimming in our sports bras, summer just coming on, she said she’d had sex with a female friend.

I went hot and cold with a thing I did not know was excitement.

They—TV and Seventeen and grownups—never tell us we can love like that. It’s this big secret they’ve always kept. I don’t remember knowing one out gay person growing up—or if I did, no one thought especially to tell me.

Most of my peers and their parents were explicitly homophobic. My immediate family was not. But there’s a difference between accepting queer people and working hard, constantly, to counter the overwhelming socialization that to be queer is bad or different: One family can’t fix an entire culture’s worth of signalling. It seemed the kind of life I wanted was the kind of life one couldn’t have.

I never knew I’d get all this pleasure. I never knew it could be this good. Bed on Sunday mornings, hazy parties, kissing on subway platforms, holding friends’ hands. This isn’t the only way to be queer; embracing traditional forms of family, community, and belonging are no less valid and dignified choices. But we need to establish the preconditions for there to be choice in the first place.

We have a right to pleasure. To different kinds of pleasure. To dinner, to caring for one’s children, to making love, to halving a stick of gum with a friend on the bus. The great potential of the queer movement is not in normalization—in making white picket fences for white picket people while exploitative systems go on—but possibility. Of expanding the ways that humans can relate to one another; of harnessing creativity to promote more just economic systems, to reimagine governmental paradigms, to expand our cultural conceptions of love. Oppression forces us into the daily defensive of not enough resources. It makes us ungenerous. It shuts us off. To enable creative dexterity, we need to fight not only homophobia, but the material and ideological conditions that limit human imagination.

Because lots of queers—lots of people—don’t get the kind of living that aches like honey: a wild, ragged sweetness on the tongue. There are structural reasons why I’m allowed so very much safety, though sometimes uncomfortably, to create and dance and eat and love: I’m from an upper-middle class, left-leaning family; I have incredible educational privilege; I’m white in the contemporary U.S.

Fundamental to the queer movement then—fundamental to enabling us to experience and channel the complexity I felt at fifteen—is a project of socioeconomic and racial justice, of gender justice, of the universal procurement of adequate material, cultural, and psychological resources. We as a movement have an obligation to work towards the conditions that enable, as Martha Nussbaum puts it, “human thriving.”

We did make out once. Me and that girl. Mid-May, prom day, but I was too young to go. She was home on break from college and we kissed in her room. I didn’t know whether it meant I was loved utterly or hated. I was too nervous to be aroused; when I was alone, much later, I wept. “You will go to college before you know it,” she said of my too-big-for-that-place brain encased in my too-ethnic-for-that-place bone structure, “and there will be men who want you.” This was confusing: I wanted men, certainly, but at that moment I was boozy with wanting her. Her words said it was impossible; her words said I could not exist.

Afterward, we went to a greenhouse. I cannot communicate the stupid, symbolically overburdened irony. The hothouse light, the tomatoes just begun their overburgeoning. And I could no more say it than I could—outside the charmed few hours—touch her, but the kisses had left new words on my tongue.

Reina A.E. Gattuso ‘15, an FM editor, is a joint literature and studies of women, gender, and sexuality concentrator in Adams House. Her column appears on alternate Fridays.