So here’s the thing, friends: when I am typing out this newsletter, I’m sitting alone at home with my cat, just shooting my thoughts into the void. Of course I know that this is being created for an audience — but also, do I really? It’s only when I start to see comments and likes coming in that I actually fully register that, you know, people are reading this.
Anyway: yesterday’s essay! That sure got a response! I’m thrilled by how many of you saw yourselves in it, and also by the number of cishet readers who felt inspired to think about their own connection to queerness, and what it is that draws them to queer people and queer culture.
It’s on behalf of that latter group that I want to return to the topic, and specifically to this one passage from yesterday’s essay:
Most likely it is that you are some kind of LGBTQ, but it’s also possible that you are ace, that you are poly, that you are something else unnamed. It is almost definitely because you understand on a soul deep level this feeling of being othered for gender expression or the map of your sexual desire, and feel commonality with out queer and trans people as a result.
One of the things that I struggle with, that can send me into territory where I sound like I’m contradicting myself, is that while I do think that being queer and trans (and for our purposes in this newsletter, specifically bisexual) means going through life having certain experiences, particularly experiences of oppression, I don’t think that LGBTQ people are bound by anything other than shared experiences of oppression and the affiliation that comes from hooking up with one another and creating community.
To put it another way: I don’t think there’s a “gay gene*” that puts queers in one corner and straights in another; I don’t think we are biologically marked in a way that destines us for utterly distinct experiences. I have never been — and will never be — one of those queer people who brags about not having any straight friends, because I find that bizarre. There are straight people I can vibe with and queer people that I can’t vibe with, because for me the question is much about one’s open-mindedness and willingness to question the dominant culture’s assumptions about “correct” behavior than what genders get your engine revving.
I’m going to wade into particularly treacherous territory now and remind you all of the existence of this bell hooks** quote:
“Queer” not as being about who you're having sex with (that can be a dimension of it); but “queer” as being about the self that is at odds with everything around it and that has to invent and create and find a place to speak and to thrive and to live.
I get anxious whenever that quote circulates because a lot of times it’s posted by straight people who want to brag about how cool they are, and I think it is a quote that is best consumed with a major dose of humility and perspective on one’s own lived experience. Because while, yes, I do think there are cishet people who have an affinity for, perhaps even a strong connection to, queerness, the second you start publicly identifying yourself as a Queer Straight Person™️, you run the risk of centering yourself, of diverting the conversation away from crucial issues of human rights and discrimination and access to resources and towards, like, queerness as a fashion show.
The value of understanding that cishet people can be queer lays in the recognition that “straightness” and “queerness” are just boxes society made up and tossed people into, that few of us truly adhere to these actual boundaries because the boundaries themselves are false.
But way too many people just try to make it about their own worth, their own value, their own deservedness when it comes to the question of who has access to certain spaces. And that is… not great.
I’m going to end this essay with a personal anecdote that will hopefully add some clarity about what I mean (though if it just makes things more confusing, well, that kind of comes with the territory of talking about social constructs that severely impact people’s lives and wellbeing even as they are fake).
A few months ago, I was talking to one of my cishet dude friends (yes, I have cishet dude friends! Some dearly beloved ones!) and he mentioned how, despite being cis and straight, he finds himself drawn to and more comfortable with queer people. Being the lunatic that I am, I ultimately wound up sending him maybe… twenty… texts*** in a row offering a potential perspective on why he might feel that way.
I’ll spare you the entirety of what I sent him, but the general gist was this: as a Black man in America, my friend has grown up in a world that genders him as a hypermasculine beast, a world that superimposes this idea of an aggressive, a violent, a hypersexual Black man onto him. If he rejects that vision of masculinity, the primary avenue available to him is the exact opposite: the Black man as family man, as church attendee, as upstanding citizen. To reject that as well — as one might wish to! — is to find oneself stranded and unmoored; a person who exists in a world that does not readily have an answer for you.
That, I think, is the space called queerness. And if you’re enjoying this newsletter, chances are good it’s a space you are familiar with.
* There literally isn’t a gay gene; all researchers have ultimately found is a cluster of various genes that make same gender attraction more likely and also just… sometimes socialization does it, I guess
** May her memory be a blessing
*** This is what people sign up for when they agree to be my friend, absolutely unreal numbers of text messages just dumping my brain contents on them
Lux, as always, thanks for this. Between yesterday and today you've driven me to a lot of self-reflection and I appreciate it. As a man who had relationships with both women and men in my late teens/early 20s while thinking of myself as straight, then married a woman, realized in my 30s I was bi, and came out as such in my 40s, I see a lot of myself in all of this... both when I thought I was straight but allied, and now. What I mean by this: yes, I identify as queer; I'm a cisgender man with generally very masculine presentation (I'm broad, tall-ish, and almost always bearded), which is all fine and good; but then I also had a period earlier in my life where I pretty frequently wore skirts (for comfort, I thought at the time, and without making effort to appear non-masculine). One thing I deal with in an ongoing way is persistently feeling like a Fake Queer for being a bi man monogamously married to a woman, and I am working on unlearning this slowly but steadily. Your newsletter is a huge help in this. But also I had never really thought about the idea of the Queer Straight Person applying beyond the point where I realized I was a Queer Queer Person -- and now I'm realizing that somewhere in here is maybe a subset of Queer Straight Person that could be called a Cis Genderqueer/NB Person (?). I have some thinking to do on this!
"The B+ Squad" series is a river of revelation and delight. You're astonishing.