The myth of the enthusiastic ally.

I mean allies exist, but.

In the mid-1990s, when I was a young adolescent, I was very very into queer culture. While my peers were obsessing over Ross kissing Rachel on Friends, I was devouring Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City series, learning lingo like “butch” and “nelly” and getting an education about the logistics of public sex.

If you had asked young me why I was so intrigued by queer books and TV and movies — why I made sure to go see To Wong Foo, Thanks For Everything! Julie Newmar in the theater — I would have undoubtedly told you it was because I was a good ally. I had queer family friends, and I loved them very much, and educating myself about their world was just being supportive, right? I knew in my heart that I couldn’t be a lesbian: I’d had crushes on boys since a young age, and anyway everything I knew about lesbian culture — the flannel shirts, the folk music, the female masculinity — held little appeal for me. I was just a straight girl who loved the glitter and glam of gay male culture.

Right?

No, not right. As I would realize at the age of fourteen, the fascination I felt with queerness, the reason why gay male culture called to me in a way that straight girl culture never seemed to, was because I was queer myself. Not a lesbian, of course, but a femme bi girl — one who didn’t see herself represented in the media, and was drawn to flamboyant gay men as the closest possible depiction. As I came into my own, as I understood myself better, the fixation on gay men began to fade. But it also made a lot more sense.

It is frequently posited that people who are the most homophobic, the most transphobic, are simply externalizing hatred that they feel for themselves — the Republican senator caught pants down in the truck stop bathroom being the archetype everyone loves to cite. I think this is occasionally true — again, there are documented examples of it — but certainly not always; plenty of people are driven to hate an other for a variety of reasons. It would be bizarre to suggest, for instance, that the most virulent white supremacists are secretly Black; most of us understand that white people are capable of hating and oppressing others specifically because they are not like them.

But what I am personally interested in, far more than the passionate homophobe who’s actually a closet case, is the person who exists on the other end of the spectrum: the passionate, devoted ally who maybe isn’t an ally. In the decades since I realized I wasn’t a queer ally but a queer person, I’ve seen this happen again and again: the cishet person who just thinks queers are really neat turns out to be somewhere on the LGBTQ spectrum themselves. It’s gotten to the point where I don’t even really believe in the existence of passionate allies, but when you say that, well —

When you brashly suggest (as I have when I am feeling spicy) that there is no such thing as a cishet ally, you get some prickly responses, mostly from cishet people who feel the need to proffer both their cishet and ally credentials. And look, I’m not saying that all genuinely cishet people are queer antagonists — if we’re defining “ally” as simply “not against queer/trans rights” then plenty of allies exist, sure. And I’m also not pulling a, “You care about gay rights? What are you, gay?”, except maybe I am?

What it is, really, is very simple: I think the majority of people on this planet are extremely self-interested. Humans, as a general rule, can’t be bothered to think much outside of our selves or our immediate inner circle. When something calls to us, it often means that we see some aspect of ourselves reflected in it.

Actually straight people — the 100%, for really real cishet folks — are not super interested in queerness. I wouldn’t say that they’re automatically against queerness — while homo/transphobia isn’t always born out of being in the closet, I do think it speaks to some kind of discomfort with the self — but for the most part, I think they are… kind of indifferent to queer folks? Just very, “I support your right to be who you want to be, love is love, use the bathroom that’s right for you” and that’s pretty much the end of it. They’re not going to dive down a rabbit hole eagerly consuming all the books that they can find about queerness; and while they might see and enjoy queer art and movies, they’re not compelled to see them simply because they are queer art and movies. Well-adjusted cishet people may be allies in the sense of supporting legislation that expands human rights — but more often than not, they’re not going to be the people marching in the Pride parade under the allies banner.

(Quick aside here that I think parents and other family members are one potential exception, but that’s primarily because many of us see family members — and especially our own children! — as an extension of the self and thus something that is automatically interesting to us.)

That said: when I say that people who are super invested in queerness are probably seeing themselves reflected in it, I don’t mean that it has to be a one-to-one correlation. Sometimes we see ourselves reflected in a distorted way, but one that nevertheless draws us in all the same. As a youth, I was not intrigued by gay men because I, myself, was a gay man: rather I was feminine and queer and gay male art felt like the primary space where I could access a queer femininity, a queerness that embraced rather than rejected feminine frivolity. (Before anyone gets weird and accuses me of erasing queer femmes: I was a twelve-year-old in the 1990s living in the suburbs of Philadelphia. I had limited access to the full breadth of queer culture.)

So to say that if you’re super amped up on queerness and queer culture, you’re probably not cishet is not automatically to say that if, for instance, you’re really into lesbian culture that you’re definitely a lesbian (not least because of the well-documented cis lesbian to gay trans man pipeline). It’s to say, rather, that if you are drawn to this outsider culture, it is probably because of some outsider element you are not fully recognizing within yourself. 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.

And look: I don’t say this because I want to reject the support of cishet folks — honestly, it’s great to see people excited about queerness for whatever reason brings them to the table. And I don’t think that queer sex is somehow mandatory for anyone advocating for queer rights (hell queer sex isn’t even mandatory for queer people).

I say it more as an offering, an invitation. If you are deeply drawn to queerness, yet deeply convinced that, as a cishet person, it is not for you, then maybe take a moment to pause and reflect. What is it that calls to you about queerness, what part of you is it that responds to it so strongly? Are you absolutely sure that part of you is cishet? And if not, what freedom, what joy, might you access if you gave yourself permission to abandon that understanding of who you are?