Surprise! I’m queer!

It’s not a surprise.

Not for anyone who knows me, anyway.

Here’s the thing: Queer is a label I had to claim—and, subsequently, grow into. It’s not quite so simple as Hey I think I’m sexually attracted to that woman over there or I mean I wear men’s flannels so like, I guess. Because both of those things have been true for a very long time, but I didn’t determine that I was queer until within the past couple of years.

I’ve had an extremely complicated relationship with femininity my entire life—although when I was younger, I didn’t really have the cognizance to recognize it, let alone understand it.

The fact of the matter is that my parents were doing their best under the conditions we were in. We lived on a farm. I had to do some dirty work. But I was also a person who existed in society, and they did their best to help me do well, even though, frankly, they didn’t do a good job of delineating anything for me, so I was really just confused.

TBH I’m still a bit confused. I don’t know how to not be confused. What even is gender? Is it what you feel? Is it the role you play in society? Do we even need to have gender-segregated roles? Obviously not, but here we are anyway.

Hence: Queer.

Queer is an immensely freeing term, you see. People complain that it is too broad, too vague, too nondescript. They miss the point. It is so on purpose. There are so many identities and feelings that don’t have names, so many identities that live between the labels the queer community is still carving out for ourselves.

I think the first time my dad realized that I probably wasn’t straight was in middle school. I had fallen in love with AFI, you see… Davey Havok in particular. And this was the time period where he lived in full makeup. Sparkly eye shadow, hella fake lashes, eyeliner, lipstick, lip ring, long hair—ugh, so much feminine beauty on such a gloriously masculine face. What? Who said I still have a crush?

I wanted a poster. I made the mistake of asking for money for a poster. My mom made me show them which one before she’d give me any money for it. Of course she immediately said no. My dad told me afterward that I didn’t have to tell them what I wanted money for in the future. Which… in retrospect, seems like fairly clear indication that he recognized I was always going to be drawn to particularly… well, effeminate boys at any rate.

So he knew something was up well before I did. I started to grasp that I might be bisexual in high school, but, I mean, I lived in the middle of nowhere in Conservative Christian central, and my parents are really religious, so what was I going to do? Go home and say Hey mom, I think I’m bisexual and see how it went? Yeah no. I don’t think so.

My ex-fiancé is the person who convinced me to just accept it and own it. The first girl I ever kissed was a friend of his, and… TBH the situation wasn’t great. Pretty exploitative, even. It wasn’t handled well. I only half regret the event. But it’s a big half.

I have since revised my understanding of my sexuality to pansexual. It’s not the most well understood term, and is usually categorized as bi+, which is… generally speaking, accurate. Pansexual means attraction is non-discriminatory per gender or sex. So, for example, pansexual means attracted to women, to men, to nonbinary, to transgender, to effeminate men, to butch women—anyone, really. For me, pansexual makes the most sense, in large part, because of my lifelong search for the most androgynous humans I can find. The less obvious your gender is, the more likely I am to be disastrously attracted to you. The obvious next statement is “It doesn’t matter what’s in your pants” but dammit it does matter and it matters because I want to be in them. hah.

Anyway. So that’s me. I’m a queer pansexual most-of-the-time-woman (I like to think I’m nonbinary, but feminine pronouns make the most sense for me, and I don’t correct anyone when I’m presenting masc because 1: it’s pointless, and 2: it doesn’t really bother me; I could opt for they/them pronouns, but the amount of work it’d take to reframe my internal conceptualization of myself isn’t worth it. I’m happy enough being a most-of-the-time woman that I’ll stick with she/her) with an extremely complicated relationship with gender and a sexuality more nebulous than Orion.

And honestly? It’s nice to know who I am. Even if that ‘who’ only exists right now. Because it’s very subject to change. And I know it will change over time. Such is the nature of existing in the world. If you’re not growing, you’re not trying hard enough.