weirdquark (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
weirdquark) wrote2011-10-11 10:13 pm
weirdquark) wrote2011-10-11 10:13 pm
Thoughts for National Coming Out Day
I became interested in gay rights long before it occurred to me that I might be queer.
I had a class assignment in what must have been ninth grade to go to the library, read newspaper articles about a current or recent event and then write a paper about the different opinions about it. I say that it must have been ninth grade, not because I remember what class it was, but because the topic I chose was gays in the military, and ninth grade was 1993-1994, and I found myself researching DADT.
I didn't understand DADT. I sat there reading articles explaining that people thought that having gay people in the military or knowing that they were there would be a problem and wondering why someone's sexual orientation would be relevant, why people cared, why people thought this was important.
I was raised Unitarian Universalist and was taught that we should respect each other and each other's differences and that everyone should be free to figure out their own path to truth, that there wasn't just one way to do things, spiritually, or just in general. So while I don't really remember being told "it's okay if you're gay" as a kid, either that it was okay if I were gay, or just that it was okay for anyone to be gay in general, it just seemed to fall under the general idea that it wasn't okay to discriminate against someone just because they were different.
My health class in junior high took a moment during sex ed to talk about what to do if someone came out to you, and while they were telling us that we should tell the person that we were glad that they felt they could talk to us about this, that it didn't matter, that we would still be friends, I thought here too: why would it matter?
Maybe I would have understood better if it had occurred to me back then that I might be queer, but all the way through high school I identified as female and all of my crushes were on guys. I never liked to talk about my crushes though, so I did have some of the people I was friends with at the time ask me if I was a lesbian (and assured me that they wouldn't care if I was) but at the time, I had never been interested in another girl, so I said that I wasn't. I didn't meet women who I found even vaguely crush-worthy until college, and even then I didn't really think much about it. I have a type. Sometimes I find men who match it. Sometimes the people who match it are women. I like the term queer, but for a while I liked identifying as having sexual orientation "irrelevant" which referred to both my long-standing unable to think about sexual orientation mattering to anything other than who I was interested in, and also to figuring that I might be interested in men or women, it didn't matter.
Despite going to a women's college, I didn't really think much about my gender either, though I remember going to some diversity workshop in the first week where we were supposed to make symbols representing parts of yourself out of pipe cleaners and put them together in some way and then remove one and talk about what it meant. The three that I remember making were being female, being Unitarian Universalist, and loving music and to sing, and I felt the latter two were much more important to who I was than my gender.
Which is kind of odd, since I had spent most of high school being one of five women (out of a class of twenty-five or thirty) in my advanced math class, and having similar numbers in my physics class. I had heard in a 'this sort of thing doesn't happen here' that girls were often discouraged to excel in math and physics. No one had ever told me that I shouldn't be good at science. I was a stubborn kid. I didn't like asking for help, and I always felt that if someone had told me that girls couldn't do math, I'd go, "yeah? Watch me." So I don't know how much my gender affected how people treated me, if I was good enough at math that I was encouraged in spite of being female or because I was female, or if I was just encouraged because I was good at math. In college, there was definitely an environment of encouraging women to go on in science, and I and several other freshmen in my physics class were asked to stay after class one day so the professor could tell us that we were all doing well and he hoped that we would consider going on in physics. I'm pretty sure most of us ended up being the ones who were physics majors for our year.
So do I think being female affected me growing up? Sure. Do I have a strong gender identity? Not so much. More and more I prefer looking androgynous, and wearing certain kinds of dresses feel like drag as much as wearing mens suits. I like gender play, I like gender confusion. I like other people who do gender play. I don't have a strong gender identity, but I do like doing things with gender presentation. I like wearing slinky dresses and pinstripe suits. I like having really long hair. I like having really short hair. I've been lifting weights over the past few months and have been enjoying seeing more muscle definition in my arms. While my real goals have to do with increasing my deadlifts and squats and presses, with being able to do handstands and pull-ups, my stupid goals include adding enough muscle to my upper body that I can wear a dress to the Gender Bender ball and have people need to do a double-take to be able to figure out whether I'm a skinny guy in drag or a woman in a dress.
I never bothered to be out when I was living in Massachusetts. No one would have cared and it just didn't seem important. Several college friends and I had made plans to continue to live together for the foreseeable future, so when one of us got a job in Texas and I was unemployed, I went with her; two more joined us the following year. And when you tell people that you moved across the country because the woman that you'd been living with for the past eight years got a job, well, they probably make assumptions, even when you use the term 'roommate'. So I never know whether or not people assumed that I was trying to be subtle when I talked about my roommate the year it was just the two of us, or whether or not what they thought changed when I had more roommates and could refer to the people I lived with in the plural. Because roommate is sometimes code for partner, and I remember going to an event, and after being introduced to someone as my roommate's roommate, being asked if we meant partner. When we said no (because we had not yet stopped bothering to correct people) the person told us that he was "okay with partners." 'Partner' is a fine term, and not exactly wrong because we do consider each other family, but since I am not romantically or sexually involved with any of the people I am living with, it's also misleading. But this is Texas. And it does feel important to be out here, because people do care here, and here I have an opportunity to show them that maybe someone's sexual orientation or gender identity doesn't matter in the ways that they think they do.
I had a class assignment in what must have been ninth grade to go to the library, read newspaper articles about a current or recent event and then write a paper about the different opinions about it. I say that it must have been ninth grade, not because I remember what class it was, but because the topic I chose was gays in the military, and ninth grade was 1993-1994, and I found myself researching DADT.
I didn't understand DADT. I sat there reading articles explaining that people thought that having gay people in the military or knowing that they were there would be a problem and wondering why someone's sexual orientation would be relevant, why people cared, why people thought this was important.
I was raised Unitarian Universalist and was taught that we should respect each other and each other's differences and that everyone should be free to figure out their own path to truth, that there wasn't just one way to do things, spiritually, or just in general. So while I don't really remember being told "it's okay if you're gay" as a kid, either that it was okay if I were gay, or just that it was okay for anyone to be gay in general, it just seemed to fall under the general idea that it wasn't okay to discriminate against someone just because they were different.
My health class in junior high took a moment during sex ed to talk about what to do if someone came out to you, and while they were telling us that we should tell the person that we were glad that they felt they could talk to us about this, that it didn't matter, that we would still be friends, I thought here too: why would it matter?
Maybe I would have understood better if it had occurred to me back then that I might be queer, but all the way through high school I identified as female and all of my crushes were on guys. I never liked to talk about my crushes though, so I did have some of the people I was friends with at the time ask me if I was a lesbian (and assured me that they wouldn't care if I was) but at the time, I had never been interested in another girl, so I said that I wasn't. I didn't meet women who I found even vaguely crush-worthy until college, and even then I didn't really think much about it. I have a type. Sometimes I find men who match it. Sometimes the people who match it are women. I like the term queer, but for a while I liked identifying as having sexual orientation "irrelevant" which referred to both my long-standing unable to think about sexual orientation mattering to anything other than who I was interested in, and also to figuring that I might be interested in men or women, it didn't matter.
Despite going to a women's college, I didn't really think much about my gender either, though I remember going to some diversity workshop in the first week where we were supposed to make symbols representing parts of yourself out of pipe cleaners and put them together in some way and then remove one and talk about what it meant. The three that I remember making were being female, being Unitarian Universalist, and loving music and to sing, and I felt the latter two were much more important to who I was than my gender.
Which is kind of odd, since I had spent most of high school being one of five women (out of a class of twenty-five or thirty) in my advanced math class, and having similar numbers in my physics class. I had heard in a 'this sort of thing doesn't happen here' that girls were often discouraged to excel in math and physics. No one had ever told me that I shouldn't be good at science. I was a stubborn kid. I didn't like asking for help, and I always felt that if someone had told me that girls couldn't do math, I'd go, "yeah? Watch me." So I don't know how much my gender affected how people treated me, if I was good enough at math that I was encouraged in spite of being female or because I was female, or if I was just encouraged because I was good at math. In college, there was definitely an environment of encouraging women to go on in science, and I and several other freshmen in my physics class were asked to stay after class one day so the professor could tell us that we were all doing well and he hoped that we would consider going on in physics. I'm pretty sure most of us ended up being the ones who were physics majors for our year.
So do I think being female affected me growing up? Sure. Do I have a strong gender identity? Not so much. More and more I prefer looking androgynous, and wearing certain kinds of dresses feel like drag as much as wearing mens suits. I like gender play, I like gender confusion. I like other people who do gender play. I don't have a strong gender identity, but I do like doing things with gender presentation. I like wearing slinky dresses and pinstripe suits. I like having really long hair. I like having really short hair. I've been lifting weights over the past few months and have been enjoying seeing more muscle definition in my arms. While my real goals have to do with increasing my deadlifts and squats and presses, with being able to do handstands and pull-ups, my stupid goals include adding enough muscle to my upper body that I can wear a dress to the Gender Bender ball and have people need to do a double-take to be able to figure out whether I'm a skinny guy in drag or a woman in a dress.
I never bothered to be out when I was living in Massachusetts. No one would have cared and it just didn't seem important. Several college friends and I had made plans to continue to live together for the foreseeable future, so when one of us got a job in Texas and I was unemployed, I went with her; two more joined us the following year. And when you tell people that you moved across the country because the woman that you'd been living with for the past eight years got a job, well, they probably make assumptions, even when you use the term 'roommate'. So I never know whether or not people assumed that I was trying to be subtle when I talked about my roommate the year it was just the two of us, or whether or not what they thought changed when I had more roommates and could refer to the people I lived with in the plural. Because roommate is sometimes code for partner, and I remember going to an event, and after being introduced to someone as my roommate's roommate, being asked if we meant partner. When we said no (because we had not yet stopped bothering to correct people) the person told us that he was "okay with partners." 'Partner' is a fine term, and not exactly wrong because we do consider each other family, but since I am not romantically or sexually involved with any of the people I am living with, it's also misleading. But this is Texas. And it does feel important to be out here, because people do care here, and here I have an opportunity to show them that maybe someone's sexual orientation or gender identity doesn't matter in the ways that they think they do.