A Queer Beginning

What does it mean to identify as man while at the same time saying that maleness is the root of all injustice in this world?

What does it mean to look at myself in the mirror, see myself for who I am (5-foot 6, thin, smooth), and describe myself as anything other than a twink who likes to get fucked by guys?

To explore those questions, it’s important to begin the moment my life changed in August 2005, when I made the decision to begin telling others that I was gay. Small, 16, and self-conscious, my first experiences coming out were like a series of electric shocks through my body.

To this day, I relive the nervous anticipation of disclosure, and remember how worried I was that my entire life would dissolve. But as summer changed to fall, vibrantly colored leaves peeling away from trees, it was as if my own inhibition vanished and I grew a new skin.

It’s five years later now. I’m almost 21, and in many ways I feel like I’m coming out again. Others perceive me as gay, but I no longer identify as such. I consider myself queer.

♦♦♦

What, exactly, does that mean? The term queer dates back to 1508 and has been used most commonly to mean something that differs from the norm. But in the late 19^th century and most of the 20^th century, it was also used to refer to those men who were thought to be gay, and who exhibited gender behaviors that were traditionally understood to be feminine.

Even today, the dictionary lists the first definition of queer as “worthless, counterfeit” and “questionable, suspicious,” with subsequent entries describing the term to mean “mildly insane, touched.”

But in the late 1980s and early 1990s, activists and authors in academic circles began to reappropriate the term, and use it to describe themselves. Though the exact moment that the term “queer” emerged in a positive political and academic light remains unclear, one of the first documented political usages was in 1990 at New York City Pride, when an anonymously written leaflet entitled Queers Read This was distributed among the crowd.

In it, queer was defined as being about “the freedom to be public, to just be who we are” while recognizing “oppression; homophobia, racism, misogyny, the bigotry of religious hypocrites and our own self-hatred.”

This inclusive definition from the 1990 Pride remains a standard of those in political and academic circles who use the term today. But strategies for queer activism, and the details of queerness, have shifted through the emergence of queer theory as an academic discipline and through tensions between established political activists and younger, more radical activists.

Because of these tensions, a single unified definition of queerness is absent today.

♦♦♦

Given these multiple definitions, I’ve struggled for many years to understand what queer means for me. I have spent years pouring over books I was assigned in my university classes and asking myself uncomfortable questions when these books challenged my identity. Looking in the mirror, I began to question how it was others perceived me based upon my physical appearance. I also asked myself how men I was attracted to perceived me as a sexual object based on my appearance.

In the conversations I had with other marginalized people, I found friction and disagreements over the meaning of the term. In four years of searching, sloughing off skins like reptiles do to grow up, I came to define queer for myself.

As I see it, to be queer is to be a person who recognizes that male privilege is the root cause of marginalization in this world. To be queer is reject simplistic dualisms like male/female, top/bottom, gay/straight, able/disabled, and black/white that have pervaded our culture. To be queer is to be a person who tries every day to interact differently with people who are different than they are, whether by race, gender identity, sexual orientation, (dis)ability status, or political ideology.

To be queer is to be political, constantly seeking strategies to engender change in a society that actively rejects who you are. To be queer is to use the past to inform a hopeful and dynamic view of the future.

Yet the term queer cannot be fully articulated in a single column. That is why I am using a series of entries to explore the central questions that are meaningful to me. I will challenge prevailing notions of what maleness, gender, sexuality, and desire mean.

It is time for an awakening that can bring together all types of men and women, everyone who falls in between, and others who blend maleness and femaleness as part of themselves.

♦♦♦

The moon illuminates my walk by the shore as I skip a rock across the pitch glass surface, leaving faint ripples. I pause for a second under the warm, stagnant air and feel disconnected. I am not content with ripples, I think to myself. I am not content with ripples, I say, and let the words hang over the waters of Lake Michigan.

So, I pick up a rock, feeling the misshapen and rough edges with my small, girlish hands, and throw it further than I ever have before, a loud plunk as the earth crashes through the quiet night. I have found a new energy to express what it means to be different, to be queer. Still small, still self-conscious, but unafraid.