💛

i am holding hands with this girl whose halo of hair glows banana yellow under the heat lamps in the reptile section, who offers her index finger to teething kittens. she asks “can’t we have one?” in the voice she uses for only me. a voice i can’t describe without using her name, but i imagine joan of arc heard something similar the day she picked up a sword. she is still holding my hand, and i feel like i’d sink into cartoon quicksand if i let go. so i don’t.

“are you two… together?”

this is not unfamiliar, but the woman’s voice, the voice she has chosen, is angrily acidic. this woman has laced her tone with arsenic, without even a passive aggressive teaspoon of sugar to hide her poison. she inhales, puffing herself up like a frightened lizard before her final words. 

“there are children here, you know.” 

in the future, i think of a thousand things to say. we were children too. two girls holding hands after school. two girls holding hands at the movie theatre, two girls in a booth at tony’s pizza, two girls sharing awkward first kisses after two solo cups of wine in someone else’s backyard. two girls holding kittens at a pet store on a saturday afternoon. 

i know now that they see us through funhouse mirrors: distorted, disturbed, our monstrous bodies taking too much space, spoiling innocent spaces with our imposing sexualities. our innocence never ours to begin with.

and obviously we were more than friends but it was more than just romantic. this is someone that genuinely liked me. i trusted them. and for the first time since i was a tiny child, i actually felt safe. and the relationship we formed at that point, was something that i needed in my life. 

we are real best friends, companions through life, like actual soulmates, not that souls are a real thing that exist. it’s so lucky to just find someone you can be that compatible with and especially to anyone that has experienced the kind of self-hatred that i have dealt with, one person accepting you can make all the difference.

He talked about it all in a lighthearted manner because that’s Phil, but you guys.

He was outed. Phil got outed. It turned out okay for him, but Phil got outed. Phil lived through one of the scariest things possible as a gay person: being forced into a potentially dangerous situation and not knowing who you could trust. Phil was outed in rural Britain when being gay wasn’t as accepted as current times and that’s terrifying. He had that control, that autonomy, taken from him.

Phil talked about how shameful you feel before you come out, even if it’s to people you know are accepting. He talked about the way that you feel guilty for being yourself, for not being yourself, for hiding it, for telling people, and for not telling people. That’s so often ignored in coming out stories and people don’t seem to realize even when you’re coming out to people you know will accept you, you still feel guilty.

He talked about the ways that when you’re young and not positive and you try to force yourself to be straight like everyone else and the realization that you’re just not meant to be like everyone else.

He talked about not letting yourself hang onto people you know won’t accept you; that those kinds of don’t have a place in your life and stop trying to make them fit.

He talked about the way that having a few friends who accept you literally changes how you view your sexuality and how you express it and the importance of having allies.

The way he talked about the fact that as a queer person, especially a het/cis passing, you never stop coming out. That you’ll always be defending your sexuality, that people will always just assume. That it’s tiring but it never stops.

Most of all, Phil pointed out how stupid being homophobic is. How could you not want another person to be happy, to live authentically? How could you want another person to live in any way that made them feel like their life was incomplete?

He tackled these topics so lightheartedly and so quickly and so Phil-like it was almost easy to forget that these topics are so fucking intense.

At the end of it, I’m so proud of Phil. I’m so proud of him for what he did for himself, what he did for Dan, and what he’s doing for us.