reblogs from purgatory

Got to see these lovely kings and queens at dashcon2, what a fantastic and mind blowing show. Thank you all for the amazing time!

I got this question in my Tumblr ask box today, from a user named LocknessKeychain:

Dear Dr. Price, I’m in a tough situation. After a lot of rumination, I’m starting to think I may not be queer after all. I have identified as such for 13 years, but I was quite young and online for much of that time, so it didn’t seem like a problem that my queerness was largely an untested theory. I am asking for your thoughts because I have found your writing illuminating in the past and you know what it means to have to rethink your identity and place in the world. I’m 25 now, and the older I get the less I feel that my old labels really fit me - but this is the life I have built for myself and I don’t know any other. From middle school on, I identified first as a lesbian, then aro/ace, a trans man, and finally nonbinary. I never came out at work or began a medical transition so I don’t have to worry about rolling that back. But I still don’t really have a script for “coming out” as an ex-queer. All my closest friends are queer, and that wouldn’t change, but I loathe the idea of no longer having this in common with them when it was something we bonded over, making them feel lied to or alienated, or being joked about as a “token cishet” (which I know they would do unless I acted as a preemptive buzzkill and asked them not to). I am worried, too, about what my family will think. My mother was supportive at first but she’s been dropping hints over the past year that she doesn’t actually believe anything I say about my identity - “You know women can just dress masculine, right?” - probably because I haven’t transitioned but also because she still believes that people are innately masculine or feminine and this is unchanging, and even trans people must have always been their true gender and always known, which just isn’t the whole story. I can’t stand the thought of her feeling validated in this thinking. The most challenging aspect, perhaps, is that I can’t fully slot into “normal” cishet culture, either. I don’t hang out with those people, I haven’t dated men, I haven’t truly been part of that world for a long time. I know too much now about the complexities of gender and sexuality. I roleplay as an ordinary cishet woman at work and in other mundane interactions, but that feels just as much like playacting as introducing myself with he/they pronouns began to feel. All clothes are a costume. Both my chosen name and my deadname feel inauthentic. I am no longer either of those people, but then what am I? That’s something I must decide for myself, but how do I begin to make it legible to anyone else in my life? Do you have any advice on how to approach this issue with other people?

So, Lockness, let me get this straight: you think that you are, functionally speaking, a cisgender, heterosexual woman…

BUT you haven’t dated any cisgender heterosexual men ever, have no desire to date cishet men, and sound pretty clearly like you would be miserable and suffer from a real lack of belonging if you were to try dating cishet men?

AND you surround yourself almost exclusively with LGBTQ people, have done so since you were a teen, will continue to prioritize LGBTQ people in your life, and feel profoundly misunderstood by the cisgender, heterosexual people around you?

AND you consider your cisgender, heterosexual persona to be a false costume, feel that none of the identities made available to you by society fit, and have tried on a variety of different queer labels for pretty much your entire conscious life?

Are you really sure that ‘straight’ or ‘not queer’ really encompasses the person that you are? The life you are living? The life you’ve lived? Hell, even the kind of life that you want to pursue?

None of what you’ve said sounds like a person I would describe as ‘straight.’ What it does sound like is a queer person who doesn’t have a clear-cut identitarian home, and who has been convinced (perhaps by the bad-faith discourse of other people) that membership to the LGBTQ community is personal attribute to be proven, rather than a form of social recognition that almost anyone who is willing can earn.

...

‘Queerness is a thing you do’ is not just about sex, or about gender or embodiment, it is about contributing meaningfully to a broader LGBTQ community, and being recognized by members of that community as a person who belongs. And you do not need to eat a pussy or grow a testosterone dick to be able to do that.

In fact, if all you do is have gay sex or transition a little bit but you make no effort to really weave a diverse tapestry of LGBTQ people into your life, you’re actually gonna be a whole lot less meaningfully queer than, say, a sexually abstinent, non-transitioning asexual who constantly shows up to events at the local LGBTQ center, brings baked goods to the queer potluck, organizes sapphic movie nights in their home, and offers the newly-out trans kid in their neighborhood a shoulder to cry on and lots of hand-me-downs.

There are plenty of ‘discreet’ guys on Grindr who have endlessly more gay sex than the bi-straight-ace tenderqueers that people on the internet love to shit on, but I might ask: of the two people, who is more likely to have a number of queer friends? Who is more likely to be out, and advocate for queer issues? Which of the two has shown up when other queer people are suicidal, psychotic, or just consumed with self-doubt?

Who lives more queerly? The straight-acting guy who runs through twinks every weekend and then drives back home to his suburb? Or the silly ‘fake queer’ who has never actually fucked anybody and has like five sets of pronouns? Who do you want to spend time with?

Being queer is ultimately a social identity: it only exists through relationships and the building of interpersonal ties. One of the ways that queer people bond to one another is through sex, sure, but just as many of us find meaningful connection through attending support groups, feeding unhoused gay people, raising children to believe they can do whatever the hell they want with their bodies, showing up religiously to the queer contra night, singing in the gay men’s choir, throwing cash at the drag show on the beach, and just committing to giving a fuck about one another.

It is impossible to live one’s queerness without there being other LGBTQ folks around to witness you. That is why the closet can be so damn crazy-making. Online, we have collectively spent over a decade debating the ins and outs of various microidentities and the rights of various people to claim them. But none of these flags & labels mean anything in a vacuum. They exist to help us find one another in the wild, and when they help us, it is because they give our isolated self some rooting in a larger world:

There is somebody else out there like me. I don’t have to live the way my family said. Thank god. Oh, thank god. There is a word for this feeling.

If you have ever felt alienated by cishet expectations, the queer world is there for you. If it is around other LGBTQ individuals that you feel the most at home, then that is where you belong. If you can give something back to other queer people, then you are always wanted. If you work to build queer spaces, archive queer history, celebrate and mourn with us, and keep our culture alive, then you are more than just ‘allowed’ to be in our community. You are our community.

If queerness is a thing you do, then fuck, community is an action — and anybody, really anybody, can make the choice to be a part of it.

quote from the prelude to "sleep" performed during my chemical romance's "long live the black parade" tour