#plucky squawks

Like if you want real world experiences get off social media, read a book written by a queer black woman in the seventies, and talk to your elders in the community. Don’t listen to the anti-intellectuals claiming higher education has no value.

Calling them deplorable, fascist, bigoted, never worked. They took those words as a badge of honor or threw it right back and doubled down. They don’t care if people think they’re doing wrong by others because on some level they already know that and they think it’s justified.

But weird? They can’t abide by that. Leftists and queers have been called various shades of weird from the very beginning and we have a tough skin for it. We don’t care if you think we’re weird. But for conservatives, being called weird is devastating. It flies directly in the face of all of their cool guy protagonist complexes, tears down that aura of invincibility they’ve built up. Even worse, the harder they try to prove us wrong the more they end up proving us right. The doth protest too much mentality comes around and bites them firmly in the ass and centrists can watch and realize that, actually, yeah, these guys are weird.

I’m autistic. I grew up being considered weird and I’ve adopted that as a positive trait about myself. But the conservative Weird isn’t harmless like the kind social misfits inhabit. They’re Midwest Weird. They’re the Weird Uncle who family members know to avoid. They’re the Weird Kid who throws rocks at cats down the street. They aren’t socially accepted anymore. They’re being judged.

I don’t really “come out” to people in the traditional sense. I tend to actively seek out queer-friendly places and those places tend, by default, to attract other queer folks, so most of my friends either assume I’m also queer or don’t blink an eye when I mention my pronouns or attraction to multiple genders.

And if I’m not in a queer-friendly space, I stay more or less closeted. I haven’t come out in an official nature to anyone in years, and at this point I don’t plan on ever doing so again.

At the same time, “coming out” isn’t always an event. It’s not always an announcement or a pulling aside like you’re sharing a secret. Sometimes it’s just correcting people when they misgender me or mentioning my past girlfriend or making an offhand remark about my identity. In this way, the concept that I am continuously coming out to people is a very real one to me.

Most of the time it doesn’t really feel that way. Most of the time I’m comfortable enough that it just feels like part of my identity, no different than “coming out” about having cats or majoring in English.

But sometimes I’m not comfortable, and sometimes I have to make the very real decision whether to disclose those aspects of myself for the sake of authenticity or whether to keep those things private for my own safety.