Jun 30, 2020
This Green Velvet Jacket Helped Me Understand My Nonbinary Identity
It’s about being able to say, oh, gender? It’s no big deal. I just threw this gender on today.
It’s about being able to say, oh, gender? It’s no big deal. I just threw this gender on today.
The Outsiders’ world was the one in which I wanted to belong.
For all the meaningful internal changes I’d made since coming out, the city and space and circles I occupied were keeping me tethered.
It both thrills me to watch myself as others might watch me in the world, and instills in me a deep loneliness—a grief that reminds me I am so helplessly stuck inside of myself.
In the water, what you are called can change. And words, like water, will dissolve.
“It was this Islam, the Islam of authenticity, community, justice, and love, that showed me how to be a truer version of myself.”
As euphoric as my queer epiphany felt, I’d had it as my mother lay sick. It felt like I was reentering the world as my mother was leaving it.
For queer writers, the discovery of this literary lineage is essential to our very existence, to our very expression of self. We can’t find the words without them.
Well, what does it mean to be a boy or a girl? The answer so often is, simply: I don’t know. And I’m not sure that it actually matters, anyway.
What was I getting out shame, anyway? So I walked away from it all: going to church, reading scripture, prayer, even the Christian music I loved so much.
There was nowhere to go back to. Oklahoma was out of the question, always out of the question. But then, where was home?
There’s nothing more queer than cobbling together something fabulous out of very little.
My trans friends rarely come home, and when they do, it is for brief bursts of time. They question why I’ve chosen to keep living here.
I want to believe that I inherited too ways of feeling joy, ways of finding pleasure, ways of being with other queers in raucous and wild ways.
I was leaving femininity behind, grateful to have an example like my grandpa to grow toward.
Who are we if not kin through our deviations? Street hustler and femme queen, macho and maricóncito, variations on a chulo aesthetic.
I know that I’m living in a ticking clock, and all of this—dinners with my parents, peaceful conversations—will likely be gone one day.
For me, homosexuality is an invitation to opt out, to abstain from the trappings of heteronormativity, a gift of eternal boyhood.
I don’t want to take time away from your book, she said, but the book could wait. My writing was always there. She might not be.
Trans people have rights because we’re human—not because we’re special. So why does having those rights recognized require a flood of trans tears?
