Dec 10, 2020
How to Come Out in French
Before I was queer, I was French.
Leaving my cishet marriage was hard, but it set us both free to find more satisfying relationships.
When I look at my personal aesthetic (if I could call it that), I see something that gives me room to move through binaries.
There is something attractive about being the subject and the artist all at once; of being entirely in control of how I am seen, who sees me.
Estrogen and testosterone have historically been deployed to produce gender compliant citizens. What if, instead, they were agents of autonomy?
This was about protecting the new self growing its delicate way within me.
Reflecting on my personal work history, I’ve learned that searching for a job I love has often kept me from balance in my creative life.
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.
