Queering My Language, Queering Myself

Cautionary Poly: Nicole Amandla Stenberg Opens Up About Her G...

Queering My Language, Queering Myself

By Kayla Whaley

I entered high school at a time when the biggest debate around gay rights was if being gay was a choice, a lifestyle that one could veer from at any time if only they weren’t so morally depraved. Many activists tried for years to get people to recognize that there was no choice. Gayness wasn’t a “lifestyle,” they insisted, it was how they were born.

That was (and is) a completely valid narrative, but it became the sole narrative many of us ever encountered. (Lady Gaga’s gay anthem was called “Born This Way” for a reason, after all.) Gay folks—and the movement was still mostly gay folks in the mid-aughts, or seemed to be from a then-outsider position—talked about how they’d always known, how there had never been a question about their orientation. They had been gay all along and that wasn’t ever going away.

I believed their experiences. I believed that what they said was important, and that I had no right to question their own lives. But I should’ve questioned to what extent their experiences reflected all queer experiences. I should have questioned whether a single narrative could ever encompass the whole.

I wonder if I would have figured out my own queerness sooner if I had.

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It was easy to call myself straight. It felt a true thing to claim. I liked boys. I’d never crushed on any girls, or been attracted to girls, or kissed a girl.

I thought about kissing girls—and doing more than kissing girls—when I was alone at night and had the dark to hide my blush and the movements of my hands, but that was easily explained. I knew what girls’ bodies looked like because I was a girl. It was easier to picture, I told myself, that’s all. (I didn’t know then that there were girls whose bodies weren’t like mine. I didn’t yet know that trans girls or intersex girls or nonbinary girls existed.)

I was straight. There was no hesitation. I knew I was straight for the same reason gay people knew they were gay: because we’d been born this way.

And then, at some point, that knowing slipped away without my even noticing. I knew I wasn’t queer, but I suddenly started to doubt I was straight.

That doubt started small, little more than a subconscious tickle buried under my many layers of active thoughts. Sometimes the doubt would stretch up, stretch until it coalesced from an inkling to a fully-formed question: what if I’m gay? The words would form in my head unbidden. My breath would catch and my face would heat and I’d glance around as if to make sure no one else could hear. But after a moment of slight panic, I’d swat the words away like gnats in summertime.

Eventually, the thought shifted. What if I’m bi? were harder words to ignore. They appeared more often, echoing louder and for longer no matter how hard I swatted at them. They felt bigger somehow. Heftier.

When I first voiced the thought to a friend, I phrased my words like a statement but spoke them like a question: I think I might be bi? There was still no surety, no knowing. Only more doubt. Always doubt. Always questions and fear and second-guessing. Maybe I was a straight girl who just liked to fantasize about girls. Maybe I just wanted to be queer for some reason: attention? “cool” factor?? special snowflake-dom??? Because even though I’d finally admitted my sexual attraction to girls, I’d still never crushed on one. I still didn’t feel queer, let alone queer enough to count.

I settled on “bisexual and heteroromantic” the first time I came out publicly. I talked about how our culture’s inseparability of sexual and romantic attraction had confused my own understanding of my identity. I said that thinking about two orientations rather than one helped me find labels—words—that fit me. And that was all true, for a time anyway.

I dropped the heteroromantic relatively soon after I’d claimed it. I didn’t announce the rejection to the world or even to myself. It was barely a conscious decision at all. The word was a sweater that looked good when I tried it on at the store, but that suddenly didn’t sit right once I got home. So I tossed it away, my last linguistic connection to straightness.

A funny thing has happened since I’ve stopped claiming “hetero” in any of its possible incarnations: I’ve gotten queerer.

For one thing, I’m much more drawn to and attracted to women and nonbinary folks than men now, but it’s more than that, too. Now when I consider dating, I think about dating women. I think about sharing a future home with a woman. I think about us unwinding with hot chocolate and TV. I imagine us holding hands at dinner and curling up together at night. We both wear dresses at the wedding.

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Sexuality can absolutely be fluid, and maybe that’s what has happened to me. Maybe I’ve been slowly but surely moving further and further from straight. But I think there’s more to it than that. I think the language I’ve used at various points to describe my sexuality has affected my actual sexuality as much as my understanding of it. As my language has gotten queerer, so has my attraction, fantasies, thoughts, worldview, and very being.

Language is never neutral. The words we choose, the order in which we arrange them, the assumptions and associations we embed in those both heard and spoken: there’s power in language and how we wield it. The variety of labels I’ve considered, chosen, rejected, and worn have all impacted how I view my sexuality and how my sexuality manifests.

I still claim bisexual, but more often than not these days I primarily claim queer. I like who I am—who I’m becoming—now that I’ve embraced my queerness. But I’ve only been able to do that by embracing (and discarding) a series of words first.