My Freedom in the Word “Queer”
Photograph by Heather Suarez, featuring Heather Suarez and Ben Jastremski
I spent another late night taking “what is my sexuality” quizzes online. I used to take the quizzes to figure out my identity as if a multiple-choice puzzle could contain answers for all the complexities of human sexuality. Now, as someone confident in my non-straightness, I take them for kicks. I find an odd type of humor at laughing at what random websites think I should identify as. The first quiz told me that I am a lesbian. The second that I’m pansexual. The third that bisexual is the label for me. But the fourth quiz cracks me up the most. It’s one of those alignment tests that has four quadrants (in this case: homosexual, heterosexual, bisexual, and asexual), and I fell right on the line between bisexual and homosexual. This quiz knows just about as much as me about my sexuality.
My freshman year of high school, I figured that I liked girls. Unlike some other coming out stories, my coming out seems boring in comparison. I told my very liberal parents and primarily LGBTQ+ friend group at school that I identified as bisexual, and they all accepted me with open arms. I was one of the lucky queer youth, but something felt off to me every time I said I was bi. In the back of my head, I wondered if I would ever fall for a guy or if some magical, patriarchal force had convinced me that I needed to like men. By junior year, I skirted around the label bi by saying blanket statements like I’m not straight instead. I got crushes on girls and went on ice cream dates with guys, yet I constantly fretted about whether my identifying as bi made me a gay fraud. For a brief period of adolescent, queer panic, I told some friends that I was a lesbian, then redacted that statement a few months later. I realized that in the space of my brain where I stored my identity, I had a giant blank space for a label for my sexuality. Why couldn’t I find a label? Maybe because labels weren’t for me.
Labels help so many people. When I first came out as LGBTQ+, labels acted as a safety blanket, telling me that other people just like me existed. Without the label bisexual, I doubt I would’ve realized that a world of possibilities existed on the spectrum between gay and straight. The plus sign in LGBTQ+ expands that safety blanket to all sorts of queer people, like the simple mathematical symbol shouts we accept you and however you identify to the world. But, for me, the labels felt restricting. At 18, I’ve only been in one romantic relationship and forming my whole identity around a limited romantic experience stresses me out. And as I learned more about queer theory, the sheer amount of possible labels sent me into a tizzy.
Then I learned about the word queer. Its former use as a homophobic slur makes it an unusual choice for a type of label. Some older generations of LGBTQ+ folk recoil at hearing the word (for good reason). It carries a lot of baggage in its syllables. But queer is going through a modern version of the linguistic phenomenon of appropriation, where people take control of a language controlled by others. Parts of the LGBTQ+ community turned queer into an umbrella term that encompasses everyone who doesn’t consider themselves straight.
I started calling myself queer at the end of 2020. And I cannot understate the impact this word had on every fiber of my being. Suddenly, the unsureness about my sexuality faded away. I knew that I liked girls and maybe boys and people who fall outside the gender binary; the word queer embraces all those feelings for me. By saying I’m queer, I don’t feel the need to defend my identity to anyone. The word queer gave me the freedom of not confining myself to a label. Once I looked in the mirror and saw my lips utter the phrase I am queer, I knew I found my word.
My experience with my own queerness has included many late nights and car rides thinking about the very fact that I’m queer. It included hiding in the closet and organizing LGBTQ+ festivals for my school. It included crushes, awkward talking stages, and confiding in the girls I thought were cute to friends. Watching But I’m a Cheerleader and reading Call Me By Your Name. States of gay panic and boy craziness. A budding obsession with suits and Doc Martens. To me, these experiences feel queer.
So, I laugh when I read the results to the what’s my sexuality quizzes. They’re almost always wrong, saying that I’m bi or pan or a lesbian, but at the same time they’re very right. I’m kind of gay. I like women. And I’m here, I’m very queer, and I’m happier than I’ve ever been.
Sources
Rocheleau, Juliette. “A Former Slur Is Reclaimed, And Listeners Have Mixed Feelings.” NPR, 21 August 2019, https://www.npr.org/sections/publiceditor/2019/08/21/752330316/a-former-slur-is-reclaimed-and-listeners-have-mixed-feelings