Photo Courtesy of Alex Jackman / Unsplash
If you ask me what my least favorite thing about myself is, I’ll fake a pondering face for a couple of seconds and cynically answer that my least favorite thing about myself is that I’m gay. I always make the face because I want people to believe that I really had to think about it for a second, as if I were preparing a deep, introspective answer even though it took me about a quarter of a second to decide that I still do, in fact, hate being gay.
Growing up in suburban Massachusetts, it was difficult to find other people like me. There aren’t many gay people there – Provincetown being a major exception and, quite frankly, a misrepresentation of Massachusetts’s queer population.
So when people have the opportunity to talk to someone of the homosexual variety, the Q&A portion is inevitable. The Q&A is a universal queer experience; it’s the period of time where I get to explain my sexuality and identity in troublesome, grotesque and depressing detail to you, who just learned way more about Taylor Swift’s latest album than you’d ever care to.
This is something I’ve been through countless times, as the only queer person in my entire family (that we know of, at least. Great Aunt Jean has been living with her “friend” for 50 years now). It usually starts with the easiest, but most annoying, question: “How did you know?”
I hate to be obnoxiously stereotypical and say this, but it’s true: I was one of those kids who felt different from everyone else. I confidently challenged the boys who refused to play with girls on the playground. I wasn’t ashamed to admit that I wanted a hot pink Barbie convertible instead of a Hot-Wheels collection. My music taste was much more woman-centric than any young boy would dare to admit in the bizarrely conservative town where I grew up – it would be a gay person’s luck that I end up in a Republican town in the bluest state in the country, right?
My most vivid queer childhood memories usually involve painstakingly awkward conversations with relatives who felt like they always knew I was gay but were somehow trying to convince me I was actually straight by constantly asking me where my girlfriend was and how I was going to bring home a “beautiful wife” for Christmas one year. (My best friend is a pageant queen and model, so I did bring somebody beautiful home with me, just not romantically.) I also remember having many realizations that the men on the TV screen were more than just … cool. I never understood why my favorite character from “Victorious” was teenage bad boy Beck until I was abruptly awoken from a deep sleep at 3:30 in the morning one night and realized Beck was more to me than just really, really cool, as were a majority of the men I had been surrounded by. Those tingly feelings were starting to make a lot more sense.
I usually have to explain a lot of queer vernacular to avoid accidentally offending anyone on a personal level. Thankfully, these days I usually don’t have to explain “slay” to the non-queer people in my life, as that one has made its way into Gen-Z slang. The issue comes in when I have to explain that “serving c*nt” is just another way of saying someone looks really hot and not a misogynistic personal attack.
After that conversation, we usually move into the area of queer dating. “Is it hard to find somebody?” Please trust me when I say that not a single queer person on this entire Earth wants to get into that with you. Yes, it’s bad – and probably worse than you could ever imagine. Being from a small town where your coming out story is the headline of your high school’s gossip column for three months straight makes the so-called dating life of a queer person that much more unbearable.
Basically, picture that every single person you’ve dated has already had both sexual and romantic relations with every other single person that interests you within a 30-mile radius – that’s dating in the world of a gay man for you. It’s like the worst grocery store high school reunion you’ve ever experienced. You’ll message him on the stupid dating app you met on, you’ll vaguely recognize his name but not think too hard about it because you don’t want your opinion of him to be ruined, and then on your first date he’ll blurt out “Hey, by any chance, do you know – ?” And the answer is yes. I do know Bryce, and yes, his “Game Of Thrones” Khal Drago sex scene fetish is weird, and no, I did not think he was good in bed, either. And then you’ll sit in silence at the shitty Italian restaurant down the street from your childhood home, thinking about how this probably should have been a hookup instead of something romantic because you don’t even go to college near each other anyway.
Sometimes, the inverse happens, where an established date was mistakenly thought to be a hookup by the other party. Once, I met this man on yet another failed dating app, we arranged a date and he picked me up in front of my house. Before I even touched the stained velvet-covered seating of his sorry excuse for a ‘97 Corolla, I’m smacked in the face with an incredible amount of audacity: “Is your hole clean?”
There was not a second date, and the Chipotle run immediately after was unbearably awkward.
Throughout the romance conversation, I find people will start to talk about how they fantasize about their weddings: what they want to wear when they walk down the aisle and all the foo-foo centerpieces that they want to place in the middle of the table that’ll eventually get thrown into a landfill and kill a few turtles.
The things I find myself fantasizing about simply aren’t glamorous at all, like losing ten pounds so the guy who’s kind-of-out-of-my-league-but-not-quite will finally have eyes for me, and being “masc” enough to not be considered “femme” but also being femme enough to not be considered masc, both of which lead to concluding that the only option must be to f*ck myself.
The conversation of dating usually leads to another dreaded topic: sex talk. I have never related more to my snarky, degenerate high school sex education teacher than I do when this question comes up. Suddenly, I’m sitting in the hot seat while a way-too-curious straight person interrogates me on my sex life.
All of it can basically be summed up in one sentence; yes, it does go in there; yes, it hurts when it goes in there; no, I am not telling you how I like it because that’s weird; and if you really want to know how scissoring works, ask a lesbian. After that, I try to stick a fork in the conversation before we start veering into what I call “yikes” territory, because you can only ask so many questions about how it works before I have to regrettably start explaining what poppers are to you.
My first time at the doctor’s office after coming out was interesting. I’m sitting in my doctor’s examination room, everything is going great. Hearing is perfect, vision is good enough to warrant passing and everything seems to be intact. All of a sudden, it’s time for a sex talk. Alright, cool, he’s just going to ask the one question about ch
ecking for cancer.
“Why is it important to wear a condom?” he says. Okay. Pop quiz today, I guess. “Uh, to prevent diseases?” I said. He’s staring at me. “And?” he says. And? There’s an and? He waits some more. “To prevent pregnancy,” he said, annoyed.
Oh. Right. There are people that have to worry about that. Panicking, my mouth managed to outrun my thought process at this moment. “I’ve been having sex with men,” I said. Been having sex? I thought to myself. What do you mean by been? Is being queer just a casual once-in-a-while thing now? My cheeks were so hot, I was sure my skin was going to peel off.
He raised an eyebrow. “Oh, I’m sorry, I guess you don’t have to worry about that then.” he said. I ended up switching doctors after that.
The weirdest question for me is always “How did you come out?” Sometimes, I just say, “Oh, I don’t even remember” because it’s too much to explain, kind of like how when someone asks you how you are and you just say “Great!” because your actual answer would get you institutionalized. Why does it matter anyway? You’d be surprised how many straight girls I’ve offended when I say I don’t own any rainbow capitalism factory runoff.
But in case you were wondering, I was forced out of the closet two separate times before being coerced to come out with somebody who I’m not in love with anymore and has now blocked me on all forms of contact. So yeah, it’s a touchy subject.
I mean, are there any good things about being gay? Well, frats love me because all my friends are girls and I help their guy-to-girl ratio for parties. I can also really wow people with my ability to quote any fight scene from RuPaul’s Drag Race. I even have the privilege of helping my mom pick out a new coffee table for the living room because I “really have an eye for that kind of stuff.”
There’s always one story that comes to mind when I reflect on my queerness in a more positive light. It was my first Pride parade after the pandemic, and I was on a mission to be the hottest person in any vicinity I found myself strutting into that day.
Cropped $3 T-shirt from Savers? Check. Jean shorts so tight that I couldn’t pull them over my muffin top? Check. Platform Doc Martens with a heel so thick that I fell in the mall parking lot on my way down to the street? The most important check.
My friends and I found ourselves at the parade late at night after a day of collecting all of our “You’re gay, good job!” free merchandise from all of the corporations that had attended that day. As the floats were going by, drag queens and queer public figures were throwing candy and other trinkets into the crowd.
I was standing next to a little girl who was clutching her mom’s leg. Her eyes were illuminated by the rainbow fireworks in the sky and the candy storm raining down on her. Her mom was trying to catch all of the candy she possibly could, which is a difficult task to do when a four-year-old is attached to your limb. I started catching as much candy as possible, handing it to the little girl so fast that we ended up accidentally recreating the conveyor belt scene from “I Love Lucy.” Yet somehow, her eyes were still fixed on the queer celebration happening in front of her.
I locked eyes with the mom. “First Pride for her?” I asked.
She smiles. “Yeah, it’s her first time; she was so excited to come; she loves all the queens and the celebrations. She looks up to people like you guys.”
Suddenly, I found myself fighting against a tear welling up behind the rainbow-colored eyelids I had worked hours to paint on. “Oh no, don’t cry, you waited months to look this hot,” I thought to myself.
“Thank you for bringing her,” I said, hearing my voice give out a little.
The mom smiles again. “No, thank you guys. She’s gonna remember this forever.”
For just a moment, I didn’t hate being gay.
