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Like trauma and illness, dealing with explicit hate is different as a child versus as an adult. As someone who once identified as straight, I find myself less likely to care about openly homophobic comments. I have the emotional distance to judge those comments as what they are—reflective of the speaker; hateful, pointless. Still, I hoped the walls built in response to racist comments, in response to abusive comments from family, didn’t have to be built up to guard my sexuality, too.
* * *
As someone who grew up buffeted by abusive comments, it took me years to realize that I get to define myself—that others’ limitations of my mind, body, or abilities aren’t real.
Unlike my ethnicity, unlike my family, being in a relationship with her represented freedom: it was something I got to choose. I hoped to preserve its innocence.
When I arrived in rural Indiana, prior to Trump’s election, I saw a polarization that didn’t exist in New York City, where the default assumption seemed to be that people were whatever they were: a mix of many different traits and identities. I didn’t hear academic buzzwords like intersectionality used in conversation. If anything, diversity and difference were the norm. I loved that freedom to simply be, and to allow others the same courtesy. I’d come to take it for granted.
In Indiana I felt pressure to label myself, to identify with either the straight or queer community, and to declare myself right away, as others did. This occurred academically and socially.
In my initial encounters with peers, I was surprised by how many identified vocally as queer—surprised not because they were queer, but because they felt compelled to declare aspects of their identity so immediately. It felt akin to her telling me, I’m straight.
After we became friends, I asked one of my peers about her strident queerness. This is my identity in Lafayette, she responded knowingly. It isn’t my identity in Portland, or Seattle.
As someone who has never identified with or trusted group identities, who only figured out as a thirty-year-old how to say the order of the letters in LGBTQ correctly out loud, it felt dishonest to claim knowledge of a collective with which I didn’t identify. Yet it felt dishonest, too, to claim no experience of knowing what it is to love a woman.
My aversion to group identities is a lifelong trait. I’ve never encountered a group whose rules I felt I could wholly abide or endorse. I’m wary of subjugating individual consciousness to the whims of a group. I wonder if any group label can truly allow individuals to embrace all their complexities and quirks, without compromise.
I’ve often been surprised, and touched, by the protectiveness and generosity of those who identify vocally as queer. I’ve seen how queerness can make space for others, to exist as they are. Yet I’ve seen the downsides, too: the ways that protectiveness can lead to overdetermination of others’ identities, to dismissiveness, to gatekeeping, to control.
In relation to my sexuality, I’m hesitant to accept any dominant narrative as my own. Internally, my beliefs and values didn’t shift significantly. What I dread, instead, is confronting shifts in how my identity is perceived externally, and retold to me. Those most likely to tell me who I am have been those who identify as queer, not straight.
For myself, I believe labels applied by others do not accurately capture my experience. I believe that for many women, including myself, sexuality is fluid, not binary and divided.
I feel the same way about my sexuality as I do about being Asian-American, or being female. That I don’t move through my day thinking of myself as Asian or as female, until someone else treats me noticeably as such.
I’m impatient with the need to divide identity into categories, for convenience, for the sake of the outside gaze. I think of myself as infinitely changeable, not as a fixed entity. I believe in possibility. I didn’t think of my relationship as being primarily same-sex in nature, until I saw how we were perceived by others, when together in public. It is only under the Gaze—of strangers, or at times, each other—that she or I remembered.
Behind closed doors, too, it was undeniable that we were both women. Gender was a part of our relationship that added its own complexities, joys, and confusions. Yet that—gender—wasn’t the primary foundation of our relationship, either, any more than sex was.
* * *
Unlike her, I hadn’t been tortured by my sexuality. My life had been overshadowed, instead, by the illnesses and violence of my family.
I wish I could take away all your pain, she told me once.
I told her in turn, I wish you didn’t have to bear witness to it.
But I told her, too, because I know it is true, that it will always be a part of me. That pain doesn’t go away. Yet her willingness to see all of me, without turning away, and her desire to do so with care, helped me heal.
She was the first person with whom I could be both unapologetically strong, and unapologetically broken and hurt, too. She could see that my strength and weakness originated from the same place.
When she asked me later what I wanted from our relationship, I told her, I’m so used to love that takes. I want love that doesn’t take.
* * *
When she told her father that she’d never known love like this before, his response was gentle.
That kind of love comes along once in your lifetime, if you’re lucky, he told her. Cherish it.
I, too, hadn’t known that kind of love could exist—without compartments, without barriers, just the fusion of all the things. She was the person with whom I could go to raves or symphonies, wilderness or cities, museums or readings.
I wouldn’t want to subtract any one element, or to over-privilege any singular aspect. To do so would be reductive. Something—the intangibles of chemistry, perhaps—would be lost.
I don’t identify with either male or female, she told me. She recognized androgyny as a state of being in herself. Even though, of course, I’m female. In other moments she said jokingly, I was basically a little boy when I was a kid.
Unlike her, I hadn’t been mistaken for a boy. But I, too, believe gender is a social construct. I, too, believe in the androgynous mind—particularly for art. Being an artist is my gender, Mary Ruefle said in a Q&A, and I agree. With her I believed more strongly than ever that love itself is ungendered. Love is intersectional.
