But What If I’m Just…Something?

A tired attempt to make sense of the over-labeled, under-loved, and exhausting world of being queer and trying to survive becoming a spectacle.

A Light Introduction

I’ve struggled with whether or not to write anything about my queer experience (especially in Utah) for a while now, mainly for two reasons. One being that there are inevitably some negative and angry feelings that arise when I talk about this, and I don’t think anything written in anger can achieve peace. The second being that, frankly, I’ve never thought of my experience as anything worth sharing.

I’ve decided to at least try. I was inspired by finishing Gay Rights and the Mormon Church, by Gregory Prince. I thought that it did an excellent job at handling the situation evenly and with all the nuance that could be asked of such a monumental coverage as the longstanding tensions between the LDS church and the LGBTQ community, both of which I belong to and have struggled to navigate accordingly.

I don’t really know how I’m going to boil down my thoughts into something cohesive or coherent. I don’t know if I can. I don’t know if writing any of this down will speak to anyone or even say anything important.

But I guess that I’m going to try.

Part One: Being Othered and Belonging to the Others

I didn’t go to Salt Lake Pride this year. There are some serious tensions around queer people right now politically, and I just plain…didn’t feel like it. It’s exhausting. I’ll try to explain.

In years past I’ve gone with my cousins, and last year with my sister. (Hi, Lucy!)

Salt Lake’s Pride is a uniquely well-made pride festival: it’s family-friendly (the adults-only areas are sectioned off and require wristbands to get into), very clean, and set up in such a way that protesters can’t even get close to the venue, and thus are reduced to only being able to harass you while you’re in line waiting to get in. I’ve always enjoyed going, but last year things were a little different.

We were sitting on the ground near the food trucks, sweaty legs pressed miserably into sticky grass after a good two hours of wandering the stalls. I’d bought a t-shirt, Lucy had bought a star pendant, and we had all bought delicious cuban food. We were idly people-watching, drinking as much water as we could get our hands on, and generally decompressing from the crowded affair that is the pride festival.

And then we started talking. One of my cousins, for whom it was her second year attending, finally spoke up.

“I don’t know why, but I feel like when I leave pride, I leave feeling kind of…worse feeling. Like I feel good, but I also feel sad.”

We all startled at first, and then agreed.

The feeling we had all quietly acknowledged was that Pride is distinctly othering and limiting. Yes, you get to go and feel safe and validated and normalized, and at the same time the entire event is set up in a way that makes you feel singled out, different, and stereotyped. There’s plenty of room for rainbows—there’s a lot less room for nuance.

The painful truth of being queer is that, at one time or another, you will feel deeply othered from the people around you. It might be a literal verbal thing where it’s clear you aren’t welcome, or it can just be a subtle and quiet implication. That’s where a lot of the love at Pride can come from—there’s power from belonging to the othereds. Like yes, you’re different and a lot of people think you’re bad or wrong, but they think that about all of us! That can feel kind of special. I think it’s not really a bad thing; but I do think it can transform into a slippery slope of accepting the label of other. When we do that, we unwittingly close ourselves off from ever achieving true equality.

I think that’s where the melancholy my cousins and I were feeling was coming from. The idea that, for lack of a better term, many of the people around us had given up the fight and taken up the word other or different as a symbol of honor. I understand why. It’s tempting and can certainly lead to unique bonds in the community, but I think ultimately it pushes us further away from the goal of making queerness normal.

Part Two: Over-indexing on Identity

If there’s one problem that the queer community struggles with internally, it’s the labels. Queerness (actually, just sexuality) is a spectrum, not a linear progression. The problem is that some people embrace the specificity of their own spectrum too far, and make pride so accessible that it loops right back around to inaccessible.

That’s how you end up with the annual posts on social media that are always some form of “remember that X group is welcome at pride! It’s not just Y group!” or “ABC is just as valid as XYZ, even if DEF is not the same as GHI!”

People feel the need to justify their occupation of queer spaces with the exact “credentials” to feel validated, which is a shame. You don’t owe an explanation of your identity to anyone—the feeling of obligation towards identification is a little counterintuitive.

That’s part of why I don’t really label anymore. I used to, and if people really press me for details (as long as they’re polite about it, because frankly it’s a little weird if they keep asking), I’ll give the same answer I did as when I first came out: I’m probably something along the lines of bisexuality. But if I get to choose how I’m explaining myself, I say I’m queer and I leave it at that.

I don’t really want to fly any flag other than the rainbow, and if people want me to prove my queerness to them, then they’ve got the wrong idea of what pride is all about.

Part Three: Being Queer in the Church

This is a major source of frustration and exhaustion for me. It’s the last sticking point in an otherwise rock-solid set of beliefs that hurts me every Sunday at least, if not more during one of the required religion classes at BYU. Families are important and kids deserve to grow up in stable and loving homes? Agreed! Everyone deserves the utmost respect and kindness, regardless of any other circumstance? Totally. There is a God in heaven who loves and knows me personally? Wonderful. The only way to get into the highest tier of heaven is to be married, a right which I am also denied?

…What?

This breaks my heart. It really does.

It hurts. It hurts so badly to be told that I was created just the way I am, that God loves me for who I am, and that the way I was created is also packed with an inherent and evil sin. That the only chance I have at a perfect salvation is to never engage in a romance on this earth and hope I am granted a partner in heaven. That is a shattering ‘truth’ to be beaten over the head with time and time again. (To those who try to argue to me that, as a queer individual, I should just date a man, I say: you are missing the point.)

Let me be clear: the church has taken massive strides in progressive attitudes from where they started. They have denounced conversion therapy, do not encourage trying to force oneself into a hetero marriage, and insist that God loves everyone.

But they still say that I cannot be married in the temple, and they still say that if I am ever to have a relationship with a woman, that I have committed a grievous sin. You can be openly queer at church. It’s just not recommended for anyone who wants to feel normal and not at a spiritual arm’s length.

Whether or not the church’s official stances count as properly progressive, there is still a culture of intolerance at worst and discomfort at best about queerness in most churches. (I hope you’ll allow me the grace of painting with a broad brush here—I can’t speak for every experience, and thus every experience is just going to have to suffer the indignity of my own limits.)

The thing that hurts me the most is the Family Proclamation to the World, which isn’t doctrine but treated as such, and specifies that marriage is a sacred thing only between a man and a woman. I’ve had sunday school teachers pull up statistics “proving” that suicide rates were higher amongst the kids of queer couples than straight couples (data that was inaccurate and not well collected), I’ve had seminary teachers insist that loving gay people was something that must be specified as “hate the sin, love the sinner,” and that everyone should be clear that their love of the person was not “supporting their lifestyle”.

My worst experience by far was at BYU, which should of course be clarified is a part of the church but is not THE church, and therefore can’t speak for it. That said, my “Eternal Families” class just plain sucked. And it’s required by BYU as a GE, so it’s not like I could just skip out on it.

Where to begin? I had to watch an hour-long panel video by an organization not affiliated with the church advocating for conversion therapy (an outlawed practice in most states in the US by now), sat through lecture after lecture about how marriage was only between a man and a woman, and worst of all: endured tearful testimonies from my peers about how marriage was the best thing to ever happen to them, or how they knew that, in the next life, the sin of same-sex attraction would be washed away.

I didn’t know what to do; so I said nothing, took the class credit, and walked away on the last day without doing anything at all.

Part Four: I Want to be Boring!

I’m not living a whirlwind movie life. Not even close. In fact, I’d wager that most human beings on this planet aren’t.

…so why is it that I feel like I’m boring? And worse, why do I feel like that’s a bad thing?

The simple answer is that in order to make queerness feel more palatable for audiences, most presentations of it in media make it out to be this grand and magical thing. Your existence is fighting for your rights, standing out from a crowd, and leading by example. If it’s not that, then it’s just being cooler than everyone else because you’re different. (See? It always comes back to that.)

The narrative has become this sort of “plain vanilla vs every other flavor” vibe, which is weird. I’d rather it be just normal to be anything.

The truth is, even the most well-intentioned media that frames someone queer as cool because of that queerness has already messed up, because they’ve still made us other.

Another common place to find this othering is in media that does it through metaphor, usually by making the queer people something other than human. (and boy, is THAT a can of worms.) Sometimes this narrative is more directed towards people of different ethnicities too, and that’s not just as bad, it’s worse.

Part Five: Why Don’t I Like Talking About This?

For a number of reasons, but first and foremost there are three that guide my tight lips.

1. I don’t feel like I deserve to feel as hurt about being queer as others. As I’ve mentioned before, I know people who have been kicked out of their homes or ostracized from friends or family over being queer. The worst that’s happened to me is that I’ve been called slurs a couple of times and lost a few friends via drifting when they got weird about it. To claim I’ve been hurt as badly as others isn’t true, and it makes it hard for me to feel like I’ve got a valid opinion on it.
2. People like to weaponize the narrative. Any side of the argument wants to use people like me to try and argue for or against any given point. My opinions, choices, and lifestyle are not meant to be an example. I don’t think they SHOULD be! Everyone should live the way that works for them. To be used as an argument for something that I’m not advocating for is exhausting. Straight church members want to use me as an argument for the “quiet celibate penitent” lifestyle. Queer members want to use me as a “look she’s totally in a cult” example. I want to be left alone.
3. This shouldn’t be a big part of my identity. I’m a whole person, and there’s a whole lot more to me than my romantic tendencies. What about my love of movies, dogs, the outdoors, friends and family? My sense of humor? My artistic abilities? My poetry? My schooling, my home, all of it? When you mention that you’re queer, it gets stamped onto everyone’s mental file of you much larger than anything else. It drowns out your personality, and sometimes it feels like people throw out the whole person in favor of their shiny new rainbow toy.

The unfortunate truth about being queer and talking about it is that no matter what, you’ve become an ambassador to anyone who has questions, opinions, or even just thoughts about it. You make yourself out to be a bastion of this identity, and they either consciously or unconsciously base their opinions about how a queer person should or shouldn’t be around that. That’s a lot of pressure!

One Last Point: Queer Joy and Disclaimers for all of the Above

I want to say this before I end.

I like being queer, and I also don’t think about it nearly as often as this post would suggest.

Because, at the end of the day, it’s a tiny facet of the massive kaleidoscope that makes up both me and any other queer person.

It’s just a part of my life that happens to come with unique challenges, and I’ve mostly been able to take those in stride.

I thought I’d write about it because I don’t think anyone’s got a monopoly on the subject, and I also have noticed a pretty distinct lack of empathy in a lot of other “queer rants” I’ve come across.

HEAR ME NOW AND HEAR ME WELL: we are all human beings doing our very best to process and understand the world in the way that works best for us and the people we care about. I truly believe that the vast majority of people who don’t already support queer people are just dealing with life in a way that makes sense to them, and I can’t fault someone for not knowing or understanding something they’ve never experienced. I also think that on the other side of the argument, queer people who lean into the narrative that all cishet people are boring, lame, weird, or bad are IN THE WRONG. That’s a weird coping mechanism they have, and I wish they wouldn’t do that.

At the end of the day, it’s everyone’s first time on earth. I don’t see why we have to be nasty about it to each other.

And if you’ve made it this far…

Thank you for reading. I don’t know what help this has been, if any. But thank you for taking the time to hear my perspective and thoughts. It’s been nice putting them somewhere other than my head for a change.

Have a lovely day.