queer story 1
My girlfriend likes to talk about selfies as political acts of queer visibility. I usually laugh in her face and post the selfie anyway because I need the likes and I’m desperate, but I do think there's some truth to it. I wonder sometimes if it weren’t for the visible queer people I found on tumblr and twitter and facebook would I have realised I too was part of this community?
I didn’t see many gay people growing up in Leicester. The pianist at our church was gay, an open secret that I sort of knew/not knew but eventually she left, feeling unwelcome. I know my mum told me why she left and I know that she thought it was wrong. My parents are strong advocates for equal rights and have been super supportive of me as I've come out and started dating, they took it all with the kind of loving casualness that has made this easy for me. Even so from a young age a message had been communicated that being gay was something to be hidden, not discussed and certainly not to be celebrated.
The playground told me that gay was a synonym for bad - as in that’s so gay - I used it all the time. As a teenager without a boyfriend and into my early twenties my family would joke that I was a lesbian if the subject came up. Sometimes my brother was teased about being gay because he too didn’t have a serious girlfriend until uni but I don’t think he felt a hot rush of embarrassment the way I did, how much I hated that lesbian was a punchline. It stopped for a bit when I did get a boyfriend at 15, I wrote in my diary mostly of a sense of relief at being ‘normal’ now. It took me another 12 years to fully understand the implications of what I was saying then.
These negative stories add up and become internalised. But slowly something shifted, in my late-teens/20s I would see butch women and think how cool they looked, how I wanted to have their clothes and their confidence. I met lesbians and gay women at uni and thought how fun they were, how much I wanted them to like me. I was the Marge Simpson "I just think they’re neat" of lesbian allies.
It took a long time to erase those negative connotations from childhood, a steady building up of positive examples of gay women, of happy lesbians couples I knew in real life, of Patsy and Delia in Call the Midwife, of the settled married couple in The Kids Are Alright, of Sarah Water's entire lesbian literature canon, heck even of Sandy Toksvig and Sue Perkins being loved by the nation with their short hair, funny quips and stunning collection of blazers. These representations piled on top of one another, steadily working away the perception I had that lesbian meant lonely, or bad, or hidden. That maybe it was a word I wanted for myself.
So to bring it back to selfies, forgive me for posting another picture of myself with short hair and wearing double denim, forgive my girlfriend’s instagram of the two of us smiling and kissing, forgive the #couplegoals and the #instagay, because it’s a narrative I want people to know and see: that gay means me, that gay means my true story, that gay does, after all, mean happy.
queer story is an ongoing narrative on coming out and being part of the queer community
If you have a tiny narrative to share please get in touch at thetinynarrative@gmail.com