queer story 2 - chloe
chloe's queer story
You’re on a first date and, of course, it comes up. You’re at lunch with the only other lesbian at work and since this is your third such meeting, you broach it, gently. You’re with a group of queer friends and it’s 1am and you’ve heard their stories countless times already but you’ve had four pints and you want to relive the shared trauma, the sadness, the relief, the joy. You’re in a bar and a man, rejected and with scorn and doubt licking the edges of his words, demands to know.
When did you know you were gay? Or his version: when did you decide?
Here’s one story I could tell. I was 13. I was watching Charlie’s Angels (the iconic sequel, Full Throttle) at a sleepover. Cameron Diaz, bold and blonde with cheekbones like I’d never seen before, sat atop a bucking bronco. She writhes and shrieks and pouts and my knickers were suddenly so sticky I thought I’d wet myself. I sat for a few moments, silently mortified, before disappearing to the loo. It took me years before I could look back at that moment and attribute words to the potent, shameful and confounding feeling — the sudden urge to watch Cameron Diaz, be watched by Cameron Diaz, be Cameron Diaz. These days, of course, I’m a Lucy Liu kind of woman.
Let’s try option two. I was 16. The first person I had sex with, a boy, noticed that I always blushed when I talked about this one girl at my new sixth form. He asked if I fancied her and umm well ha maybe I guess yeah? Turns out he fancied her too. We spent the next year finding rare moments to fuck — the three of us — when his mum was out, when her boyfriend was away, when I wasn’t at one of my numerous Saturday jobs. It wasn’t clunky or awkward; it was weirdly normal. For years I cited those times as the best sex I’d ever had: in a pot-saturated attic, to Alien Ant Farm, with a woman who now has a mortgage and a husband and children. But I didn’t have the language, the framework, or the self-possession to understand what that experience made me: I’d watched too much American Pie and threesomes were simply shorthand for being “not frigid”. A marker of what a woman would do, not what she wanted to do. You can’t be what you can’t see.
Try again. I was 24 and fresh out of an emotionally exhausting relationship with a man with whom I’d spent two years too many. I worked in the student movement and I was surrounded by frank but kind, radical but earnest young women who took me in as their own (and leant me dozens of books). I was constantly agog at their otherness, their openness — it buoyed me and I felt validated. I’d found myself in a gay girl gang for the first time, which was about more than just nights out and drunk snogs — though that was lovely, too — it was about a newfound sense of agency, visibility and possibility. Okay, let’s stick with 24.
So first comes the feeling — second comes the terminology. I tried bisexual for a while, but it didn’t quite fit. It took a few years to get to grips with lesbian. But I found my home in queer. Queer is the group of friends I made at 24; the student activists who are now building new communities in the charity sector, in politics, in the US and in Australia. Queer is the group of friends I made at 26; the witty weirdos I spend my evenings laughing in pub basements with. Queer is accepting and anarchic. Queer doesn’t ask many questions but it provides a lot of answers. It’s an umbrella, but it doesn’t shelter — it makes me feel seen.
A lot of people talk about wanting to “look beyond labels” (usually straight people, go figure) and even vodka brands shout at me from the arches of the tube that labels are for bottles, not people. But my label was my liberation. Words can limit, sure. But they can also legitimise. It’s not about categories, it’s about communities. And while language can fail us, as it so often does, it’s democratic: language expands to fit those who use it. It was designed to be stretched, so go ahead, have a play. My guess is that anyone who tells you you don’t “need” a label to explain your existence, has never had to do it.
So when did I know I was gay? When I finally found the word for it.
Chloe is trolling Tories by day and telling stories by night. One part of The Lol Word you follow her on twitter for updates on her current edinburgh fringe show.
queer story is an ongoing narrative on coming out and being part of the queer community