Rules for Being Gay

I only really came out as gay to one person. For about six months, Laney* and I passed notes about girls we thought were hot, gay sex acts we made our Sims do, and the latest episodes of A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila. We got to first and second base at a sleepover in my basement, during a two-person game of truth-or-dare she initiated. But she told her friends I was bisexual, and they told their friends, and those friends told everyone else. Seventh graders are brutal.

This was 2007, well before gay marriage, and I was the first openly gay kid at my school. But oddly enough, coming out made me more popular. People still spread rumors about me, but that was nothing new— I have Tourette’s, so I’d gotten used to kids saying I was demon possessed. The difference was that while I was embarrassed by my tics, I was proud of being gay. It gave me a structure to rebel against, and a sense of identity right around the time most kids start looking for one.

There’s no shortage of rules for how to be a straight girl, but I couldn’t seem to get any right. Boys laughed when I tried to flirt, and when I bought the spray tan Teen Vogue recommended, I just ended up sweating orange streaks. Being gay had just as many rules, but they were a lot easier to follow, not least because there was no one around who could tell if I was doing it wrong.

When I started middle school, the custody agreement between my parents changed, the first of many changes in a protracted court battle between them. I now had to spend overnights with my dad, which was a nightmare in every way but one: my mom getting me a cell phone. I only had one person to call, and my dad watched closely to make sure I didn’t: this left me plenty of prepaid minutes to spend online. Mobile data was slow then, so the text-heavier the website the better. My favorites were Scarleteen, Livejournal, and WikiHow.

I read guides on how to meet girls, and bought every rainbow accessory I could find at my local Hot Topic. When it came time to come out to my mom, I turned to all three sites for advisement: this backfired before I got the chance to tell her, when I left my Firefox tabs open on the family computer. I cried all day and holed myself up in my room, even though she accepted me being gay. I was relieved to no longer hide it, but there was just something about family disrupting the sanctity of my online world. Of course, when I finally emerged from under the covers, I went back to the family computer and back onto LJ. We didn't have "posting through it" as a phrase back then, but the practice came naturally.

As I got older, I started getting rules from Tumblr. Initially I just followed lesbian aesthetic blogs, retweeted pictures of butches in snapbacks and femmes in spiky heels. But the lesbian blogs were just one degree of separation from the trans blogs, and they all came with new sets of rules about gender and sexuality.

By the end of my sophomore year of high school, I had five or six trans friends, all of them transmasculine. A local gay-straight alliance president set up a meetup for all the GSA presidents in the county, and it felt like every time I went, more of them had come out as trans guys. One of them even had a boyfriend, a gay (not even bisexual!) guy, which I knew was possible in theory, but had never seen in practice. At the time, I was a butch dyke who had recently had my world shattered by falling for a straight cis guy. I didn't see myself in their relationship, but I couldn't stop thinking about it. Like, why didn't anyone tell me that was allowed?

It was through Tumblr discourse that I learned you were allowed to be trans even if you didn’t literally, constantly feel like you were in the “wrong body”. (I would eventually come to understand the “wrong body” narrative as a rhetorical device for extracting healthcare from medical gatekeepers —- more on this another time). Scrolling through photos of hot trans men, I allowed myself to consider “what if that was me?”. The bold, all caps posts about how you should NEVER bind with ace bandages inspired me to grab some from my mother’s medicine cabinet, and I took my first ever mirror selfie in boymode.

The rules I got from Tumblr weren’t always good ones. I’ve talked about that extensively elsewhere. But gay and trans people online have always served as models of possibility for me, and it’s a responsibility I try to pay forward. I’m never going to put a “minors DNI” label on my Twitter, even though my posts are chaotic and definitely not for children. That just seems like too much of a fuck you to my adolescent self, who was always looking to queer adults online to figure out who to be.

I gossiped a lot more about these experiences on my episode of Jolene’s podcast When A Guy Has A Really Fucked Gender, which you should really listen to if you’re interested in the nuances of trans identity development. Or if you're just a voyeur.

*Not her real name. Her family was and is very Catholic: as far as I know, she’s straight now.

I’m Watching

I just finished Season 3 of Righteous Gemstones, one of the few TV shows where I actually have weird parasocial attachments to the characters. This season is kind of mid, but there were some genuinely heartwarming moments, and some crucial Kelvin/Keefe moments happen that I won’t spoil for you. I really don’t do the shipper thing anymore because I’m an adult, but I’m going to be searching AO3 for fanfic now. Like, it was that exciting to me.

On My Mind

There was Twitter discourse yesterday about a therapist who said people-pleasing is manipulative. Of course, people jumped in to say that people-pleasing is a trauma response, and that the intent isn’t to control others. I’m not in the habit of judging people for being deferential or approval-seeking, g-d knows I’d be a hypocrite if I did. But I don’t see how we’re supposed to square “it’s a trauma response and there was no ill intent” with “mental illness isn’t an excuse/impact over intent”. Maybe this is a sign that the online zeitgeist is moving towards a more contextual understanding of human behavior — huge if true! But I fear this is an instance of survivors with “internalizing” symptoms upholding their own innocence, at the expense of those of us who yell, or ghost, or take drugs to melt the world away. Fawn is a trauma response, but so is fight, flight, and freeze. What if all of us are flawed in the ways we respond to fear, and all of us still deserve care even if we aren't healed?

I don't think anyone needs to stay friends or lovers with someone who manipulates or controls them, and it annoys me that I feel the need to repeatedly say this. I'm just always like - what about the mad people who aren't always harmless, who can be manipulative or harsh or out of line? What does it mean that "mental health advocates" are so eager to distance themselves from that? It just upsets me, on an abolitionist basis and on a basic human level - I know I wouldn't want to be judged for the way I act at my most extreme mental states. I think few people would.

Transgender Marxism (2021) mentioned!