Lately, I’ve been waiting for the rain and grey skies to move along so that summer can really begin. There it is, that familiar feeling that life is about to happen for me, just over there, when…
“You always say that everything is about to change,” a friend said to me recently. I cocked my head towards him, lips pouty with indignance.
“No, I don’t.”
When I thought about it further, I changed my answer. “Yeah, I guess I do say that a lot.”
But I feel like that a lot. I wonder if maybe the feeling is hope. It’s all about to happen. Other times, fear. Because when change does happen—because it does inevitably, always happen—I cling to what I know with the grip of a small, tantruming child, even if it’s what I wanted.
What plagues me is the feeling that if I would just get the cog out of the machine, or put in the right cheat code, or open door number x, the perfect, authentic life would be there for me, laid out like a feast. I could run towards it, stuff it into my gluttonous mouth. There would be no more wondering; I could know for certainty I had arrived.
Living in this waiting game, time flies. Moments crack and fizzle out. There is always a next but never a now.
I love summer because its atmosphere welcomes this novel idea that nothing much matters beyond what’s right in front of me—a solace for my constant need to Try V Hard.
Pride Pop-Off kicked off summer for me for the second year in a row. I spent weeks of my energy exclusively on the pride block party I organize in my little hometown, and it ate. Besides even more people than last year attending, we raised double the money for the local LGBTQIA+ center (with a Dunk-A-Straight fundraiser in a dunk tank), and I was able to pay all of the drag queens a great rate.
As a white cis queer women (I feel most comfortable with the label queer but could also be called bi or pansexual), I questioned myself often this year as I planned and marketed the event. Who am I to throw a Pride event? Who am I to write on this topic? I don’t want to center myself in the conversation, so I haven’t written much about my queerness publicly. However, I also see how invalidating my own queer experience further feeds the division within the community, a division I’ve seen worsen this year—probably because the current administration has the LGBTQ community under constant fear and stress.
Unfortunately that stress has pushed queerness into the arena of the oppression Olympics—everyone arguing over who has it worse. (Lesbians vs bisexuals is my own personal dreaded arena.) Of course, each one of us deserves to be seen and acknowledged in our specific struggles. Queer people are not a monolith, and there are absolutely some queer people that experience greater burdens than others (trans folks and queer POC for example). Certain presentations of queerness have more privilege because they are more palatable to the public. Certain (straight-passing) relationships are afforded a respect that obviously-gay relationships are typically not. I could go on, but none of this is groundbreaking discussion.
And as we obsess over our differences, the exact systems we’re desperate to separate ourselves from get stronger, better at opposing us all. This binary and divisive thinking, born of the hetero-patriarchy, wiggles its way into homosexuality in unsettling ways, and it hurts us all.
This is why queerness is inherently and systematically political.
This is why living your queerness out loud is revolution.
This is why I don’t want to hide, and I don’t want you to hide, even if your queerness is messy and still evolving—like my own.
What gives me the most hope is that at the many Pride events I’ve attended this month, the division I find online is nowhere to be found. Only love and celebration and so much fun. The threats I received in the comments of the ads I ran for Pride Pop-Off were empty (and pathetic). The officer I contacted to make sure we were safe was not needed. No one asked me to get out the imaginary slideshow presentation for proof of how many women I have slept with/dated in the past. I promise you, at real-life pride events, there is no proof-of-gayness to register for.
Lizz, I know you’re gay, my ex texted me once, years after we dated. The relationship was short, but it was my first in sobriety, truly confirming what I’d denied for years about myself. My thought process was mostly this, again and again throughout our time together, Wait, I am gay?
So when her message came through years later—in its obvious, matter-of-fact sarcasm—I felt it like a strange aftershock. I recognized that I’m still doing that to myself sometimes, all these years later.
Often, it’s just me that needs to affirm me—not anyone else. And I’ve come to know this as a pretty common queer experience: that need to be validated after years spent hiding and questioning and undermining what we know deep inside to be true.
And living your truth is terrifying (!)—especially when society defaults to a very different lifestyle.
My friends and I’s running joke is that I threw Pride Pop-Off last year as a public coming out party. In some ways, it’s accurate. I moved home from New York more certain than ever about who I was, and I was ready for people to know about it. I wanted to capture the queer joy I had experienced in New York, bring it to my hometown. Brooklyn block parties were my inspiration. The help and the funds came seemingly from the divine. I expected to disappear behind the curtain of the planning, but in the end, I did not.
However, this year, it felt so much less about that and more about our queer community in downtown York. A community that I found through throwing Pride Pop-Off last year. The event was a true labor of love. It was a protest. It was proof that queer people are not going anywhere—even if we’re scared. And by the end, as I shouted ‘Love you, bye!’ to returning queens from last year and new ones I had just met, I recognized that the work of it had granted me what I was missing all along.
It was community I was hoping for when I found the courage to walk into the change waiting for me. When I finally grabbed the mic in a crowd of two hundred queer people and said here I am too. No one was going to hand it to me. I had to get offline and show up in the world. I had to trust that as I evolved and changed and grew, I could be loved too.
This is the first book I’ve read by a straight man in literal years, and I only picked it up because Vibha recommended. She has yet to steer me wrong. Still, I was skeptical for the first 50 pages or so. By the end, I was stunned at the book’s ability to keep me captivated despite simplicity of plot. A family story, a love story, a story about being lost. What he did most stunningly for me was the tricky dance of holding both love and disdain for where you come from. A great writer of place; a book full of tenderness. I’ll be thinking of the ending for a long time.
Happy Pride. Support your local bisexual bitch with a monthly subscription to Hangry Ghost. <33333
I love you & I love this <3