Today is National Coming Out Day. I see today as kind of an Independence Day for queer people, only without the fireworks, parades and free candy (those all happen on Pride Day in the spring). Coming Out Day is all about being who you are and letting go of the pressure to conform.
For a lot of queer people, being in the closet builds this tremendous pressure inside. They walk around in constant fear of being discovered, analyzing every gesture they make and every sound they utter. They carry around an immense burden of family expectations, friends’ perceptions, and personal goals. Some queer people pass as straight for as long as they can hold out, hooking up with members of the opposite sex to keep people from suspecting. Others can’t pass, and are forced to endure quiet laughs or funny looks. Very few people make it through the process unaffected.
Being closeted is neither a fun nor fair life. With that in mind, I’ve made my own choice. I’ve decided to participate in Coming Out Day this year. I have to admit something I’ve been carrying around for a long time …
I’d like to make out with a girl.
I’m not sure how my boyfriend feels about that, and I would never, ever act on my illicit desire?I have never tried making out with a girl. As a queer high-schooler, I never even imagined making out with a girl. If you had asked me if I thought about it, my reply would have been, “Why would I want to do that?”
I know I don’t really want to kiss a girl; the feeling is more of an intense curiosity than any kind of attraction. I’d be fine if I lived my whole life without any intimate contact with someone of a different gender, but I’d always wonder what it would have been like.
My grandmother taught me too well. Everytime I think to myself that I would never like kissing a girl, my grandma appears, puts her hands on her hips and stares into my eyes.
“Don’t knock it ‘til you try it,” she says.
But our world doesn’t deal well with people who don’t fit into neat, little boxes with perfectly square corners and tightly sealed flaps. The gay world doesn’t deal with identity any better than the straight world does. I myself have jeered at “supposedly” gay boys who have had high-school girlfriends. I always told myself they weren’t being true to their own identity.
But now I’m kind of jealous. There is a good chance I’ll never make out with a girl.
Some people, gay and straight, employ childish arguments for why they have never hooked-up with a member of the opposite or same sex. “I wouldn’t need to kiss a?insert disgusting animal, vegetable or mineral here?to know that I wouldn’t like it,” they tell you. These are usually the “straight” boys whose eyes are always wandering when they pass a baseball field, or the “flaming” gay boys who turn the channel a little too quickly when Pamela Anderson comes on.
Many of us feel we have an innate identity that we have to follow. These identities supposedly offer us freedom, but they really box us in. They constrain us behind walls of “can’t” and prisons of “should.” The words “gay” and “straight” mean infinitely more than who you are sleeping with at the time.
I know identity isn’t that simple. I’m forced to pick an identity, because that’s what the world and my conscience require. Identity is an intensely political act. Unfortunately, even refusing to be labeled is a kind of political stance. My primary identity is gay or queer. That’s a choice I make because I like what they mean. I like their freedom and how they include just a little less judgement than the other things I could be. I like the political struggle the words imply. But even those terms have their constraints. And every now and then, when I’ve had a little to drink, I look over at a girl walking by and wonder.
I think that’s probably okay. My grandma’s a smart woman.
