Queerly Beloved

So, honestly, I've spent more time thinking about what it means to be queer over the last year and a half than I had done in a long time. I started reaching out to the local queer community (without much success, because I'm still pretty terrible at meeting new people) and I've started engaging more in discussions of the trending topics of the times.

It's interesting for me to look at these topics now and contrast what I see with how things looked when I was a confused pre-teen or adolescent. As a child I had outside influences primarily telling me that everything queer is bad, so most of my focus was on trying to reconcile why I was different, and what that meant with regards to my relations or interactions with all the other people of the world who despised even the idea of it. I thought I was gay until I hit puberty. It's always made me laugh but I thought I was gay because I knew I was different, and I was the only person who though being gay wasn't a twisted backwards thing to be, so I figured that meant I was gay. I didn't have even 1 queer role model in my actual life, so I didn't have extensive knowledge of the rainbow of queerness and what it contains.

Also, unlike other girls, I didn't really have any desire to have a boyfriend. But eventually something (or someone) struck me the right way and suddenly, I didn't think I was gay anymore. I didn't know a lot about being gay, but I knew (or thought I knew) that I was a girl, and I thought gay girls liked other girls... NOT BOYS! And because I'd started crushing on boys/males, I though "well... I guess I'm a straight person."

It was a couple years later that I would read in an article about a musician/singer that they didn't identify as either gay or straight. The idea was quite fascinating. The term bisexual wasn't in the article but came into my vocabulary around then. I didn't use it for myself at this point though, I still thought I was straight from the previous revelation. It wasn't until I developed a serious crush on a female that I began to apply it to myself. And it was a solid 6 months into the crush before I could admit to myself and understand that's what it was. So I'd figured it out. I was bi.

But oh... I didn't really seem like this fit right either. For the most part I chocked it up to the stereotypes about bisexuals and stupid preconceived ideas people had that I didn't fit into. But it seemed like some people did fit these notions and I certainly didn't. I just didn't know what to make of it all. I'd be out and proud in circles of exclusively queer people or freely non-judgmental spaces (like college), but in other context I'd mostly only tell people if I were hoping to have a romantic relationship with them (and that was pretty rare). It usually didn't go great either. I've had women that won't date me because I'm honest about being not strictly lesbian and I've had guys who just think it's a cute idea that they don't even take seriously.

Adding into all this, it seems notable that I have always been drawn to genderqueers, androgynous and trans people. Again this was never something I thought applied to me, because I wasn't super butch, I don't have any body dysphoria, so I'm obviously not trans, and though I wasn't very feminine, I thought I was feminine enough people wouldn't accept me as part of the genderqueer crowd. But there again, that's just me believing, for various reasons, that I'm not queer enough.

So now I'm a single middle-aged queer person and about a minute before the world shut down due to a global pandemic, I decided I wanted to try dating again. And of course when I log on to a queer dating app I feel bombarded with young people's lingo and terms for who's what and who's looking for what, so I start learning terms to describe me to potential suitors. After almost 2 years of thinking it over, I'm still not sure what to say.

OK This is where I'm finally gonna bring it back to how I used to see things and what I see now. I supposed I've always believed (or wanted to believe when people insisted otherwise) that gender is a spectrum. As I got used to this idea over the years, I sort of grew to imagine that everyone else knew deep down that it was true, that most people simply say that it is binary because of conditioning (brainwashing).

And now, I actually don't think that's true anymore. I think somehow most of those people believe gender is a binary thing because that's their actual reality, and I actually am different from them. The good news here, obviously, is that I'm not alone. There's other enbies out in the world and they're coming out of the woodwork. And the mathematician in me likes to make note of the fact that 1s and 0s still exist in non-binary systems, they just aren't the only ones that exist. So this is me. But I'm a still girl... sort of. A non-binary girl. And I'm not exactly bi-sexual. OK the kids these days say pansexual. But I think I still prefer my own term (which never caught on) gender-indiscriminate or equal-opportunity dater. Because that's been the root of all this. I just don't fuck with gender. Yours or mine. We can be friends, or maybe lovers, or maybe not either, but none of that will be driven by gender for me. Unless maybe you're delightfully genderqueer... then I'm fairly likely to take a liking to you, but that might just be me yearning for my own kind.