When I finally encountered the concept of “queer,” I thought, “Oh, definitely. That’s exactly what I am.”
Growing up, the idea of “straight” was this thing that I got by way of conditioning, but it was not something that made a lot of sense to me. I never understood how people could be true believers in much of anything, let alone sexuality. It always struck me as “fluid” anyway, and “straightness” as a concrete identity, at least, never really appealed to me.
To learn there was this other identity was huge.
It had been something I identified as sort of quietly and privately, but not for any particular reason, and I have also never found a home in any queer group or community. It never became an outward part of my identity.
I’ve always been gregarious and social on the surface, but in reality a little reclusive and closed off in real life. As a result, I never found myself in a specific community. This was just how I saw myself, and it was even less of an identity than a response to what I was offered as a default.
I’d forgotten this, I think, when I wrote a piece a few years ago and referred to myself as a “straight man.” A friend who knew me in college called me on it, implying it was out of character for how she’d known me.
What I meant, I said, is that I was a straight man in that I never openly identified as anything else. I never made any real sacrifices by way of my identity. And I have always passed as straight in every single way: I am married to a woman, and we have a daughter.
I didn’t feel as if my queer identity deserved to take up any space or bandwidth in communities of people who actively and outwardly identify as queer. They did the actual work of advocating for those who identify as queer; they lived the struggle. While I was glad the “queer” identity gave me a place to be outside of “straight,” I never really did the work to get what “queer” really meant.
(My friend Ian Harvie, the great actor and transgender comedian from Portland, calls this “queer adjacent,” a term that I love.)
The theorist and rabble-rouser Herbert Marcuse once implied that he was happy about the feminist movement of the 1960s because he felt it might help to feminize the otherwise masculine establishment and elite. In a similar way, it strikes me that our LGBTQ family and peers have helped to make society at large better by reminding us that it is totally okay to occupy a space outside of the supposed default — and that doing so might be liberating and beautiful.
A huge tragedy is that the people who have helped to reveal this truth ultimately live shorter, more tormented lives by way of harassment, legal oppression, the mental health lapses that result from it, and more.
When that sank in, I welled up with tears because I realized that being guided toward this reality by so many different people — a reality in which “straight” wasn’t the only option — literally saved my life.
At least several of the people who made that possible for me, if not many, literally gave everything just to be themselves. In passing, they gave me the gift of perspective.
I don’t take this lightly. For this gift, I am profoundly grateful.
Alex Steed has written about and engaged in politics since he was a teenager. He’s an owner-partner of a Portland-based content production company and lives with his family, dogs and garden in Cornish.
