Aguilas Off Pine

Month: April 2021

A Reflection on Avoiding Pity in Response to Sharing Trauma

Aguilar

“Thank you for sharing these moments and your monologue. As always, I admire your courage in saying out loud and publicly what so many of the rest of us do not. I am glad you’ve found a community on which to lean on, even down in OC. Sincerely…”

Today, a friend from high school recently posted his experiences with sexual assault via his Instagram. I clicked through the link in his bio to his own blog and started listening to the audio on my way home. It cut in and out, my cell phone reception spotty as I traveled down the 710. When I got home, I inspected his blog to find the direct link to the audio clip and listened a couple times to the way he finished his audio essay, pained but declarative and affirmative in the kind of response he would be able to receive. It took me a while to think about what I wanted to write, what I could say in a public forum, how to keep the focus on him while not being careful not to sound like I was pitying him, and I settled on the above. I was not surprised to learn that he had been sexually assaulted, it seems all too common amongst men, especially queer men of color.

Another young man, also Latinx, had recently shared his own experiences with sexual assault and I listened to him and let him know that I understood and that what had happened to him was not right. He seemed aggravated as well, declaring that he hated sharing his experience because he did not want any pity. I kept my emotional distance, acknowledging that I had once felt the same way, but did not share with him my pain. This young man ended up crying and I felt validated knowing that sharing my sharing my own experiences with sexual assault would only distract him from the hurt he had not yet processed. When he brought it up again over a private message, I again said I was really sorry to hear how hurt he had been. He asked me to stop saying that, as it made him feel bad, and he only wanted to feel good when he was around me and tried to turn the attention to our sexual encounter. I asked that he stop trying to police my emotions, pointing out that all I was doing was having a legitimate reaction to the topic he kept bringing up, that it was serious and deserved professional attention, but that I wouldn’t push him into anything he didn’t want to and wouldn’t bring it up anymore if he didn’t.

This week’s reflection is on a recent experience sharing my trauma and experience in therapy, as well as a meditation on why when showing that vulnerability, we feel that we must avoid pity as a response to sharing traumatic stories.

My cousin interviewed me this week for one of his courses, the topic at hand being something like health in the queer Latinx community. For his interviewees, he was reaching out to yours truly and to a mutual cousin of ours, also bisexual, but undocumented and cisgender female. On questions of physical health, it was easy to point out to my careful diet, forced upon me by a series of stomach issues and social anxieties, within which I gave myself the pleasure of indulging, as well as the ample physical activity keeping me sane throughout the week. On mental and emotional health, I shared that I had been in therapy for some time in grad school and was looking to go back, to work on specific issues which I couldn’t detail yet. I shared instances of self-harm in my past and of the years of my life I spent depressed and contemplating suicide. I pointed out that a great amount of shame came from homophobic family members, including his own mom, my blood relative. I could tell by the look on his face that he was feeling something strong, but I didn’t question him on it and continued to answer truthfully, allowing a silence to hang in the air between us when I wrapped up a rather painful thought or memory. It was clear sometimes he was uncomfortable, but that was completely fair and a valid response to some of the uncomfortable moments I had shared with him. Toward the end of our interview though, I did ask him to consider how these same questions might affect our cousin, who has had less access to resources than I have had to help deal with these issues. I don’t know that she has been sexually assaulted herself, but I had told him that it felt that my sexuality added an extra level of pain from the intolerance around me growing up and that it was only now that I had so much help accessible to me that it finally felt like I was zeroed out, more in control of my emotional state than not, and that I was finally able to receive other’s legitimate reactions.

On those portions of the interview where it was my turn to share grief, pain, and suffering, I did not find myself wondering, more out of intellectual curiosity than anything else, how he might be reacting to my story, but did not find myself sanitizing my pain to ease his consumption of it. Not in the same way that I used to, because I know that there was a time when I felt ashamed to share my own stories so as to avoid a pity party. I remember the first time that I told my therapist of my own sexual assault, a twenty-two-year-old reflecting on his time as an eleven or twelve-year-old. I told that him that it was difficult to place that memory in time, as I had instinctively tried to suppress it and reject its occurrence in a time that was my past in order to refuse to carry it into my future. I remember that he got quiet, dabbed his eyes with a tissue paper, and he said, “I’m sorry that happened to you.” I recall freezing for a bit, processing the scene in front of me and wondering why it was that he was crying but that I only felt a calloused indifference to my own suffering. Our sessions for the rest of that year continued in much the same way, me sharing instances of trauma and abuse, detailing them in ways that had only been written down, only once before spoken aloud and never to someone who was not also sharing their own trauma, with my therapist allowing himself to be visibly upset and me maintaining every nerve and muscle under strict, practiced ease. I doubt I fooled him, nor was it the intent to fool him, I just simply was not ready at the time to feel sorry for myself or to acknowledge that my inner child was still hurting from the violence.

That time has come and gone and with it the sense of shame as if I was responsible for things adults had done to me as a child. It is not that I feel sorry myself now for surviving my childhood abuse and the resultant echoes into my young adulthood. It is that I understand now that pity is not anathema to the healing process and can sometimes be a genuine reaction to complex and disturbing situations. The top definition that Google brings up for pity is “the feeling of sorrow and compassion caused by the suffering and misfortunes of others.” I would not wish any of the trauma I endured onto others, therefore, I acknowledge that it is suffering and misfortune. Similarly, when I see it in others, I do feel a great sorrow that abuse is all too common and remind myself to be compassionate to the individuals in front of me, wherever they may be on their own journey. I know that back then I did not want to experience other’s pity because I was not ready to admit just how much I had been hurt. This twisted itself into the insidious phrase, “It is, what it is,” which I found myself thinking about others around me as well.

See, what inevitably happened was that as I found myself denying that I was deserving of pity I began to create a baseline that had to be overcome for me to feel pity, compassion, or anything other than cold indifference and left me emotionally crippled, unable to really express my feelings, I was utterly unable to acknowledge the negative events that had happened to me and thus unable to acknowledge when those around me were hurting. This conflicted with my desire to help others, to find ways in which I could contribute to society, a desire itself deeply rooted in my low self-esteem and the need to feel accepted within society. This problem continued to grow, as I spiraled into a denial of my past and of what could be happening to others around me. As I’ve said before, I have at times been rewarded for being able to set aside emotions and apply a cold logic. Those positive responses to my suppressing my emotions cause me to shudder in imagining who I would be had I never stepped into that counselor’s office and asked for help.

Whatever it is, the instinct that drove me to desire a kinder, softer world won out and I began to work on my ability to create a space for others when they needed a friendly listener and allowed myself to accept that I truly needed a therapist. From there, I have begun to work on allowing myself to feel that same compassion and pity for myself, to allow myself to acknowledge how that pain has shaped my life, and therefore, to accept that other people may feel pity towards me when I share my stories. In truth, they may feel any sort of which way and that those reactions to my pain are as much, if not more so, a reflection on them as they are on me. After all, not everyone can be a fully trained professional, versed in the best methods to react to different traumas, which is totally fine. But where it is coming from a place of love and kindness, a reaction of pity is simply an acknowledgement of pain.

In that words are limited in their ability to capture broad spectrums of human emotion, it is worth acknowledging that pity can also be “used to connote feelings of superiority, condescension, or contempt,” as per the Wikipedia article on Pity. I understand that false compassion as a way of contrasting the object of pity from the clearly wiser subject expressing pity. This type of pity is anathema to the healing process and has often been the sign of someone who could not allow healing in those around them. As I have grown, I have learned to distance myself from these people, to create space and strengthen boundaries from those who want to see me down as away of themselves feeling elevated above. But it has been a difficult process and it wasn’t always clear from whence this type of pity came. Although I do still try to avoid those who can only interact with my pain through a condescending superiority, I know that this isn’t the type of pity that I was scared to receive when I first started telling others of my pain. After all, toxic and controlling behaviors would not have been new to me then, what was new was gentleness, love and understanding.

In continuing my own journey, I seek to remind myself that it is ok to feel down, it is ok to feel overwhelmed and deserving of some pity. It is ok to feel vulnerable and incomplete. On days that the despair wins out, I allow myself the rest and consider that my life isn’t over and I’ll try again tomorrow. 

Thoughts a week out from the funeral

Aguilar

I wasn’t sure whether I would continue talking about it or not, but I figure that it’s better than keeping it bottled up. I have had a rough couple days since the funeral. Part of my problem is that I was trying my hardest to puh away my cousin’s death. It doesn’t seem accurate to say that I was acting as if it hadn’t happened, because in truth I hardly saw this cousin. But I had also tried not to think about it too much since that first week after we learned the news and the nightly prayers had stopped.

I let my dad enter the mortuary first, not so much out of deference as to give myself the ability to react and avoid him by keeping him in sight. Besides, a cousin had texted asking if I could confirm the stream details for the family in Mexico. My aunt was greeting people at the beginning of the room, asking those who felt comfortable to sign in. She talked with my dad a bit, although I couldn’t hear what they said. We talked too, which left me more dazed and confused. She said something about a hat, how they had asked her to bring his favorite hat, she said something about how it didn’t even look like him, how it was a mannequin except his lips matched. I tried my best to be consoling, but I couldn’t make sense in the moment of what she was saying. Someone had convinced her it would be better to let the entire family see his body. I didn’t know how to say that if she truly had faith then shouldn’t she believe that his soul had already left his body, I hoped that it would be comforting, but I figured that if I didn’t know how to say it, it was better to not say anything. Besides, I didn’t believe it myself.

It bears mentioning that I’m going to describe what I saw. I won’t past this paragraph, although I’ll stretch it to say everything I want to say, about the body… I walked up to the open casket and looked in, but having heard my aunt refer to a mannequin and processing what was before my eyes, I had trouble recognizing my cousin. I sat in the front row, but could not stare in from where I sat. At some point an aunt and I slipped away to get dinner, tuning into the same livestream as our relatives in Mexico to follow along with the program. I asked her to clarify and she confirmed that he was indeed in the casket. I got a chance later on in the evening to stare in though and, in looking back and forth between a photograph and his body, I finally recognized his lips. There was little else there however, as his hair had fallen out in the two months his body had rested in the morgue. He was young and his dad fairly smooth, so he had no facial hair yet, but I wondered what my own jawline would have looked like if it was me instead and my beard had fallen out, my head covered by a baseball cap instead. That’s when I noticed that his jawline had been reconstructed. It was like the flesh from his chin to his neck had been peeled up, stretched, and then pulled down past his neck. It wasn’t obvious at first as it followed the contours of his neck, but once I saw the first ridge I noticed more. I wasn’t sure if it was related to the embalming process or the accident itself, but it snapped into reality that before me was in fact a dead body, pale flesh and hairless.

Having to sit still for the viewing confirmed that I wouldn’t be able to sit through mass the next day. It reminded me of how much trouble I had having to sit still in class, hour after hour in grade school. By the time I had gotten to college, I had learned I needed to burn off a lot of the nerves to rest easy, focus, and pay attention. The morning of the wake I couldn’t get up and had not gone out for a run. I stayed in bed till just past noon, not sleeping, scrolling through social media trying to think about anything but the funeral. I had enough time for a short walk but had to leave before traffic really picked up toward the Inland Empire. By the time I had sat down in the front row with the aunts and on time cousins, my leg had started to twitch. Without a doubt it was nerves, but if the stillness of a viewing was getting to me, what hope did I have to make it through the mass.

There were moments of tenderness during the wake. I held my cousin in my arms as he cried for his lost brother. My uncle’s sisters rushed to his side as he wept over the closed casket. The next day, these moments continued during and after the funeral, the family coming together to grieve. We even got together after the funeral at my aunt’s house and at some point, all the 20-year old cousins were gathered out front, drinking beers and laughing over our now buried cousin’s twitter. Our lives didn’t end there though and the days that followed, away from that familial cocoon have been rough.

Since I couldn’t be with them, with those specific family members, I withdrew. I still went to work the day after the funeral. Or maybe it was the Thursday after, because I distinctly remember talking to my supervisor and he is only in the office on Tuesdays and Thursdays. We talked about the randomness of life and how unexpected this is. He cried a bit and I just wasn’t able to get there myself. That’s what it was. See, I had gone to work on Wednesday and around lunch had to excuse myself, went to my favorite coffee shop near work, Patria, and cried in my car. So, the next day, I had been crying and well before my supervisor getting teary-eyed, I had seen how bloodshot my eyes looked.

The emotional space my supervisor created for me at work contrasted perfectly with the space someone I had recently been talking to had refused to create for me. In casual conversation on the Wednesday after the funeral, this young man had let me know that if I say a certain day is a possibility to meet, it would be helpful to follow up. I told him I understood and let him know that I had had the funeral and needed to take care of myself. I clarified that if I had said that Saturday was certainty, I would certainly have reached out to cancel, but was too distracted to remember a possibility. He said he understood but felt that the maybe still warranted me reaching out. At that point I had looked at the prior messages to see if I had possibly been unclear, but the prior messages still read as me asking to confirm later in the week if we were set for Saturday. He pressed on and said communication is important, that he is not just some guy I am having sex with and that for him friendship was more important than anything else. I apologized to him for feeling stood up but let him know I truly did not even remember well enough to reach out. As this back and forth seemed likely to continue, I stopped apologizing and let him know that he was prioritizing his assertion that communication needed to happen over the context of my situation and that this continued insistence was quickly becoming rude, despite it initially being a valid concern. His next message was still about the Saturday, he hit me with the classic “I’m sorry if you feel that way, but…” So my next message back was to let him know I didn’t have the emotional bandwidth for the level of engagement he wanted and wished him a good day.

Between these two contrasts, I am happy to say that most people have been on the end closer to my supervisor. As I doubted my judgement and have a history of putting my walls up too quickly, I showed the texts to a friend and to a cousin, both who seemed annoyed at how quickly the young man had moved on from me letting him know about a funeral in my family. It is in coping with these small annoyances that I’m pleased to see how I have grown, even if my responses are not always perfect. That’s something to focus on as I try to move on beyond this death in the family.  

Evidence of Absence

Aguilar

At the mortuary where we were viewing my cousin’s body, I was surprised to see my bio-dad showing up in the back of an uncle’s car. I hadn’t seen him in two or three years, but I recognized him right away, strangely, looking happy to see me. It annoyed me that he immediately went in for a hug but I was also just puzzled he was there. The first thing out of my mouth was not hello but, “I’m surprised you bothered to show up.” He quickly responded, “Why wouldn’t I be?”

A hundred reasons quickly ran through my head as I assessed my priors. I had known he would be back in the States around this time, so it wasn’t out of the question that he could show up. Growing up, he hadn’t brought me to every family function, but now as an adult myself I have skipped a dinner here or a party there, but knew the seriousness of this event and only thought I might skip because I couldn’t get out of bed. Still, his relationship with his siblings had gotten strained lately, specifically he and his brother had started drifting away from my aunts. Plus, I had hoped he would not be there, because I did not feel like I had the emotional capacity to see him.

However, it didn’t go as poorly as I imagined, likely because my expectations of him are so low. We politely greeted each other, exchanged a couple sentences summarizing our lives, and did not sit together for the vigil. At the cemetery itself, he stood nearby, as much to talk to me as to my cousins. During the final ceremony, reflecting on my family’s loss, I began to cry. At some point, I was again surprised to hear sniffling and quiet sobbing coming from his direction. Beyond that surprise to hear signs of emotion coming from him, I didn’t feel anything and walked away. The timing is a bit hazy, but I think they had already lowered my cousin’s body into his grave and were letting us drop white flowers down. I dropped mine off, waited until I could hug my aunt, and then cried a bit more holding her. I deeply needed that hug, needed to feel warmth and affection.

As has happened many times growing up, in listening to my aunt talk about her son, I saw the evidence of  absence of a strong emotional connection between myself and either of my parents. My aunt loved her son deeply and seemingly, unconditionally. As she spoke about him yesterday during the vigil, she demonstrated a profound love, a patience with her son, and perhaps most tellingly, she reported that she had nothing to regret, nothing but good memories with him. I joked with her a bit that she couldn’t say the same of one of her older sons, one of the cousins I’m closer to, as I knew they clashed. I felt a tinge of remorse saying that, as I knew similarly my parents couldn’t say the same. She admitted it was true they had bad memories, but that she loved all her sons in their own ways. 

My uncle loved him deeply too and was devastated. Yesterday after they closed his casket, my uncle leaned over it and sobbed, his shoulders heaving with the weight of his sorrow. His sisters and wife consoled him. My father had already left, one of the only two immediate family members to have taken off. I can’t picture him caring so much about me to display such strong emotion. This isn’t because I feel unloved, rather that he himself has told me that he had no desire to be a father and had only been interested in reconnecting when I was younger because he was lonely and didn’t have many friends. Thus, it is difficult to imagine him being so broken to have his son taken away suddenly, given his voluntary absence for large periods of my life.

When I was younger, I often only found myself realizing what I was missing by observing other families. Before I started school, I don’t remember ever wondering where my father was and didn’t realize I didn’t have any male role models in my life, as I couldn’t truly miss what I didn’t know existed. In kindergarten, around Father’s Day, we were asked to make cards that we could save and give to our dads, as we would soon go on summer break but, the teacher explained, they still deserved something special for that day. I remember raising my hand to ask, “What if we don’t have a dad?” I assume she had been prepared for this because she asked, “What about an uncle or older brother?” I didn’t have that either and after some back and forth she got me to admit I sort of had a step-dad. I made the card and when he picked me up from school later that day, I threw it in the back of his car as I didn’t want to talk to him, scared I’d say something wrong or that he wouldn’t take my card. I don’t know who found the card, someone must have when the van was cleaned, though neither he nor my mom ever brought it up. For my part, I focused instead on summer break and forgot the card until years later when I was thinking about my early childhood. If I had had the clairvoyance necessary to know he’d still be around these 20-plus years later, or the diplomatic skills to see the value in giving him the card as a request that he step up to bat and act as a father figure, I would have given him the card. It’s not that I regret not giving it to him, it’s just that, given that he bothered to stick around, I now wish he had been more of a father to me, instead of ignoring me or picking on me so much.

I remember years later, when a family friend of my parents began to have his own sons, I realized just how much I wanted to have someone like a dad that loved me. I watched this man push his son on a toddler swing he had installed indoors, the same style that he used to push me in, and then later he picked him up and tossed him in the air, all the while laughing. I hadn’t felt such a sharp pang before and started to panic from the strong emotions swelling up in me. I was scared that someone might see my cry, but I felt a strong longing that I had never felt before, having never seen before signs of such strong paternal affection. After all, although my stepdad was still in our lives and by this point had fathered my two youngest sisters, he wasn’t exactly affectionate with them either and at nine or ten years old, I still didn’t have a grasp on what a father really could be. If anything, the closest person to a father figure at that time was this family friend and his wife had just given birth to my replacement. Seeing how he treated his own flesh and blood made me realize that I didn’t have that, presented itself as evidence of the absence of paternal affection, and the sudden lack had me in tears. 

Although that was the pain I felt then, the truth is that I had also missed out on my mother’s affection during those early developmental stages. Looking back into my early childhood, I remembered the loneliness of my mother always having to work, how I would cry into her legs when she was leaving for work and would hide in her closet so I could smell her clothes while she was gone. As a young adult it dawned on me that the reason my mom couldn’t stay was because neither my dad nor her next baby daddy had bothered to stick around and help her support their children. Knowing my mom as I do, I know she told them she didn’t need their money and was proud she could work long hours to provide for us. Knowing my father as I do now, I know he would have taken that opportunity to keep his money, even though it was badly needed; I imagine it was the same for her other baby daddy. Still, it wasn’t until I started having friends that told me that their moms stayed home from work that I realized what I was missing out on, evidence of the absence of a mother’s (or father’s) love in those early years. I want to stress; I do not blame my mom for having to work and not being able to be round during my formative years. I do blame my dad though for allowing himself to live a very comfortable lifestyle while my mom worked long hours to scrape by.

In short, it wasn’t until I met parents who supported and loved their children that I realized my parents did not. Well, not exactly, as for example, I had already been kicked out of the home when I came out. Most damning, I learned from straight friends that their Mexican parents had told them that if they were gay it would be ok, as all they cared about was their happiness. In learning this I came to realize just how conditional my parents’ love was and how much it was not dependent on their nationality or geographical origins. That is, even my friends with parents from Hicksville, Mexico, had been told they were loved, gay or straight. Meanwhile, both of my parents have at times abandoned me and it was in seeing how supported my peers were by their parents that I truly came to appreciate how much I lacked. So it goes and will continue to show itself.  

I truly believe that if I had not gone on to be successful, as defined by our capitalist society, that neither parent would talk to me. I can’t prove this now, but the signs point to their conditional love and support. Had I ever stumbled, had I needed them to accept me as a broken person needing help to rebuild, I fear they would not have bothered. It is immensely reassuring that this theory will never see itself tested, that on this I can only speculate and never truly gather evidence to support it. 

  

No Fresh Fade before the Funeral

Aguilar

My 19-year old cousin died in February. On his way back to his dorm he fell off his skateboard, into the street, and was run over by a passing vehicle. The driver was only 20 years old. It was close to midnight, visibility was poor, my aunt and uncle seemed to understand and had no resentment towards the driver, although my uncle was much more visibly distraught. 

It happened on a Friday evening and come Saturday afternoon everyone who could, aunts, uncles and cousins had gathered at his parents to be there for them and for his four older brothers. The brother I am closest to, the second oldest was in tears. He felt, as many older siblings do, that he had somehow failed his baby brother and that it should have been him, because he doesn’t have a degree. I told him that our lives hold more value and meaning beyond fancy papers, but felt awkward. “It’s easy for you to say that, with your master’s degree,” my inner voice criticized.

His mom was much calmer. She spoke of godly grace and love, thankful for the time she had had with her son. I could feel in myself the absence of such faith, although I have found my own comfort in the universe’s indifference to our lives, one moment here and another gone. Before we left that first saturday, members of her congregation had come to grieve with her. 

The religious traditions surrounding death continued into the week, although virtually because of time and space. Family in Mexico was able to join, as well as those of us with jobs that would have prevented making an evening trek, 3 hours out to where my aunt and uncle live. Those that could drove out to my aunt and uncle’s place and sat with them in the living room while the rest of us followed along on our phones and laptops. Two of my older cousins had together created a sideshow presentation so we could all follow along in prayer. Each day, different family members paired up to do the call and response readings. I even did my first of such readings, although, unfamiliar with the structure, I read over the response prayers. 

On Wednesday my aunt cracked. One of her sisters asked her how she was holding up and she got as far as, “I’m thankful we’re doing this…” Her voice trailed off and she hid her face in my uncle’s shoulders. The next day I cried on my way to and from the office. I called out Friday because I hadn’t stopped crying. I didn’t know my cousin well, I’m ten years older than him and there’s many other cousins between the two of us, including his four older brothers. But I am closer to my dad’s side of the family and seeing my aunt break seemed to give me permission to do so as well. My uncle, from the get go, was not well, at some point that first Saturday he had just walked away from the house and we had to go looking for him. 

That week came and went. On the last night of the prayers I was over at their house again, bowing my head at the right time but otherwise staying quiet so as to not remind my family I didn’t know the prayers. Not that they minded, but it felt too much like I’d be drawing attention to myself. The family agreed to gather virtually one more time and we did, a little more distant from the date of the accident but still with my cousin’s corpse in some morgue somewhere. 

Finally after two months of waiting, the funeral is happening. Today, I’ll be leaving to the Inland Empire for the viewing. Hopefully, it will still be early enough that I can beat the work commute traffic. Tomorrow, we’ll bury his body. I didn’t work today and I’m fact had a hard time getting out of bed. I had pushed out of my mind the fact of the matter, ignoring the loss as a way of coping with it. It’s almost as if, because of the mortuaries and cemeteries being so backed up due to Covid, that the indifferent universe conspired to have our grief frozen. I don’t think I know any other way to cope, or rather, that’s my default and I find myself having to force the processing of my own emotions. In that my own emotional wiring is tangled up and broken, I can appreciate the traditions and customs forcing us to see what’s in front of us, to gather with those most deeply affected and share in their misery, expunging our own grief and reminding us of theirs. Perhaps that’s why I laid in bed for so long this morning. I wasn’t ready to go experience that intimacy yet. Not that I am now either, but waiting will only make the traffic worse. 

Owning the Benefits and Costs of a Straight Passing Identity

Aguilar

I’ve been going back and forth on how to write this, because it feels unbearable to read, “I’m a masculine guy so I have a hard time in queer spaces.” I roll my eyes when I see this and think to myself, “This guy’s trying too hard.” However, I do need to acknowledge how I’ve benefited from people assuming I’m straight and most importantly, if I don’t accept that I make queer people uncomfortable then I won’t be able to work on attracting the kinds of friends I actually want. I know it’s going to be a difficult process working on expanding my identity to make those types of friends as well, but, it’s something that long term I would like.

At first, I was considering just writing about how straight passing and masculine I come off and poking holes in it, because to a straight man, no matter how much I pass, I’ll still be queer. That ignores that the benefits are so great to just having general strangers assuming my straightness and leaving me alone. I thought about starting here because of how much the gay community prizes masculinity and seeks straight passing men. Even in the super liberal city I now live in, I still routinely see “masc for masc” or other ways of stating that preference on the apps. Even the guys that don’t say that on their apps will still approach me in a certain way that makes it clear that they’re chasing after a straight passing fantasy. Although I’m unsure of my own masculinity, I have to acknowledge the conversations I’ve had with other queer men, which are really stupid in my mind but are these constant surprises when I say I don’t like sports, don’t drink beer, etc. 

I don’t think it’s particularly surprising to say that gay men share some of the same stereotypes around masculinity and sexuality that the greater straight community does. So usually after these conversations is my attempt at defending the identity I have in my head, which is that I’m just a huge nerd. Now, with how much STEM is being prioritized as a good industry to go into, I don’t think this is an undesirable trait. I just think I need to work harder on showing my comfort with being perceived as queer.

To that is the reality that I choose to play into the visuals of straightness and desire a straight passing public persona because I’m worried about being perceived as queer. My politics might be queer, but my perceived identity is not. Like most queer men, I’ve learned a bit about how to market myself and choose to market myself as straight passing. The hours I spend at the gym, the hobbies that are another form of exercise, and the constant dieting and mindfulness of what I’m eating is so that I can have a body that men desire and that plays up the natural traits I have that are tied to perceptions of masculinity, such as my body hair and broad shoulders. On top of the skin, the way I dress is still safely heterosexual, leaning into the natural traits which other men have chosen to play with in a way that approximates androgyny and femininity. For example, when I’m riding the metro into downtown Los Angeles, I make sure to wear a dark jacket on top of whatever floral pattern I have on, buttoning it up before riding through Compton and Watts and making sure it stays that way until I get to a gay bar; my pants and shoes, as I’m too cheap to buy more fashionable ones, have not been an issue.

I’ve been rewarded for this type of behavior. It would be one thing if this positive feedback loop was limited to awarding me sexual partners. However, it’s everywhere in my life. From the family members that applaud me for passing to the coworkers that are happy to read me as a particularly nerdy but straight engineer. Grossest of all is that in prioritizing the quickest and surest way to financial stability, I ended up in a straight, male dominated and heteronormative industry. In fact, I could be tempted to summarize that the only drawback is that I make other queer people uncomfortable.

However, there is a cost to maintaining that sort of identity. So many of the habits I’ve picked up have been learning how to suppress certain tells and emphasizing others, so that people can attach their own stereotypes to the identity I’m projecting. That stiffness isn’t something I’ve easily been able to just drop when I’m amongst the queers; as laid back as I am at home, I know that in crowds and public I get uncomfortable, but so much of that is a fear that I might be seen, a concern that someone will clock me and thus disrespect me. The clothing is not necessarily an issue, because it’s similar enough to things I could wear at work. But, when I’m looking longingly at someone at the bar who is freer than I, I am also analyzing what their identity costs them.

I don’t think it’s particularly ground breaking to say that feminine men have a more difficult time in general. I’ve given myself this platform, but the reality is that I need to take a step back here and have someone else really go through what their feminine identity has cost them. See, at the bar I’m just being superficial, wondering how much the nicer shirts cost, the clothes, the accessories. That’s what I had initially started off thinking about, the superficial costs of maintaining our identities. After all, we all have these accessories or shortcuts for identity, to signal how we’d like to be perceived and those all cost money. But, that doesn’t get at the missed opportunities and public scorn that feminine men might feel is more critical.

As the pandemic wanes and queer public spaces reopen, I have to task myself to keep in mind how I am perceived and work to change that. I’ll complain about it more in detail in another post, but I don’t want to continue dating men who are into me because of my proximity to straightness nor do I want to make friends that are constantly policing their gender expressions. Thus, in order to attract a different type of person I need to put in the work to present queerly.