Politically Queer, Socially Heterosexual
Being black and trans means, I'm often given more queer street cred than I probably should.
I think, to some degree, I've always struggled with being deified. Contrary to popular belief, I didn't throw the first brick at Stonewall. Historically, I've been more like the quiet wife of one of the policemen who participated in the raid. I spent my 20s trying to fade away into the background and seeing that as a sign of ultimate personal success. I suppose for that reason, I feel very odd existing in the way I do, where it seems to be disruptive of me to say that while I may be politically queer, I'm quite socially heterosexual.
Since my mother passed, I've been thinking a lot about my life path and how it compares to hers. Going through my mother's things, I realized we had so much in common. More than I ever recognized or celebrated when she was alive. I realized that I am the version of my mother that broke away fully from a lot of the conventions that have historically been quite common within our family. Of course our experiences are quite different with me being transgender, but we are so similar in so many ways. I watched my mother, a Harvard grad, seemingly put a bit of her greatness aside in order to perform a traditional, heterosexual, Christian role. Despite my mother being more accomplished than my father, she became a woman who followed my father's desires whether they made sense or not. I didn't fully process this until I was older, but I think seeing her do that made me feel as if doing the same within my own relationships was some form of success.
Who I am in my 30s is very inspired by who I was in my 20s: a girl who desired a more traditional life where I would of course be relegated to my home and labor around the house. I used to idealize that so much that I always felt like whatever I wanted wasn't nearly as important as whatever the man in my life currently desired. I spent most of my 20s figuring out ways to make myself seem smaller, slighter, less apparent, and less disruptive. How could I convince this man I was in love with that I'd make a good wife? Each life skill acquired, not necessarily for me. I took me a while to break through the matrix and realize that wasn't what I really wanted, and looking at my mother when she passed, it's hard for me not to notice how many things she wanted to do that were never done largely because she opted to have a more traditional life. I realized that I'm living a life where I'm able to at least try to pursue some of those things and so my 30s have been all about me learning to be bolder, bigger, more apparent and more straightforward.
Moving to Los Angeles and intentionally pursuing this path, I started being recognized more regularly as a queer person. Not usually a trans person, but quite often a sapphic person. Tragically, I am not sapphic, but a lot of people who meet me assume I am in some way. From what I've gathered, it's because I am more overtly sex positive and alternative than most people, and for a lot of people, that's an indicator of someone being not quite fully heterosexual. But I was quite different before I moved to the city.
Before moving to Los Angeles, I spent 6 years in Orange County in some of the more conservative parts of the county. In all my years socializing in the OC, I never met anyone who identified as queer. Maybe one girl who was trying to get me to have a threesome with her friend...but even then; I only heard about her being bisexual through someone else. I spent my 20s being very isolated in spaces where no one was openly queer, and stealth encouraged me to distance myself from anyone and everything that could be recognized as queer. I was always an outspoken pro-LGBT person; but when I say that I mean in very narrow circumstances, usually with people I knew, in private conversations, I'd offer lukewarm affirmations of gay relationships. When you're a straight person doing that, you can easily feel like you're being radical, but being around queer people is actually quite a different experience. It's one thing to support something theory, it's another when they become real, tangible people who'd likely draw attention to the unhelpful heterosexist things you internalize that aren't directly challenged when you're speaking of someone theoretically, but not engaging with them personally.
I had plenty of queer friends in college, but that was a 4 year span of my life that ultimately doesn't really overtake the majority of my life where I knew very few queer people. In Highschool, I was probably the most openly queer person I knew. My rainbow clothes and splatter paint everything sort of gave it away. I had a more radical queer identity and during that phase of my life, I was attempting to break away from the expectations of my parents. I was trying to become my own person and, again, even that was about a 2-3 year span of my life. Yeah, it was pretty radical for me to have a mohawk and do research papers about different conceptions of gender and sexuality around the world, but ultimately, I hadn't been in community with other queer people. I dreamed of running away to the city and going to Tiger Heat with a bunch of other LGBT people, but that never really happened. Instead, I continued to be surrounded by heterosexual people within a conservative area. As I transitioned, I very quickly went from being mildly radical within these spaces to just someone in the background who fell into the same patterns as everyone else.
Those patterns are my modus operandi. Being recognized as queer is odd for me because I spent most of my adult life with people assuming, correctly that I'm a straight woman and putting me into a certain category for that reason. I'm used to deferring to men and speaking to them a certain way. I'm used to people expecting me to be of use. I used to slipping into a unique harmonic tone and rhythm when speaking to other women. I'm used to shifting my tone to seem pleasant and being very concerned that I seem less than pleasant. As I've moved to Los Angeles and connected with queer women, sapphic or otherwise, I realize that many of them do not have these patterns. I admire it. I recognize that they are living lives where they don't think about these things the way I do. I envy how many of the queer women I know have a boldness about them that always reinforces their boundaries and reiterates that they are not here for the pleasure or entertainment of men. I have a deep resentment for the part of me that falls into these patterns so easily. It happens sometimes when I run into other people from the OC or otherwise more conservative areas. People would often assume that I have a hard time in these spaces or moving through the world in this way, but in all reality, it's what I'm more familiar with. It's like we're part of the same cult or something.
Because these patterns feel so central to me, I've often struggled with the idea of "queer" as a label that I really identified with. While I've changed a lot as a person, the thing that remains the same, is I feel the most radical thing about me is entirely what I say and do, and less who I am. I understand that I am a black transgender woman, I represent an extremely stigmatized and often violently attacked population, but clinging to that often feels like clinging to dogma. My race has always presented more robust hurtles and I can confidently say that when it comes to discrimination, for me, it's mostly been racial. Even in the narrow circumstances I've been in where I've been openly trans within these more conservative spaces, there was always a sense of handwaving the trans part of me because I was otherwise assimilated into their conception of womanhood, at least socially. I may complain a lot, but in all reality, people often treat me quite well and I know it's because I tend to move through the world with this particular suburban, heterosexual, loosely Christianized, overly polite way of presenting myself. While I used to have a lot of frustrations around DL men, that hasn't been the case for most of the age-appropriate dating years. When people see me with my partners, our racial difference is more stigmatized than anything else. It's hard for me not to think of "queer" as a title for those who challenge the status quo of gender and sexuality. I feel like the only area I really do that is my polyamory, honestly.
It feels like needless essentialization to say that I would be defined as queer solely because I happen to also be transgender. I'd probably feel differently if my work wasn't the only area in my life where I found myself regularly speaking about being transgender. Aside from conversations with potential romantic partners, it's not something that really comes up. I know that feels odd to say, but it's an honest report of my life. When I was that kid with a mohawk, I was actively living in a way where I challenged assumptions of gender and sexuality, but now the assumptions made of my gender and sexuality are typically true, save for the instances where people assume I'm sapphic. As a political label, I have no problems aligning myself with queerness, but I suppose it feels odd to me to say that I myself am queer in the way many people I know who identify as queer are. I recognize the immensely complex journey I've gone through, but that journey feels very far away from my life today. A footnote with shoddy attribution.
As I said, there's such a difference between being a sole advocate for queer people in a conservative area and being in a community with queer people. What I've realized recently is, on the timeline of my life, I'm realistically still just a few years into truly socializing with queer people. Many of my own assumptions of queer people based on what I've read, but not experienced have been turned on their head. I can now say that within my friend groups, I tend to be the token straight girl. I find queer people to be more fun, less serious and more open. That's who I'm trying to be in my 30s. I'm trying to break away from those patterns, but it's also quite bizarre that, because I'm a black trans woman, people tend to extend a great degree of queer street cred to me that really overstates how out and open I've historically been. Offline, it's like my life has been defined by these phases of hiding myself. Initially hiding that I was trans as a child, then after coming out as trans, hiding that I was for the sake of stealth and passing. And these days, because my transness is synonymous with my work, telling people what I do for a living almost immediately outs me and that's something I'm still getting used to.
I know that for people who've followed my blog for a while, it seems strange to say, but before the pandemic started, I had just shy over 100k subscribers on YouTube and my average video got less than 20k views. That's not nothing, but I was definitely a far more niche creator than I currently am. I used to mostly make videos about being transgender, which meant that my content was only really relevant to the extreme minority of people searching for that kind of content online. This allowed me to be stealth while also having a YouTube channel. Long term followers of my YouTube channel will remember that I once removed all of my content and decided to go faceless for a while when I first started to date my ex. I once felt like being out as trans would ruin my entire life so even if I had a little bit of a presence online, I still went to great lengths to separate my online and offline life. That's one of the only reasons I use the alias "Kat Blaque" online. These days, it's pretty typical for me to be recognize when I'm out and about, but even then, I've discovered there's a segment of my audience that for some reason misses each video where I mention that I'm transgender. I suppose it's because I've never been a person who waves a pride flag, I'm not sure. Offline, I find that I tend to only be recognizable in liberal areas. I experience invisibility in more conservative cities, and invisibility is what I spent most of my life fighting for. It's what I'm the most accustomed to.
I do recognize that in a cissexist world where everyone is expected to be cis and heterosexual, there are a lot of boring people who'd look at the point-by-point of my life and say, "You're queer." However, it feels like bending to essentialism to agree with this interpretation. People have tried to tell me who I was since the day I was born. I'm used to it. At least once a week, someone online (because it only happens online, never offline) tells me that in fact, I am actually a gay man. And it's laughable because even when I didn't have a binary identity, I was certainly not recognized as a man; or even boy. I've struggled with how I tend to be registered socially and how people register me as an idea. I suppose that's what it's like being on the other side of that conundrum where your reality conflicts with the working narrative people seem to have of you based on their narrow conception of others who share parts of your identity.
I often feel as though many people do not recognize that not all transgender women are in a constant state of transition or reaffirming their gender identity. Some of us reach a point where discussing being transgender starts to feel like needlessly drawing attention to the pimple on your forehead or the freckle on your neck. It's a part of us, but it doesn't define us. For many of us who transition, we reach a point of invisibility and we often have to decide to be more vocally open about who we are as a way of reminding those around us that while you may assume we are normative, we in fact are not. Some people identify so deeply with that activist spirit that it becomes a strong characteristic of their persona. I've met many absolutely beautiful trans women who "pass" who will tell you that they are "trannies" within the first conversation you have with them. There are some of us who move in a way where we are constantly, intentionally, drawing attention to the differences we have as a form of political action, and then there are those of us who find peace in simply allowing society to make a mostly accurate assumption of us based on our appearances. It still requires a lot of practice and strength for me to speak of myself offline openly as a transgender person. I've spent most of my life without that language in my vocabulary. It's gotten easier with my public speaking, but unlike some of those trans women I've met who define themselves in their first few breaths, that's just not something I have practice with. Despite being 33, I feel like if I am "queer", I'm still a baby.
It's all very possible that my feelings around this will one day change. It's all very possible that I'll reach a point where I feel confident in a queer identity and I don't feel this need to constantly reaffirm that I am heterosexual, used to being assumed as such and have only moved through the world being known as such my entire adult life. Frankly, I feel quite silly inferring that vocalizing my heterosexuality is a sort of struggle, but it does frustrate me that so many people seem to assume that I have a uniquely queer perspective. I feel like there's a layer of the world I genuinely don't experience that many queer people do. Even the alternative subcultures I participate in are typically very heterosexual. I have no conception of some of the queerer sides of many of the communities I'm part of. Much of what drives my curiosity of queer culture relates to that. A whole layer of culture that feels distinctly separated from what I currently know. I've read more than I've experienced. Advocated for more than broken bread with. I catch myself thinking ignorant thoughts and drawing heterosexist comparisons and being disappointed in myself for being ignorant despite what I've professed.
As I get older, I recognize more and more that I have so much capacity for growth. That with each year, I learn something new about myself that shifts me in a more genuine direction. Maybe my feelings around this will change one day, but for now it seems pretty truthful of me to say that while I may be politically queer, I'm still very socially heterosexual. Maybe that'll change one day. Maybe it won't.