Chapin City Blues

“There ought to be a time in one’s adult life which is dedicated to rediscovering the most important readings of our youth. Even if the books remain the same (though they too change, in the light of an altered historical perspective), we certainly have changed, and this later encounter is therefore completely new.

–Italo Calvino, Why Read the Classics?

90s Queer

I came out as bisexual in high school. To my friends, it wasn’t a surprise. We were outliers, the damned. The wretched of the high school hierarchy. My whole life, I tried to give a name to what stirred within me, flowed through my blood, lingered beneath my goose-flesh prickled skin. How could I explain to my mother that the same butterflies that fluttered in the cavity of my heart, squirming through my guts whenever I stood near my best girl friend also rose whenever the pink-haired gay boy pushed his lips against mine during gym class–possibly the worst class to not be straight in?

I don’t know if my mother understood what I meant. Or if she did and simply chose to ignore it, as if it was a condition that might go away on its own. Maybe she understood and quietly accepted it as most Latine parents are wont to do. It wouldn’t matter, because by the time I entered college, I no longer identified as bisexual; although, it was clear that I was anything but heterosexual.

“The World is Not a Safe Place to Live In”

J.K. Rowling, who often writes under the male pseudonym Robert Galbraith, donated £70,000 to an anti-trans organization’s fight for a legal definition of woman. The same people who damned her wizard books for turning kids gay twenty years ago are the same who are currently masturbating to her bigoted ways.

Half a world away, Nex Benedict, a 16-year-old nonbinary Owasso High School student was brutally beaten in a girl’s restroom. The administration of the Oklahoma high school refused to call the ambulance for the victim. They didn’t even call the police. Nex later died in the hospital. The news stories that follow deadname and misgenders them.

Three hundred miles away, my friend worried about her own nonbinary child.

Macho Caricatures

I am five years old when I learn of my claustrophobia; although, I don’t know the word, I understand the sensation of the world closing in around me. My father and I are wrestling, imitating the moves on TV. In my mind, my father is one of The Bushwhackers because their movements remind of his, the ones my mother calls borrachos. I imagine their breath carries the same tang of my father’s.

He sweeps my legs and pins me down. It isn’t violent. There is no aim to hurt me. The whole of his weight isn’t on me. But he is a large man and I am a thin, scraggly kid. I am under him, a moment of father/son bonding quickly becomes a coffin. The world is blocked off from me. My breath quickens. I will myself to be brave, but I am not like my brothers. I am not strong like they are. That is why I treasure these rare moments playing with my father. But the fear consumes me in its obsidian maw. I am, after all, only five years old. 

My mother consoles me. Dries my tears. Asks me what happened. I cannot describe the feelings welling from me. All I can hear is my father’s disappointment. The way he blames my mother for coddling me. How he can’t play me with me because I’m always quick to tears. That maybe I am not a real boy. Maybe I’m really just a girl. Ironic, because that is what he wanted. Instead, he got me. 

2000s Queer

I am twenty-one reading Borderlands/La Frontera for the first time. Two chapters into the book and I am convinced that it is not worth reading. Not worth my time, the pages it’s printed on. One sentence echoed through my head:

I made the choice to be queer. 

No one can just wake up and decide to be queer. It isn’t a choice. 

I am the embodiment of the Italo Calvino quote.

He/They

It wasn’t a choice while, at the same time, it was. Gloria writes: 

“For the lesbian of color, the ultimate rebellion she can make against her native culture is through her sexual behavior. She goes against two moral prohibitions: sexuality and homosexuality. Being lesbian and raised Catholic, indoctrinated as straight, I made the choice to be queer (for some it is genetically inherent).”

The problem with reading anything written in the past through the political lens of the present, you run the risk of misunderstanding the text, misinterpreting the meaning. Gloria wrote her most revered work in the 1980s, an era when homosexuality wasn’t widely acceptable as it is now (despite present day rightwing bigotry). It was the height of the AIDS epidemic and Ronald Reagan’s brain was (possibly) already riddled with Alzheimer’s. 

Understanding the time something was written matters; that was my mistake as an undergrad. I didn’t grasp the difference between being a lesbian and being queer. Those two words were not exclusively under the same flag. 

To be queer was to be ousted from your family, your home. For decades, it was used as a derogatory phrase. It is why it took me so long to accept it into my vocabulary, always skirting on the fringes of the community finding under-utilized terminology to describe my orientation. (Queer isn’t just my orientation now; it is my gender identity, as well.) 

Neve/Jane/Evelin

So you’re finally putting it together?