“‘Queer', not as being about who you're having sex with (that can be a dimension of it); but 'queer' as being about the self that is at odds with everything around it and that has to invent and create and find a place to speak and to thrive and to live.”
—bell hooks
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I’m the queerest I’ve ever been. I have created a queer life for myself that’s divested from what is straight, what is binary, what is fixed, in favor of what is fluid, what is cyclical, what is certain for me. I have made this queer life on purpose despite the seductive, sticky tendrils of straightness always trying to pull me into docility and obedience. I have willed this queer life from hearty desires and pure selfishness, from a hedonistic determination that drives me to not only want what I want but to have what I want (and I want it all).
My queerness feels like a revolution in my body and I’m embodying this revolution, my queerness, even more each day as a way of practicing somatic honesty and pleasure activism with myself. My queerness is entwined with pleasure because being true to myself, to the wants of my body, feels good. And when I feel good, I feel free. And when I feel free, I feel like maybe it’s actually possible for my body and my skin and my desires and my joy and my energy to actually be my own rather than belong to legacies of pain, injustice, oppression, and trauma.
I didn’t choose to be queer and I choose my queerness anyway. I choose it even though I don’t have to, even though my life was groomed from a young age to take on a different rhythm, one born of tradition and doctrine and an illusion of comfort that would’ve actually been the annihilation of my aliveness. I choose to be (be as in embody) ‘queer’ as a devotion, as a veneration to my aliveness.
I’m the queerest I’ve ever been and that I feel this way establishes how much work I’ve done within myself to get me to this place—this place of ease and comfort within my gender, who I am loving and how. (I never thought I’d get there.) It marks the depths of healing I’ve done to disentangle myself from internalized homophobia and anti-Blackness, from the transphobia I learned and the binarized, evangelical thinking that had me doing so much harm on myself. Having dug myself a little more out of those tombs of thought has opened me to what true pride in my queerness can look and feel like.