rainbow (micro-essay)
gathered scattered thoughts on the religious discrimination bill, transphobic contracts condemning high school students’ sexuality and the repressed men in politics who let jesus take the wheel to drive both home
I saw a rainbow this morning & then the news this afternoon. it got me thinking about how closeted I was when I got baptised at age 18. even without religious parents or teachers, I somehow managed to 'find' god. what I really had found was a way to hide & self-destruct in plain sight.
lemme tell ya, one of the best ways to ‘prove’ you’re ‘not a lesbian or something’ is to date an equally repressed boy and get baptised together at age 18. then, every time you ‘lust’ after another girl, or self-harm, or deal with abuse/hate from that boy/god who says he/He loves you, you can just pray.
you can just ask god for forgiveness. you can just believe you’re purified by his love. but really, your queerness is in you like water vapour. you can’t piss it out, bleed it out, roll it into saliva on your tongue until it forms a language only god knows. none of this will make you any less queer.
at the end of that relationship with your man / god / family, you will still be queer. if you faced the heat at just the right time, maybe you’ve already turned into a rainbow. but I know from experience that’s not always how it turns out. in fact, I’m not even sure that’s how rainbows work.
sometimes you just feel lost, alone, done, isolated, tired, wrong. especially if your family/school/friends/lover made you feel like being your authentic self wasn’t allowed. that shit stays with you, even when you’ve ‘come out’. queer trauma - like any trauma - crystallises all throughout your body/existence.
‘coming out’ sometimes involves slowly pulling out small fragments of trauma like splinters that take some time to surface before they can be tweezered out. if you feel stiff, it might be that you have more splinters than you realise. resistance causes tension. it feels a lot like hate.
every little piece of information you absorb as a child makes you who you are - and despite our best efforts, kids are still growing up in homophobic transphobic environments. if you’re lucky, you’ll spend your early adulthood softening into the beautiful fluid queer baby full of power, kindness and love that you always were.
whenever coming out happens for you, know that you & your experience is not isolated, wrong, or ever fully repressible. even if you are worried you feel much too old to be learning about your queerness, you & your queer experience is valid/loved/shared; always has been valid/loved/shared.
it’s not always safe to grow up out, as the news/gov is reminding us this week. but that doesn’t mean you don’t deserve safety and space to figure out who you are and love that person exactly as they are, with every fibre of your being. it might take time and space, but it will happen.
remember, anyone trying to repress you is most likely trying to repress themselves. if they seek to prove you don’t exist, chances are they’re trying to prove something in them or their god doesn’t exist.
believe me you.
I finally do.
