CS: I didn’t come out until after high school, although I think anyone who knew me would’ve been like, “Okay, but you were definitely queer.” I had no cell phone, no social media. And I think that was what is harder — my political analysis came so much later as a result, because I didn’t have those references to even understand myself in any way. I just had a deeply repressed high school experience. But I came out right after high school as queer, and then it took me even longer to come out as trans, because I didn’t even know what it meant to be trans.
Yesterday I was tweeting about how, as much as I rolled my eyes at the music video for Taylor Swift’s “You Need to Calm Down,” it’s like, “Shit, I had to go on dial-up internet and try to find random ass queer clips from movies to find any sense of myself!” But then my whole political awakening came through queerness and my being part of the queer community, being part of the queer left and understanding power through that lens. And then coming out and then being trans, through to my realizing, like, “Oh shit! My whole identity has been about code-switching and navigating between what was expected of me and who I knew myself to be.”
I think that’s helped me both build empathy for others and recognize that we’re putting it on a lot — like, we’re all performing all the time. What does it mean to pull back the layers of our performance and actually expose the vulnerable human beings we are at our core, and what does it mean to connect on that level? Which is also how I feel really connected to the restorative justice and prison abolition — lessons from movements that really are about imagining something wholly different than what we thought was possible, because that’s such a queer vision of the world, total and complete transformation in magical unpredictable ways.
EG: Growing up, I heard the term “bisexual” said at some point and I was like, “‘What does that mean? Like, truly, what does that mean?” And I didn’t get an answer for a very long time. The word didn’t even stand out to me — it was just like one of those words that you hear in conversation and then it’s lost, and you say, “Oh, whatever. Maybe I’ll hear it again one day.” You don’t even subconsciously register it. And now it’s such a vital part of my life. I never had that growing up. It’s really frustrating to know that there are so many people that could have been out or could have known who they were earlier if they had just been educated. But because of abstinence-only laws in Florida, people are not only getting pregnant much sooner, but the fact that gay sex, queer sex, what it means to be transgender aren’t being taught in schools — it’s like, for the love of God!
CS: Yeah, totally. We’re then disconnected from our own sexuality. There’s so much bi erasure, there’s so much trans exclusion, and that means it delays everything.
So many leaders of critical movements were queer. Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson weren’t just leaders of the queer movement. They were leaders of the Young Lords and leaders of prison abolition movements. Today, you have the Dreamer movements and the Black Lives Matter movements and others, all being led by queer and trans people. And that’s because we’re the best.
