I could spend a few thousand words on that story. I was out to most of my friends by 21, but I didn’t come out to my family-and, by the transitive property of Southern gossip, everyone I’ve ever met-until much later in my 20's.
It would take me until age 19 to begin coming to terms with the fact that I was queer. I was from southern Louisiana, I went to a deeply conservative religious school, and there was something bone-deep in me that felt so excruciatingly out of place there that I rejected it all wholesale. I read A Separate Peace and wanted to be one of those ruddy-cheeked boys in ties and oxfords having a homoerotic time at a fancy boarding school. And also, you dress like Jimmy Buffet,” she would have died screaming.īack then, I never felt welcomed by the Redneck Riviera trappings of the Gulf Coast. If you went back to 2007 and grabbed a fussy, long-haired, 16-year-old me by the shoulders and said, “One day you will be 30 and you will cut your own hair with kitchen scissors and everyone you’ve ever met will know you’re queer. I wear them so often that I’ve become synonymous with them my friends text me every time they see a frat guy or a tailgating 55-year-old man wearing one.
I have about nine in my closet right now in varying shades, from sky blue with pink hibiscus to a cool black with gold monstera leaves. Coming out was not the point of my story. “I just turned 30,” McQuiston writes, “and I’ve learned something about myself, in the way that you continue learning things about yourself as you grow into who you have always been: I am tired of talking about coming out. McQuiston’s essay taps into that inherent desire to not have to define anything, especially when so much time and energy has been spent trying to define it (for others, and oneself). “Coming out” is essentially telling the story of how one became oneself, but that heavily implies that one’s self is something fixed, and that queerness is literally the opposite of a fixed identity. Her coming out story, part of which she details in the following essay, is a sort of anti-coming out story, a narrative about living life on one's own terms. Turns out McQuiston herself would make a great Casey McQuiston character.
0 kommentar(er)
