Coming Out, Again and Again
The day before my eighteenth birthday I sat on the couch with an NEC laptop in my laps and watched Tranamerica alone at home. Seventeen going on eighteen, was anyone ever so young? Something shifted in me that day: I knew I would never be a woman, get married as a woman or have kids as a woman and still keep everyone I loved by my side as a woman. So I conformed, made compromises, gave up careers, lost friends, betrayed myself and oh man did I pay for it, but still it wasn’t enough.
“When did you know you were gay?” I often get asked this question. I know the answer they want. They want a number, a coming out story, an epiphany, a coherent narrative to pinpoint me, a reason to welcome me into their space. I don’t have that answer. So, I lie. I tell them I liked the first guy when I was eight. He was a runner and had a bowl cut. I could always run longer when I was running with him. That was how I knew I was gay. Women would say “aww”; men would nod knowingly and silently. But that’s not when I knew I was gay. Because at that moment, I was convinced I was a girl.
I became gay in those bars on Christopher Street, at the warehouse parties in Bushwick, in techo music, in lacy crop tops that don’t fit, in the gaze of other gay men. I became gay when I discovered the narrow path to affection was to become a persona. I should feel lucky to come of age a second time in those spaces but all I wanted, once again, was to grow out of them because even there I didn’t belong. I still don’t know where I could belong when I see masc gay men put on femme outfits, from plaid mini skirts to platform heels, and paint their finger nails on Fire Island during the weekends, then come back to their corporate jobs in high places for the week, the same men who sat next to straight men and interviewed me in deep voices in those suffocating meeting rooms. Neither do I know the first thing about being a woman. Non-binary is a status I cautiously subscribe to because I am not trans. I don’t wear dresses or make up or use they/them pronouns. Not often enough. But I know that I was a very feminine child, that I didn’t perfectly fall into the default and no one is ever surprised when I tell them I am gay. I remember constantly being mistaken as a girl until I was thirteen. I secretly took joy in that, as if I had won some special award, as if I passed. At thirteen, a grotesque mustache quietly exposed me as it climbed above my upper lip. That was the end of this joy. But my wish to be a girl continued, in secret, until this day before I turned eighteen.
Fitting into spaces isn’t the answer. Occupying spaces isn’t either. Why do we have to come out again and again, to our friends, to our parents, at school, at work, on social media, before donating blood, as gay, as non-binary? When they knock on the door asking us to to come out, what spaces are they inviting us to enter?
I visited a bar in Meatpacking once before the pandemic to celebrate a girlfriend’s birthday. They charged men twenty bucks at the door. I had no idea people were still doing that. So, I asked the woman what if I identified as a woman. She was alarmed and defensive. I added: “Has anyone ever asked you that?” “Normally only frat boys,” she said, slightly softened. I gladly paid my share. It could be equally sexist as it is feminist to charge men a cover as a soft promise for them to get lucky. It depends on where you stand politically. But that’s beside the point. To me, those twenty dollars are a sign that says: this is a cis heterosexual space. Sometimes this message comes in the form of a cover charge, sometimes it does not: Coyote Ugly, the dive bar in the East Village that hangs bras from the ceiling, only allows women to dance on their bar. Without this piece of knowledge, I have once stepped up and got dragged down violently by the bouncer after two seconds. Kavatsutra, a kava bar with locations in New York, Florida and Colorado, marketed their ladies night as “Chicks only. Chicks means born with a vagina. You must have ovaries.” After the atrocious transphobia backlashed, they noted on their Instagram that “The point of ladies night is to get ladies in the door so the men can bang them. If there’s no vagina then they don’t qualify because they don’t benefit the business and the plan.” What do we make of these spaces, where connections are allegedly forged? Of course one might argue it’d also be ridiculous to have women dance in gay bars, or why don’t trans people get their own bars? But there already are graceful answers to these premature oppositions. House of Yes, a nightclub where everyone can finally free themselves from the need to be a persona. Bubble T, “where queer Asianz rule” but everyone is welcome.
We can’t punish the present with the past but we do need to make peace with the old in order to make space for the new. There’s still so much lacking in our language that has limited our way of thinking. After all, how do we even form a thought before embedding it in language? Maybe being non-binary is a whole new way of thinking, of breaking out of even the male/female sensibilities despite the absence of certain lexicon. Maybe it’s simply about blurred lines and being comfortable and finding a place in this world. Fitting into spaces isn’t the answer. Occupying spaces isn’t either. It’s about cultivating new ones. Because I am done coming out when I go out.
