Do I Call Myself Queer?
By: Elan Cassandra
Tags: LGBTQ, Queer, Life, Self, Identity

Photo by Clem Onojeghuo on Unsplash

I had the childhood of a typical cisgender heterosexual woman. I had my first crush on a boy when I was just three, and every event outside of ordinary life — camps, intensive classes — had to have a love interest. Unrequited, generally.

My crushes on boys were so obvious to my parents that they (in a good-natured way) made fun of me relentlessly.

By the time I’d hit my mid-teens, I was so obsessed with this fairy tale image of having a boyfriend that I wrote numerous obsessive entries in my never-ending journals.

What never got space in those journals or in the analytical areas of my mind were the girls I placed on some sort of pedestal. They were there from my earliest school days. Girls I thought were beautiful and smart and whom I was a little afraid of, not because of any way they’d treated me, but because of how perfect they were.

I got with my first boyfriend when I was seventeen, and the time between boyfriends has never been longer than a few months. Despite the boy-craze of my teens, this wasn’t intentional; it just happened that way. My current relationship with a straight cis male is going on seven and a half years.

And so, by every obvious measure, I’ve lived a very heterosexual life.

When I was twenty, however, I did seek out women, and I did have a sexual experience with a woman who was also a good friend. But by that point, I already had feelings for my next boyfriend.

I went to Pride that next year, with both of them actually. It was within days of same-sex marriage being legalized in New York, and there was so much joy in the air that I couldn’t stop crying the whole goddamn day.

Over the years, I’ve had crushes on women, people mid-transition, and individuals who don’t necessarily identify as one gender. And I know that were my male partner to have a sudden realization about their gender and decide to transition, I’d love and be attracted to them no less.

I like and love and am attracted to people for who they are.

However, throughout my life, I have experienced all of the privileges of a cisgender heterosexual woman. I have had to deal with no difficulties and no discrimination based on any perceived queerness.

And that’s where my hesitance to identify as queer — at least out loud — comes in to play. If I’ve experienced all the privileges of a basically heteronormative cisgender life, have I earned it?

This brings me to a conversation I had just before COVID and which I think about with some regularity.

I was on the set of a short film that starred a transgender woman, was written by someone who is non-binary, and was filmed at a lesbian bar. I was mostly there to assist, and while running lines with the supporting actress, I found myself in a very personal conversation with her (which, if you know any actors or former actors, won’t be surprising).

She and I exchanged relationship traumas and personal histories, and she told me that despite having only dated guys, albeit notably feminine ones, she’d done a lot of internal wrestling with labels, and she identified as queer.

This struck me. It really struck me. Because she and I weren’t so different. And as much as I had identified with this community over the years, I had sort of sidelined myself.

I don’t at all think that being a cisgender woman in a relationship with a cisgender man makes you straight. I would never suggest that the identities of my bisexual or pansexual friends are somehow changed by being in apparently heterosexual relationships. I find the idea to be crazy.

And yet…

I have a very hard time calling myself queer. I feel like a fraud. An imposter. As I said, it feels unearned in some way.

(I’m sweating through my shirt as I write this.)

I don’t have an answer here. I have no conclusion. I have only that conversation at the film shoot, the way this young woman took ownership of her identity, and the idea that maybe at some point I could too.