~*~just queer things~*~
FYI: I don't think this newsletter is super heavy, but it's not as cute as its title implies.
I'm still listening to the audiobook Real Queer America, which I wrote about last Monday, and I'm still enjoying it a lot. It's bringing up a lot of thoughts and feelings around topics like chosen family and not feeling queer enough. Topics that I could probably spend days writing newsletters about. But wrestling all of my disparate thoughts into a series of neat, focused 500-word newsletters doesn't seem fun to me. Instead, I'm just going to dump some of my thoughts here in a bulleted list to get them out of my head.
In Real Queer America, Samantha Allen talks about her chosen family in Johnson City, Tennessee and how she met them post-transition, which meant they only knew her as that version of herself. She contrasted this with her friends in Atlanta, who she loved, but who had known her 'before,' and how that layer made the relationships feel different.
This reminded me of how I've only been out as bisexual for a few years now and the vast majority of my friends and family have known me longer than that. I've met lots of people in Berlin and some of them know I'm bi and some of them don't and a couple of them assumed my queerness before I told them, but most didn't because I'm married to a man. One friendship stands out in my mind because we gravitated towards each other, assuming and pretty quickly confirming each other's queerness, and there was something special about sharing space with another queer woman who only knew me as my queer self, and had never known me as my policing-my-identity self, my 'before.'
Relatedly, it felt pretty special several years ago when a newer friend, despite knowing I was in a relationship with E, asked me if I was queer. The fact that this question felt special and meaningful to me should maybe have tipped me off, but I was still years away from identifying as bisexual and said no, I'm straight (lol). Then my friend and I had a nice conversation about reversing the heteronormative assumption that everyone is straight, and instead assuming people are queer until they tell you otherwise.
I'm blessed with a lot of wonderful friends who are like family to me, many of whom are queer. I've kept in touch with a great group of friends from high school, but, although half of us identify as some flavor of queer, none of us were out when we were growing up together and sharing physical space regularly. Many of my college friends are queer and stayed in Boston after graduation, so E and I continued to see them semi-regularly until we moved to Berlin. But throughout that time, E and I were the straight couple who were sometimes invited into queer spaces.
E and I used to throw an annual holiday party where more than half of the attendees were queer, but was that queer community? Or was it just community? What's the difference? And does it even matter?
It doesn't really feel different to spend time with my queer friends now that I'm out. But maybe it would if we lived in the same city and did more "queer world building" (an idea Allen mentions in Real Queer America, but I can't remember who she credits it to) together - visiting gay bars or going to drag shows or just generally being queer in public together. My friends and I tend to be more the stay-in-and-drink-tea-together types than the night-out-on-the-town types. But maybe staying in and drinking tea together and talking about relationships is queer world building.
As I'm typing this I'm also remembering when that friend who asked me if I was queer, who saw me before I really saw myself, came to visit me and E in Berlin. I brought her to Other Nature, the queer, feminist, worker-owned sex shop I've mentioned several times in this newsletter. It was raining out and we warmed up in the shop's book room, drinking complimentary tea. If that's not queer world building, I don't know what is.
Well, this bulleted list idea didn't work out quite the way I hoped it would. I still have many more thoughts in my head about queer friendships and community and 'passing' as straight. But I've been working on this newsletter for quite a while and I need to move on with my day. Let me know if you want to hear more about any of this and feel free to tell me about your thoughts and feelings around these topics.