Queer magnetism, visibility, and creating possibility from necessity
A love letter of enoughness, creation, and accommodation, to the too much/not enough gays and everyone who loves them
Every other essay, this one included, is a part of the Soft Body Personal section of this newsletter. If you prefer to only read about the worker cooperative and all things adjacent to alternative business, click here to change your preferences to receive only bi-weekly Rest Day Creative missives.
In the early months of living in Portland, nearly every time I drove through city streets I felt a particular sense of awe and excitement at what I saw out the window. It was late spring, that time when the streets get dusted pink with fallen cherry blossoms and people emerge blinking into the coming months of sunshine. Walking on so many sidewalks and sitting in so many cars adjacent to mine was someone, or many someones, who just looked so hot.
The hotness was and is very specific. I don’t mean hot as in tall/dark/handsome. I don’t mean hot as in low body fat or symmetrical features or certain kinds of curves.
I mean hot as in visibly queer.
This city is full of “visibly queer” people, and the only thing that whips my head around faster to get a second look is if I see a cute dog on the street.
As
said in their great piece on dyke pride, “I know you can’t tell who’s gay just by looking, but also you totally can and I won’t be taking any more questions on that topic at this time.” You can’t tell, but also you can…and without refuting that because it is absolute fact, I am here to say that sometimes I worry you can’t. (I cannot tell you how many times I’ve done a double take for what I thought was a queer cutie, only to have it turn out to just be some dude with a beanie who probably frequents a lot of breweries or something).For my own queerness, not everyone may be able to tell that I am gay. I want to be read as gay, and I just have to hope that some can.
Hotness in queer culture can overlap with conventional straight beauty standards for better and for worse for sure, but what else can pass as hot in a city like Portland is its own animal.
Visible queerness translates to its own kind of attractiveness.
The trans femme taking your ramen order with the bandana in their hair, all the better to see their bright blue eye shadow. The goth couple passing on the Hawthorne sidewalk holding hands, looking somehow both intimidating and beautifully soft. The obvious marks are everywhere: hair dye, piercings, mullets, trans short kings, gender-bendy crop tops and skirts and oversized shirts, cargo pants, glitter, chains, painted nails, mascs in long shorts, fern and animal bone tattoo sleeves, the works. All the Doc Martens and the Blundstones and the high platforms and weirdly, but also somehow attractively, neon Crocs?
No one is flirting with me, but when so many people look like that, I get a feeling of transference like everyone is.
The list is far from exhaustive and none of these elements are inherently queer, but on so many people, select pieces come together in that delicious, slightly ineffable way that says queer before anyone ever opens their mouth, and therefore to me says, hot.
This hotness is inclusive of fat bodies, of trans bodies, of disabled bodies, of bodies of color both because why can’t those be inherently hot, they just are, and also specifically because by being gay, or appearing gay, they become hot. Portland is not the paragon of utopian gender-fuckery, anti-fat bias, anti-ableism, and anti-racism so many of us want it to be, but I have come across so many hot people here whose looks alone give me hope that pockets of it are or could be.
I guess I should be clear that I don’t see this hotness as synonymous with sexual or romantic attraction. Either or both can be there, but I see the attraction of visible queerness as more of a resonance. It’s like an appreciation or kinship separate from something familial – something you want to merge with, imbibe, consume, inhale. Maybe you want to touch bodies with it, maybe you want to build a homestead and raise a flock of chickens with it, maybe you want a separate third thing entirely.
Whatever it is, the attraction is a magnetized feeling, something you can’t help but want to be closer to in some way. This is what I love about queerness, it is intoxicating to me.
Appearances can be hot because they hint at what might be underneath, and what’s underneath is what creates the attraction and draw itself. This is what I mean when I say all of my friends are hot. It’s not because I select connections based on attractiveness, but because knowing them better highlights all that the physical presentation stands for.
One of my favorite places to be visually reminded of our queerness in space together is summertime at Rooster Rock, the clothing-optional beach on the Columbia River. On this stretch of sand, queer bodies in all levels of undress are on display in beautifully unselfconscious ways — top surgery scars, stomach rolls, paleness, body hair, all of it.
Queer-coded clothes may be one of the most obvious ways to flag queerness, but it’s not the only way. I know this because even undressed something palpable emanates from these bodies toasting under the sun like so many gay seals, eating snacks, lounging, wading nip-deep in cold water.
I take immense joy in all the visible queerness of this city, because for all that is not in right relationship here, our sheer visibility is still some indication of either our safety or our defiance, both of which are connected to this lineage of pride and love of self-identity.
So with all of that said, weighted by the comfort I feel by looking around me seeing and knowing queerness — maybe it comes as a surprise that I am not all that visibly queer, and I’m no longer trying to make myself be.
I have to bank on whatever that ineffable thing is that emanates off of me too and hopefully get across: I’m one of you. This is who I love. These are my pronouns. This is how I move through the world. This is what I believe. I love you. I want to know your heart. I want to be seen by you. Do you see me?
When you don’t present as obviously queer, that’s a lot of subtext and not much to embed it in.
I can’t really fault people for not being able to read between the lines of an essay I’m more or less trying to morse-code to them with my eyes. I know what I look like, and no stranger will probably ever look at me at first glance and immediately think: queer, non-binary, them/them. That’s what the insides say, but the outsides…not so much.
Factually, I look like a cisgender woman in her thirties, and most strangers probably think I’m in a heterosexual, monogamous relationship with a cis boyfriend named Ryan. I look like a she/her with some girl-next-door vibes who always turns in her library books before the due date (to be fair, I do always turn in my library books before the due date).
No one has ever tried to use he/him pronouns to refer to me, except when I was four years old and had a cute blonde bowl cut with a rat tail. My voice is not deep. Some might think I’m cute but no one would think I’m handsome. I don’t have the bone structure for it in a conventional sense, and I don’t carry myself or my body in a way that imparts masculinity. I love a butch, I love a masc, but I am not one.
I am a boring non-binary person. I don’t necessarily look all that queer, and if I do it’s more subtle. In this moment, I have a chin-length bob, and it’s a mousy brown color, which people seem to think is a self-insult but is the actuality of my natural hair color and I feel morally neutral about it. My nails are cut short and I haven’t painted them since 2013, but I like to cosplay a Hint of Femme™. I don’t wear mascara but if I feel like it, I brush my brows upward with a tiny spoolie, curl my lashes, and rub blush on my cheeks. I shave my legs even in winter but never my armpits, which I like growing wild except for those moments when a breeze tickles the hair there and sets it on end.
Any concerted effort toward masc presentation is less frequent. I have a binder, but I only wear it once or twice a month, if that, because it has a tendency to chafe and I’d rather be tits-to-the-wind than having to deal with that shit.
So much of what I find hot in the visible queerness I see around me is not what actually works for me, in my own body. I love a gender-bendy look, I love bright colors, oversized boxy cut clothes, patterns, piercings, hair dye, shirts with political statements that tell me I can trust you (you’re right, hot stranger, trans lives do matter, we do need to free Palestine). I love all of that — on somebody else.
I’m not trying to look more queer, more genderqueer, more androgynous. To be honest, I tried.
Right before I moved to Portland a few years ago, I semi-seriously told a friend that the first order of business in my new city was to get a queer haircut so all the hot queers would know to find me and become my friend. (In practice, the strategy turned out to be iffy, but I think that was more because I was in a multi-year mental health collapse.)
The haircut didn’t afford me much friendship, but it did give me a certain level of queer cachet. When it was freshly cut, the soft mullet looked pretty cute. I would introduce myself with they/them pronouns and could see recognition in the person’s eyes that said, “Okay, I can see it.” I could tell that appearing more androgynous made me make more sense to cisgender, heterosexual people especially, who could understand a person with a look that “matched the pronouns” but not someone who “looked like a woman” but said they weren’t one.
Even more than the understanding though was the recognition, gay-to-gay. Standing in line to get carnitas at Güero, a cutie made flirty eyes at me, and that never happens (though I wish it would!) While hiking on the Colorado Trail, a hot trail worker told me they liked my haircut with an intensity in their gaze when they said it. I’d been dragging ass all day but that compliment certainly sped up my hiking pace. (Let me tell you how many times instances like these have happened in the wild since I’ve grown out the mullet: precisely zero.)
I felt seen by the attention, and being seen made me feel like one of those hot visibly queer people that I see all over this city. I felt like my people, for once, could tell that I was probably queer just by looking, and in that way I felt like I was closer to belonging.
But I also didn’t feel as much like me, and belonging doesn’t matter much when it’s not really all of you.
I can’t really talk about being queer, genderqueer especially, without talking about being autistic, because that informs so much of my presentation and my ways of being in queerness.
I’m a clothes minimalist, just as much or more out of autistic necessity than a sustainable ethos. Style is a special interest of mine, and I have spent an inordinate amount of time curating specific pieces and aesthetics, so in that sense, I am “dopamine dressing” but none of it comes with patterns or bright colors. Regularly having to pick through more than a modest amount of clothes adds a level of decision fatigue I can’t afford most of the time. Having pieces in neutral solids where I know every article can mix and match with one another further reduces that fatigue. It means the closet I look at every day is not loud on my eyes or distracting on my body, but it also means less variety and fewer statement pieces. I wear a gold ring and the same gold chain every single day. The sameness is comforting, but not exactly bold enough to say much about my identities.
I have a kind of gender stasis, and it’s only when there are deviations that I feel gender dysphoric. What happens within those deviations feels deeply autistic to me, a kind of crackling undercurrent of rejection when I see something on me that doesn’t match what I feel to be true. Presenting as too femme feels dysphoric to me, but so does presenting as too masc. Gender euphoria for me is not smack dab “in the middle" between male and female because I don’t internalize myself as half/half and I don’t even know what middle of the gender spectrum would even feel like.
Inside I feel like a floaty genderless entity that likes to feel pretty but is not a girl, and doesn’t want to be called a “good girl” but maybe in some sexy contexts wants to be treated like one. I look femme-of-center, and probably most of the time I even act femme-of-center, but in my body there is no center. Wherever that is, my gender finds equilibrium there, but it’s certainly not in womanhood and it’s definitely not straight.
How other people respond to me is what reminds me that I feel genderless and queer inside but no one else will ever fully see me as gender-free or gay as I feel. When I had the more androgynous haircut, the external reception of me matched more of what I felt internally, and I received more correct assumptions about my actual queerness and gender — but when I looked in the mirror, the face didn’t feel like mine.
It was disorienting, to be treated more in keeping with what I wanted, but to feel less like I could see myself.
Is that feeling gender dysphoria? Is that feeling a kind of autistic dissonance? I’m not sure if I’ll ever know the difference, or if there is a difference in my body. When I am misgendered with incorrect pronouns, I feel the sting of it, so it must be dysphoria. But those instances also have the flavor of low-level autistic distress. The something-is-not-right-ness of expecting to perceive and understand the world in one way and to have its reflection appear distressingly different than expected.
I’d get glimpses of the opposite. Some days with the mullet, the bangs would look spiky just so and the tendrils would lay just right at the nape of my neck. I would feel incredible. I’d feel that illusive combination of insides matching outsides and outsiders being able to see the inside. That was the height of euphoria. Gender euphoria, autistic euphoria, whatever both/and that is.
But I also felt deeply uncomfortable the other 95% of the time that I couldn’t specifically tame my hair to look and feel the way I wanted and needed it to, which is why I think autism must be just as present as feelings about gender and self. I needed something so specific to feel okay, but to get there wasn’t fully in my control.
It is laughable when someone says, “It’s just hair, it will grow back,” when you have to look at that hair over and over for weeks and months and feel like the wrong face is looking back at you.
The hair grows back, but it can still cost you something until it does, and that something may be a resonant sense of self. Too high of a cost for me.
Few times have I ever felt more me than when I looked in the mirror pre-mullet and saw my own eyes look back beneath long straight hair and blunt bangs. I did not look queer. But I felt queer, for myself, with myself, in a wholly euphoric way.
It’s just that I also felt deeply, alienatingly invisible to the outside and the communities I wanted to be a part of.
The funny thing is even if disability may be a barrier that prevents me from looking all that queer, disability as a whole can be as queer as it gets, and feels like a very queer part of me.
The act of queering – relationships, politics, sex, survival — is creating new possibilities in order to accommodate what is real and true. And what is disability if not circumstances that necessitate and call for creativity to accommodate true needs?
Many ways queerness can show up (if not all ways) are about finding alternatives that support what’s true. Queering can look like finding ways to accommodate physical and sexual attraction beyond gender norms through queer unions or asexual friendships or polycentric relationships. Queering can look like supporting people and bodies seeking new shapes to match internal structures, and those accommodations might look like forms of social transition, name changes, HRT, or gender-affirming health care as a whole.
As alternatives to hetero-patriarchal norms, queer accommodations can look like creating non-hierarchal relationship structures, like a “heterosexual” couple queering sex by centering non-penetrative acts, or like fostering deep love in some middle space that is not fully romantic nor wholly platonic or particularly erotic. Queering can look like subverting the nuclear family to create networks of care beyond kin. It can be co-parenting families, coliving setups, and community gardens.
Disability can be an ultimate queering because it is existence as subversion, survival both as fact and as defiance. It is finding new ways of intimacy and ways to be in the world because we have to and, if we’re mindful, because we want to. It is the making of our own validity in the face of what tries to invalidate us.
I don’t know about you, but I feel like all humans, queer or not, need more of that in the face of the present we’re in and the futures we’re moving toward.
My own disabilities are themselves invisible. They are hidden disabilities that offer a similar privilege of protection and also a source of loss in being unseen like my invisible queerness can. But they exist all the same. Like my queerness, they are core pieces that allow me to reach into the recesses of my being to see what is true and make new pieces of myself and my environment to accommodate those truths. My disabilities both necessitate and allow me to have conversations in relationships not only about what isn’t working but also to make space for what might need to change.
Changing environments or restructuring relationships to meet needs can be accommodations for disabilities. More generally, they can also make way for human interactions that account for our humanity. The creativity that takes can be queer as hell.
Any marginalization of identity is a wellspring for creation, because those are the parts of us that this world isn’t made for and is actively built to ward against. They are the places within us where we feel the friction of what does not work, which means they show us what needs to change, what we need to accommodate, and what we need to queer, imaginatively speaking.
Sometimes we can clearly see identities in the ways that people wear them, but the creative roots of what they stand in for live so much deeper.
Seeing someone or something we think looks queer can strike a sense of resonance with what we already feel. That representation is important. It’s also just a scratching of the surface.
The source of that magnetism comes in the depths of our creative impulses, seen and unseen, that we draw on to create new possibility. The ways we love that don’t look like they’re supposed to, the ways we move through the world that we’re told we can’t or shouldn’t, and we do anyway. Even more so: what we do with that information to create new ways of being.
To me, that’s queerness. I may swoon at the feet of queer visibility, but that’s only because it’s in service to what can and can’t be seen: queer possibility.
It may just be true for me that when I feel most myself, I am not my most visible, and when I am more performatively visible, trying to get objects to speak for me instead of my own words, I feel less like myself. Given my specific sensory support needs and general aesthetic preferences, I might always have a certain level of invisibility within the greater queer community, at least where obvious looks go. I can make peace with that.
Within me, it is all a gender-neutral playground, a little gay, autistic paradise. It’s just that the advertisement for that paradise looks less like a photocopied zine and more like a Scandinavian furniture catalog: boring to some, suited for specific tastes, stands the test of time, and probably looks nice minimally accessorized in your living room.
I don’t look that queer, but I feel queer. And by that, I mean full of possibility.
I don’t have to choose between feeling like myself and being seen, and for anyone who feels similarly, you don’t either.
We can be seen as ourselves, it just means that we may not be seen as the drive-by sidewalk hotties. We’re the queers that radiate in close quarters. So come closer.
You can put on an article of clothing or snip a haircut that says queer but queerness lives in all of these deeper places too as the things we can never take off. The continued practices of queering our structures and our relationships and our survival is how we will see those deep parts of each other, building on them and learning to love each other better whenever we see more.
Given the state of our political systems, who knows how much of our visibility will be afforded to any of us in the future. But no matter what happens, we will find ways to see one another. And if we can’t, we will create them.
This is a love letter to all the gays who show up and slay with the glitter and the go-go boots, the Carhartt’s and the carabiners, the combat boots and the neon hair. You probably don’t even know how much it means to strangers you never even speak with, how much you buoy them just by showing up like you do.
You create possibility through recognition, through resonance, through visions of expansion and joy.
Your visibility is important and life-giving and liberatory and so, so hot.
This is just as much a love letter to all the subtle gays, the quiet gays, the closet gays. This is for the gays who wear masks in public, who say nothing at all but say everything with their silent, “I will not forget about you.” This is for the queers in transition who don’t feel like their appearance fits with their inner selves but are on their way. This is for the queers who are perceived as one gender but feel like another one or none entirely, the disabled queers who are too damn tired to be perceived as anything, and the queers who may never change a single thing about how they look or sound but feel that tremor of electricity inside all the same.
You create possibility in all that you hold, seen and unseen, and I know you’ll blow us away with your brilliance if and when we do get to see it.
Your queerness may not always be seen, but it is just as valued, and you’re the hotties too.
(This is even for the allied straights, the heterosexual babes who may not ever get their brush with gayness but still seek to creatively queer this world beyond the parts that exist to cater to them. If you’ve read this far, we need you too.)
Queerness doesn’t have a uniform but it does have a revolutionary magnetism, it does have ways of being and loving and showing up, and if you’re here, no matter what you look like, you’ve got it.
Tell a queer person you love them today. Even if it’s just yourself.
Love,
Iris
Recs and Thoughts
Pride month was June, and this month is Disability Pride. Maybe it’s that they’re back-to-back and because they’re both called “Pride,” maybe because Portland does Pride in July for reasons unknown and because I just passed my diagnosis-versary, maybe it’s that I’ve never known myself as autistic without also knowing I am queer, but I always find something sticky in reconciling queer pride and disability pride as separate entities. What underscores both (and all attempts to recognize history and pride in marginalized identities) is that our existence matters, our joy matters, and most of all our strength in community matters because it is in service of our collective liberation. There is so much to say here but the main thing is if you care about queer liberation, that liberation is wholly incomplete (and inadvertently causing further oppression) if it’s not hand-in-hand with an intersectional lens that includes disability justice. I want your queer joy, I really do. But you know how your “Protect trans kids” shirt lets me know I can trust you? So does wearing your mask. Bare. Minimum. Please don’t think for a second they’re not the same thing. Lives are on the line either way (and some of them may be in the direct line of fire of your mouth particles). I know it can feel like it, but the pandemic isn’t over. The queerest acts are the ones that recognize our individual freedoms and joys are only made possible by the care we take for each other.
Speaking of! I was reading The Future is Disabled, and now that I’m done I’m re-mentioning it because I still want to (lovingly) shove it under everyone’s noses and I will make no apologies if this recs section somehow becomes a
fan page in future.I’ve since moved on to reading Inciting Joy by Ross Gay. I already knew within the first pages that it was going to be a banger, and every essay in it continues to be. I don’t know when this book wouldn’t be timely, but it’s certainly timely right now.
I’m largely assuming there’s enough greater discourse right now around political fallout and ways to act that we don’t also need me in it, but if you want to reorient around action, these two pieces from earlier in the month are great compasses: How We Get Through This by
and The revolution starts by building with poor folks in your own backyard byThese musings and questions by
are very much in line with what I was thinking and feeling last week when I was dog-sitting and the power went out for the third time in a week (and remembered again when the power fizzled out for a fourth time on Monday). At what level of inconvenience, personally, collectively, will it be enough to remember the realities we are in and not keep ourselves separate from them? The truth is, we’re all already affected by all of it, just more or less insulated from the extent.
Recent honorable mention read goes to Everyday Utopia, which I felt gave some useful background history and alternatives for relationship and living structures.
Intermittent dissociation also brought to you by: finding out that a British lesbian Love Island knockoff exists that is based on a gay Love Island knockoff?? I couldn’t watch I Kissed a Girl via the BBC so hopefully the sketchy alternate link I found does not result in a computer virus. (So far so good?)
I’m finding it impossible to not be in in awe of videos like the ones on this page. To get cheesy about it: if magic art like this is possible, think of all the other creativity in this world that must be possible too!
Go doomtouch grass (with love).
THIS IS SOOOOOOO GOOOOOOD AND I FEEL ALL OF THESE THINGS
Finally had time to read this and loved it!!!! Feel this so so much: “So much of what I find hot in the visible queerness I see around me is not what actually works for me, in my own body.” Hashtag femme problems. Beautiful reflections friend!