When queer people find their sexuality, they are in childhood yet again, in the eyes of the world and the community itself. “Baby gays” are inexperienced in the world of discovering feelings for the same sex. They are experiencing the same kind of crushes as they were – or thought they ought to be feeling – in third grade. The criteria might change (how good the crush is at jumping across the playground vs. how good they are at answering the professor’s questions), but the innocence is still there.
With trans people, the later they realize it, the less of a headstart they have on reliving/rewriting their newfound genderhood. If they want to transition with hormones, they are literally going through puberty, most likely for the second time around.
Queers/LGBTQ+ peoples experience the stages of life in non-chronological order, or at least re-live them. Because they have been so conditioned to be heterosexual, they feel obligated to be attracted to another binary gender. Once they discover their actual sexuality or gender (actual does not equate to “forever,” actual can be used for 3 months to years), they can begin the life stages their body was asking of them. More kids are discovering their actual sexuality and gender younger – and being supported in this discover – thus negating the re-living the non-chronological order that many in the current community have gone through.
We have had to live at a different time as our bodies because of cultural/social pressures of heterosexuality and cisnormativity. We cannot experience ourselves in “real time” for ignorance and/or fear.
We live outside of a lot of realms – time, social constructs of normativity – because of our marginalization from society. We build new families, many for lack of biological family (we didn’t lose them – they left us). We have named them under familiar hetero/cis names of “family, house,” even “mother, father” because it is what many of us craved: acceptance from these people. We craved it so much, as well as rights themselves, that we pushed for marriage equality. When it passed in 2015, I soon heard about queers not happy with it. For a few reasons:
- we would forget who we are
- marriage is not what should be craved – we should be fighting for acceptance of our lives and structures.
But for those of us who did want marriage equality, we want to live within the hetero/cis structure because we know that it is “secure” in safety, as far as society will allow it, which is not far.
I now understand the queer naysayers of marriage equality. We are building our own brand of multiculturalism: getting assimilated into the culture because then we will not shake our own house (Audre Lorde). We understand different structures outside of the nuclear families. We understand partners, secondaries, various parents. We understand the in-betweens.
Multiculturalism keeps you safe. Decolonization will knock your house down to build you a better one. And it will build homes for those without them. Safety is a right. With multiculturalism our house will be one-story on the surface, but inside we will still know who’s one top, and be fighting each other to reach it.
If we stay in this multicultural house, there will continue to be stairs. There will always be a hierarchy. If we knock down and rebuild the house, it can all be one level. Liberation. If we hand back the tools to the original caretakers of the land, they are under no obligation to house us in it. We always hope our victors will show mercy – as we do not deserve justice – and if they choose to, they will build us a better one-story home, as they had the keys to the blueprint from the beginning.
Colochos de Flores 