awochna

Being gay, open, and introverted

14 November 2014

This time, I am here to talk to you about myself, or at least some of my intersectionalities and how they can make life difficult, or at least different. I don’t want to talk to you about What it’s like to be gay, open, or introverted separately, but together.

This is something I experience in my every day life. I have a partner in the fiancee stage and neither of us is in the femboy/twink/thin category. We are also very much into holding hands. We live in a very conservative state (Arizona), but in probably one of the most liberal cities in that state (Tucson). Trust me when I say there isn’t a whole lot of competition. Nonetheless, we are both out and open about our love to everyone. Lastly, we are both introverted. Neither of us likes talking to strangers at random, epecially if we are the ones being approached. We like our quiet time and space and just enjoy each other’s company. We buy our girl scout cookies each year, but we don’t buy them in front of the grocery store, sorry scouts! Probably as a result of being introverted and some trauma in our past, we both have anxiety when it comes to confrontation.

Despite all of this, we are confronted by people on a regular basis. Two subjects often come up:

  1. Our hair is blue (me) and red (him) because we regularly use a semi-permanent dye. Sometimes, its a simple, “Nice hair!” which isn’t too bad. We can and have dealt with those quite easily. Some people want to know which brand. Some people want to tell us the story of how they dyed their hair red one time, but since they have dark brown hair naturally, it didn’t turn out red. At that point, we’re going a little too far, but at least they aren’t trying to be confrontational. We dye our hair because we want to and we can, but we don’t intend it to become a conversation starter every time we leave our residence.

  2. We’re gay is much more confrontational and what the rest of this post is about.

We know we’re gay, we’ve checked. We make sure not to go grocery shopping at certain stores because the customers of those stores are not used to seeing gay people; we can tell. We have literally been stopped in the frozen foods isle so someone can tell us how brave we are being for holding hands in public. We understand the fight against discrimination and that our togetherness is a symbol of hope against those who don’t believe we’re human. Those interrupt our day, our putting groceries in the trunk, our trying on clothes at the mall. We are not the movement.

The worst ones are the people who don’t look at our holding hands as a symbol of hope and support for equal rights, but as some twisted perversion of nature. They don’t even have to say anything for us to see how they feel. The previous type of encounter is at least positive, but this one happens way more often. We can go for a walk at night and pedestrians on the sidewalk will just stare at us, or mumble something under their breath. This is where the confrontation anxiety really comes in. We’re lucky that we don’t have more vulnerable appearances.

Is that going to make us stop holding hands and hide displays of affection that are more than perfectly reasonable for opposite-sex couples? Of course not. In a battle of looks, stares, and mumbles, at least we keep our symbol. Does it make us uncomfortable to hold hands in certain parts of the city, or times of the night? Of course it does.

You could say, ‘well, at least you are getting recognized,’ but that’s not the point, is it? Equal rights is what we need, not classification. We don’t deserve more attention as a cute gay couple than the cute straight couple in the same isle or the cute lesbian couple in the next isle over or the cute asexual person in the line to check out.

We have, on more than one occasion, seriously forgotten that we were gay. Not that our sexual preference changed, but that we forgot that’s a label that we have to be aware of in society. To us, wanting to hold hands as we go for our nightly walks is just normal. We are not the movement.

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