Being queer is my entire personality.
It’s a common, bigoted critique that members of the LGBTQI+ community center their queer identity in everything they do. Folks who assert this fail to understand that queerness is much more than an identity. Queerness is a politic, a responsibility, a miracle, an alternate universe.
As Ocean Vuong wrote, “…when I look at my life, I saw that queerness demanded an alternative innovation from me. I had to make alternative routes.” Any identity that exists outside of dominant power structures requires invention. My queerness both invited and compelled me to reconceptualize core social constructs like gender, family, and community.
This reimagining caused me to invariably reject the status quo. There is no “normal” or “default” way of living; there is only the way we choose to live. If individuals choose to repress and oppress an expansive understanding of sexuality and gender, that is their own doing. If we instead choose to live liberated, fully realized lives, that too is a decision. It is not a matter of “normalcy”; it is a matter of choice.
Even if a person is not queer, their acceptance of queerness and gender variance as natural and good begets skepticism toward and rejection of the status quo. If the restrictive definitions of family, love, and community we’ve been supplied are purely constructions, what other governing social concepts are convenient fictions? What systems and people are propped up by the status quo? What are more liberatory ways of living modeled by societies in both the present and the past?
Audre Lorde wisely wrote, “There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.” Queerness is but one window into a rich web of liberatory futures. When we begin to interrogate the status quo, we discover that gender and sexuality are two items on a long list of social constructions—from white supremacy to national borders and beyond.
In maturing in my identity, I realized that queerness requires not just a deconstruction of gender and sexuality but actually the whole of the social status quo. The systems that demonize, criminalize, and attack LGBTQI+ identities are the very same systems that uphold white supremacy, threaten people in migration, create and hasten the climate crisis, demoralize workers, and so on.
At its root, you cannot untangle LGBTQI+ rights from any other human rights struggle. Liberation is, and has always been, collective.
It is for this reason that queerness is my entire personality. In my queerness, I work in some small way to realize an alternative world. In this world, there is always enough for everyone to eat. Family is rarely, if ever, defined by blood. Love does not require anyone to make themselves smaller.
I will celebrate my community this Pride Month. I will remember that queerness is both my biggest blessing and greatest responsibility. I must dance, and I must take action to fight for the freedom of my community and the dignity of all. True Pride is, has always been, and must always be defiant, political, and radical.
I invite you to join me to take action this Pride Month. UUSC’s Resistance Network, the Unitarian Universalist Association, and TRUUsT (Transgender Religious professionals UU Together) are organizing a public comment campaign to speak out against transphobic policies at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. By submitting your own unique public comment, you can help delay the enactment of these policies and ultimately fight them in court.
This June, may we delight in the celebration of Pride. May we work together to build a queer future: a world of freedom, liberation, and relentless authenticity.
