My memories of growing up are marked by flashes of confusion. Because I knew about homosexuality. And I’d heard a tiny (almost all derogatory) bit about transness. But I’d never heard of being nonbinary. I had no imaginative space for understanding or seeing myself.I guess it’s like not knowing your own name?All I knew was having a handful of moments where I’d suddenly and electrically see myself, like catching glimpses of someone beloved in a crowd. “Oh, yeah, that’s me!” No hesitation. No question.Imagine hearing your name called across a room, or your name dropped in a conversation, or stumbling across yourself in a class photo — and BAM, your brain lights up in recognition. “Hey, Andrea!” “Here!”But then (What the heck’s an Andrea?)(Imagine Jason Bourne waking up, but if instead of a dude suddenly able to take down a government assassin with a pen, it’s a short Asian-American teenager clutching the paperback of I am My Own Wife and having Feelings about Yitzhak in Hedwig and the Angry Inch.)
Doing drag for a How to Host a Murder party in middle school - drawing on a mustache and pulling out a chair for a female character to sit with a dramatic flourish. Me!
Cutting my hair short for the first time. Me!
Every Halloween: always somehow in drag. Me.
A photo of a butch Asian-American person clipped and treasured from the NYT arts section, carried in a folder from my bedroom wall to my dorm room. Mine.
A postcard of a particular looking man’s face coveted, gifted, treasured, making a similar journey from home to home. Mine.
Reeling for weeks after an anime fashion show, buoyed by giddy joy I mistakenly interpreted as from dressing goth instead of wearing drag. Definitely a pattern!
Putting on my first blazer in college and lighting up inside. Huh.
Wearing my first binder and realizing I couldn’t feel my body before. How?
Seeing “Into the Light” at the SF Public Library for the first time and not knowing why I suddenly felt like crying. What is HAPPENING?
Of course, this wasn’t accidentally repressed. I knew without being told that this was something to hide. Society is very clear about how it will hurt people like me.
“What if I was gay?”
" … then I’d say your life would be very hard.”
-
"What if I was gay?”
"Pssh, Andrea, don’t be GAY.”
-
"Look, no one’s ever going to accept them [trans people], Andrea.”
-
"But you have to admit it’s weird, right?”
But I still treasured it. I skulked through adolescence as a little trans magpie, grabbing queer movies, shows, and stories to my heart like a compulsive shoplifter. Not really knowing why I held them so closely, but only that I had to. (To be all geriatric millennial about it, I didn’t have the internet to find myself on yet, so it was all books, shows, and that one Sailor Uranus page of my friend’s wall calendar that I flipped through at a sleepover.) How many 14 year olds stumble on The Naked Civil Servant on tv then walks their 9th grade butt into a Borders to buy Quentin Crisp’s autobiography? These moments hung together in mysterious fragments for decades until they finally snapped into focus when I came out in my thirties. And once they did, many many many other, smaller glimmering memories and clues bubbled up and resolved into the larger constellation. It makes me so sad and angry to think of how obvious and wonderful this was, and how it was buried and trashed.
Honestly? This kind of identity aphasia is familiar from being Asian-American: from growing up thinking I didn’t know how to be Japanese, of being clocked and coded in ways I couldn’t control while also feeling shame about claiming a selfhood. The sudden grief and overwhelm of never seeing yourself in stories until you do.
But imagine how disorienting the cognitive vertigo was of feeling imposter syndrome for an identity I couldn’t name and didn’t know existed.
I may not have had a word for myself, but the four year old watching the Nutcracker and immediately and passionately wanting to be Drosselmeyer or vibing with The Beast in Disney movies was absolutely already queer AF.
So I’ve always been myself, but I didn’t always know myself. Basically, I grew up not knowing that I was real.
No kid is “too young” to see LGBTQ+ people in our culture.