That Damn Magazine

I remember standing in my kitchen, three years old, crying, gripping a tear-soaked copy Time Magazine. In large red block letters, “Yep, I’m Gay”, and beside it a picture of my idol, Ellen DeGeneres. I adored her, and now, she was gay? 

My mom recalled that day to me, last night, over the phone: “You were crying, no, BAWLING, because you didn’t know what it meant. I didn’t know how to help you. You just looked at me with big tears and said, ‘She’s gay mom, I cant believe it, what if they are mean to her and take her off the TV?’. I didn’t know what to say to you, I remember saying, ‘Tobi, it’s just a big deal because people don’t understand, but they will, someday’. But that didn’t help, you just sat and cried and eventually fell asleep on the kitchen floor with that damn magazine and your Pokemon blanket”. 

       I get upset sometimes, that no one ever taught me what being gay was.

       I get enraged sometimes that I come from a small town full of ignorance. 

       I get tears because that ignorance causes some children grow up to hate instead of understand. 

        That was my first experience of any other sexual preference even existing. Then came middle school, where I heard the word ‘queer’ for the first time. The word was never used in a positive manner, it was used as a derogatory slang. Smear the Queer. Before leaving home for college, I don’t think I had ever met anyone who identified as queer because of how my city viewed them. Until my lifelong best friend came out to me last year, identifying herself as queer, I could never even begin to understand the word. I know, now, that queer is just an umbrella term, one that is used as an identity people can lean on and be proud of. Queer has become the term for the movements popping up all around our nation, all around the world. I can’t help not thinking about the Queer Africa I only caught a glimpse of while in Tanzania. There, where hate crimes are still very much existent, the word has become a dangerous identity to hold, but also one that shows a new response to the hate. Identifying as queer has become a catalyst for change, allowing for a “new” queer community in Africa. 

Humankind is beginning to comprehend. People like Annamarie Jagose are writing books on Queer Theory, movements are happening, the term is being used as a way to identify as “out of the norm”. Through all the positives, “Queer skepticism” exists, according to Jagose,as it can limit identity or put some identities in a larger category, which can be painful to some who hold a specific gender identity (Jagose, 101). She goes on in more detail about the contestations that the word holds, “an umbrella term for dissimilar objects, whose collectivity is underwritten by a mutual engagement in non-normative sexual preferences”, “[queer has been] accused of working against the recent visibility and political gains of lesbians and gay men”, and the allowance of “gender non-specificity” (Jagose, 112-116). This all comes from our need for an identity, and these are the exact contentions I have with the word. After all, who am I to identify anyone with an umbrella term? How will I know they will be okay being called ‘queer’? Coming from my little ignorant town, I can understand how this word can be painful to some, pain that they will always hold onto.

       After my mom recalled that day to me, last night, over the phone, she said, "For the paper you're writing, tell your teacher thank you. Sounds like you've finally got some answers...only took you 18 years". 

I wish we didn’t live in a world that finds the need to label everything. However, we do, and I cannot imagine that changing anytime soon. So, for now, I guess I will just going on using the labels given to us, queer being one of them. I think, as an ally, I can use queer as an empowering term to represent the entire LGBT community. I understand it is not an end-all solution - as some would like to think it is - but it is simply a category of sorts. I know my three year old self would have benefitted from the understanding I now hold. I’m glad I can say that now, I finally understand. At least, I hope I do.